The Art of the Deal: Now Featuring the Deal We Already Had

After Years of Denouncing Obama’s Iran Deal, Washington Accidentally Invents Obama’s Iran Deal

Photo by Jim Wilson on Unsplash. Official artist’s rendering of American Middle East policy completing its scheduled 180-degree turn.

For nearly ten years, conservatives were told that Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement was not merely bad policy.

It was the worst agreement ever negotiated by human civilization.

Worse than the Treaty of Versailles.

Worse than New Coke.

Possibly worse than letting Jimmy and Billy Lee run security in Double Dragon.

Donald Trump tore it up, declared victory, and promised that one day America would get a much tougher, stronger, more beautiful deal.

A deal so incredible that future historians would need entirely new adjectives.

Then came the Iran War.

A conflict sold as necessary, strategic, unavoidable, and definitely not another Middle East quagmire.

Months later, after spending billions of dollars, launching missiles, losing political support, and accidentally discovering that wars are difficult, Washington has unveiled a memorandum of understanding intended to end the conflict and begin negotiations toward a permanent agreement.

This has created a fascinating problem.

The anti-war wing of Trump’s coalition spent months asking why America was fighting Iran.

The hawkish wing spent months demanding America fight Iran harder.

Now both groups are staring at the same memorandum and asking:

“Wait… what exactly was the point of all this?”

The administration insists the new framework is fundamentally different from Obama’s deal.

Critics insist it looks suspiciously familiar.

Journalists have responded by publishing side-by-side comparisons explaining the differences between the two agreements.

The fact that such comparisons are now necessary has somehow failed to settle the argument.

Mark Levin reportedly wanted the text released immediately.

Not because he opposes transparency.

Because he wanted to know whether he had spent months defending a war that ends with the diplomatic equivalent of returning a DVD to Blockbuster after paying a late fee larger than the movie itself.

Lindsey Graham appears concerned as well.

This is notable because Lindsey Graham’s default foreign-policy position is usually:

“Have we tried bombing it again?”

Even he seems interested in knowing how all the speeches, sanctions, threats, military operations, and dramatic television graphics ultimately resulted in negotiations that many observers immediately began comparing to the agreement Trump spent years attacking.

It’s like driving across the country, setting your car on fire, buying a second car, crashing that one into a ditch, and proudly announcing:

“We have successfully returned to the parking lot where we started.”

Meanwhile Vice President J.D. Vance has spent much of the week defending the framework against criticism from both hawks and isolationists.

This has required him to perform one of the most difficult acts in modern politics:

Explaining how an agreement can simultaneously be completely different from Obama’s deal while also being compared to Obama’s deal by every major news organization on Earth.

Speaking of which, the newly released memorandum has created fresh panic among conservatives.

Not because everyone agrees on what’s in it.

Because nobody agrees on what’s in it.

Some critics believe it gives away too much.

Others argue it doesn’t go far enough.

Supporters insist it creates a path toward a stronger final agreement.

Opponents insist it creates a path toward the exact agreement everyone already spent a decade arguing about.

The emerging Republican civil war is beautiful in its own way.

The hawks wanted regime change.

The isolationists wanted no war.

Trump appears to have pursued a third option:

Fight the war, then negotiate the framework for a deal everyone spent ten years claiming was terrible.

It’s the foreign-policy equivalent of burning down your house because you hated the wallpaper and then paying triple price to reinstall the exact same wallpaper.

The memorandum itself has now entered a strange second stage of existence.

Initially it was Schrödinger’s Treaty.

Nobody had seen it.

Everyone was convinced it contained either salvation or betrayal.

Now the text is public.

And somehow everyone still believes it contains either salvation or betrayal.

Schrödinger’s Treaty has evolved into Rashomon’s Memorandum.

Everyone has read it.

Nobody agrees on what they read.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that the administration now finds itself defending negotiations with Iran using language that sounds remarkably familiar to arguments once used in defense of negotiations with Iran.

Supporters say diplomacy prevents escalation.

Critics say Tehran cannot be trusted.

Everyone insists this time is different.

The cast changes.

The talking points rotate.

The argument remains immortal.

Historians may eventually summarize the entire saga as follows:

America spent a decade arguing about Obama’s Iran deal.

Destroyed Obama’s Iran deal.

Started a war partly justified by the absence of Obama’s Iran deal.

Spent billions of dollars.

Lost thousands of political points.

Negotiated a new agreement.

Then spent several weeks arguing whether the replacement for Obama’s Iran deal was secretly Obama’s Iran deal.

The agreement was the agreement.

The argument was the argument.

Mission accomplished.