We’ve never seen a president like Donald J. Trump.
Heck, I’ve never seen a human being like Trump. When Henry David Thoreau wrote about the man who steps to the music of a different drummer, he was probably imagining a religious seeker or political dissenter—not a billionaire businessman who dated European supermodels and erected golden towers before ascending to the heights of global power. But has anyone danced so wildly through life as the current POTUS?
Trump’s latest two-step: waging a brutal war against Iran—to the delight of America’s most fanatical Iran hawks—and then, this weekend, announcing a momentous peace deal with the Islamic Republic—to the hawks’ horror. “The Great Deal will bring Peace and Security to the whole Region,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Many presidents have tried to make Peace with Iran, and all have failed before me.”
It’s not a ludicrous claim. To understand why, you need to think about the normative foundation of U.S.–Iran relations in American discourse. Since 1979, Iran has appeared in the collective American psyche as an implacable nemesis to be vanquished, or at least contained. But now, thanks mostly to Trump, it’s beginning to look like a normal nation-state with which the U.S. can cooperate. Even President Barack Obama, after striking his own deal with Iran, avoided depicting Iran that way.
That’s why the Iran hawks, who had been gloating throughout the war that Trump was on their side, are now freaking out. Consider the reactions from a troika of Israel Firsters whom I’ve termed “the Marks.”
Fox News host Mark Levin said the U.S.–Iran deal sounded like a “suicide pact” for Israel, since it covers the entire regional war, including in Lebanon, where Israel has been waging a deadly military campaign. “The Israeli people won’t put up with it, the Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] won’t put up with it, we should not accept it either,” Levin said.
Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, lamented certain stipulations of the reported agreement that would boost Iran’s economy, namely, sanctions relief and a reconstruction fund: “That’d be like doing a Marshall Plan for Germany while the Nazis were still in power!”
Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies, seemed to still be working through the first stage of grief: denial. “In 23 years of working on Iran, I’ve never been more confident that we will see the end of the Islamic Republic,” he wrote Monday on X.
Perhaps the latest news splashed some cold water in Dubowitz’s face, helping him accept the changed reality. Trump told reporters in France that the agreement with the Islamic Republic announced on Sunday had in fact already been signed. Vice President J.D. Vance likewise told Good Morning America, “We already signed the deal digitally yesterday.”
Liberal analysts have emphasized that the “deal” is actually just a preliminary “memorandum of understanding,” basically, a commitment to keep talking. And they insist that it won’t lead to an Iran nuclear deal better than Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Conservative commentators counter: A new deal would be better, because the JCPOA was negotiated by Obama, a total wimp, whereas Trump has proved he’ll hit Iran hard if it acts against American interests.
I think both groups miss the point. What Trump has actually accomplished is to reframe the Islamic Republic as a legitimate actor in world affairs, rather than a Forever Enemy whose very existence America can scarcely tolerate. “We got along very well with Iran,” Trump said on Monday in a joint press conference with France’s President Emmanuel Macron. “I find them to be more rational, very smart,” Trump told NBC News last week. Would any American president before Trump have been caught describing the Islamic Republic in this way?
Trump seems to have arrived at this reframing not through any naively liberal tendency to trust an America-hating theocracy, but as the result of a war in which Iran demonstrated that it has real leverage rooted in military power. If the U.S. can’t topple the Iranian regime, and if the health of the global economy depends on Washington and Tehran getting along, then Trump can no longer follow the lead of uber-hawks who reject, in principle, U.S.–Iran diplomacy.
Of course, just as Trump swung wildly from frenzied bellicosity to peace-loving diplomacy, he can swing back again. But that’s kind of the point. Trump’s uniquely nonideological and erratic approach to governance has raised the novel possibility of genuine peace, based on a realistic acceptance of Tehran’s illiberal regime and a recognition that Iran does not actually pose a threat that justifies costly war.
We’re not quite there yet, but that’s the pathway Trump has opened up. I hope he takes it.
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