Iran war: Here’s what’s holding Trump back from making a deal.

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Iran’s latest demands in the diplomatic quarrel over the Strait of Hormuz may seem excessive—Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said they “could never be an acceptable condition of any deal”—but in fact they were part of the deal that President Donald Trump agreed to two months ago.

The proposal, issued Saturday by the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, stated that Iran would not open the strait—the waterway for a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil traffic—until the United States ended its naval blockade, lifted sanctions on Iran’s oil exports, released Iran’s frozen assets, withdrew its military forces from the area around Iran, and paid reparations for the damage inflicted by its massive bombardment of the country since February.

Except for the part about reparations, the demands restated some of the 14 articles in the memorandum of understanding signed by U.S. and Iranian negotiators in mid-June. Though Trump hailed the MoU as a major achievement, the text described it as the “framework” for an agreement that diplomats would finalize over the subsequent 60 days. It fell apart within a week, predictably, as the two sides acted on conflicting interpretations of its central provisions.

And now Iran’s leaders—mainly top officers in the military’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—are shoving the document back in Trump’s lap, underlining their reading of the original, conceding no favors, and adding an extra demand to boot. They feel they can do so because they hold what Trump would call “the cards” in this conflict. They control the Strait of Hormuz, which is now twisting the global economy and possibly America’s upcoming elections. They control their own country’s borders, society, economy, and politics, in some ways with a firmer, more oppressive, more anti-Western hand than the leaders who were killed in an airstrike on the first day of the war. And Trump’s own vacillation—his repeated threats to annihilate Iran, followed by repeated steps back—has convinced them that he poses no existential threat and that, therefore, they needn’t offer him a face-saving way out of his own trap. They seem to be pushing for not a compromise but a win—which, in their terms, would be Iran’s ascendance as the region’s leading power (despite the bombs’ devastation) and America’s slinking away in decline.

Trump doesn’t see it that way, or pretends not to. “We are low-keying it with Iran,” he told a reporter with Axios in a phone call on Sunday, meaning that he’s just waiting for Iran to collapse. “We are only semi-negotiating with them,” he went on. “We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money. … It will work out. It always works out. It’s like a chess game”—ignoring the fact that, in fact, politico-military disasters frequently don’t work out, and, in any case, the waiting game that he hopes for is nothing remotely like chess.

In the same weekend that Iran moved its castle and called “Check,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly rejected the 15-point peace plan for Gaza that Trump had presented as a “historic breakthrough” 10 days earlier. The centerpiece of this strategy called for Hamas to disarm and for Israel to withdraw from Gaza, without first getting agreement on which side goes first. It also called for various Palestinian and multinational entities to keep the peace, stabilize Gaza’s governance, and repair the war’s damage—without first creating the various entities.

The MoU with Iran and the 15-point peace plan for Gaza were both mostly the work of Trump’s globe-trotting emissaries, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his fellow real-estate tycoon Steve Witkoff, neither of whom holds the rank of a government official nor has more than the slightest idea what he’s doing.

Nobody in American Politics Can Figure Out When to Back Down

There may be a way out of the imbroglio in Iran. The MoU was always a bad deal for the U.S., but under the circumstances, it may be better than keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed or resuming a senselessly murderous war. Even the wording of Iran’s present proposal has some room for bargaining. For instance, the call for reparations could be folded into the articles for lifting sanctions and freeing frozen assets. And some of the loose language, in both the MoU and the current statement, could be nailed down. (The call for U.S. military forces to withdraw from the area near Iran couldn’t really mean the shutdown of our huge bases, holding 50,000 troops, in Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, could it?)

Our allies pray daily for Trump to summon the pros from Dover—a resuscitation of the foreign service, a rejoining of diplomats and the practice of diplomacy. But this, alas, will likely require the election of a different kind of president. The question is whether we can last the intervening two and a half years.

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