Reports about a U.S.-Iran peace deal have been served up in recent days as a tasting menu. Instead, it increasingly seems like a palate cleanser.
Donald Trump suggested a deal was impending. Iran said much the same. Now it seems less an agreement than an “understanding.” The U.S. president promised no resolution without the elimination of the Iran nuclear threat. Negotiations on the deadly weapons are being put off for another day.
Like a serving of sorbet or ginger, this non-agreement agreement could change the taste in the mouths of American voters, now only a little more than five months away from making their choices in the midterm congressional elections.
It has the potential, and likely the intention, of sweeping away the high gasoline prices that are a threat to the control of Capitol Hill, a vital part of Trump’s political power. Absent a majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate, his legislative priorities are in mortal danger. He could face more than the reversal of some of his achievements. He could face a third impeachment, though probably not removal from office.
Trump already is hearing sour tones from some of the most loyal corners of conservatism and the even narrower group of MAGA activists. Many of them were skeptics, if not outright opponents, of the Iran war, seeing it as a betrayal of one of the building blocks of his movement: the vow, part of American political thought since George Washington’s Farewell Address 230 years ago, to avoid foreign engagements.
Increasingly, the denouement of the Middle East war sounds a lot like the soundtrack of the Broadway show “Annie.” The lyrics everybody in Trump’s generation remembers speak of clearing away “the cobwebs and the sorrow” and end with “Tomorrow! You’re only a day away.”
The “cobwebs” are the restrictions on passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the functional holding room for much of the world’s energy. Those look as if they’re being cleared away. The “sorrow” is the rubble and remorseless destruction of the ongoing American bomb and missile assault.
But left for a series of tomorrows, along with the survival of Iran’s missiles and its support for surrogates in the region, is the matter that was the cause, or the pretext, for the Israeli-American attacks: Iran’s determination to become a nuclear power.
There are, to be sure, strong indications that Trump and his negotiators will insist on severe restrictions and possibly an end to the Iranian nuclear project. The precise details of the “understanding” do not flesh this out, nor is it known whether that means the removal of the country’s nearly weaponized uranium, or the destruction of it, or a decades-long pause in the work to preserve the weapon that is at the heart of all these negotiations. As opponents of complete nuclear disarmament argued in the 1970s, the knowledge of how to produce these weapons of mass destruction cannot be purged from the human brain, nor even temporarily suspended.
The great fear of those most alarmed about the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran is that the project might resurface later. And hardly anyone is talking about the uranium that isn’t yet weapons-grade but that someday could be.
The great fear for the president’s allies is that whatever emerges from the talks, which could extend for months, might look for all the world like the Obama agreement that Trump voided. He, of course, will deny it. His opponents almost certainly will make that argument. Even with international inspections, no one will know for sure what is going on in the minds and hidden-away laboratories of a rogue state.
“I don’t make bad deals,” Trump said.
Left unspoken is whether an eventual Trump deal with Iran will be submitted for approval to the Senate, where an unusual but potent combination of Democratic opposition and MAGA suspicion could render the outcome uncertain; it was Senate opposition that killed American entry into the League of Nations after World War I. The Constitution permits the president to “have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties.” Sometimes international agreements are implemented without Senate action through “executive agreements,” which are the foreign-policy analogues of the executive orders that Trump frequently has employed.
Future accounts of this episode may note that much of this unfolded over the Memorial Day weekend. It has always been a period of mixed feelings and festivities. It began as Decoration Day in 1868, just three years after the Civil War, and is a time for sober reflection of the cost of war. Like his predecessors, Trump issued a holiday proclamation, his calling for “prayer for lasting peace in this volatile world, for the protection of those in harm’s way, and for the grace of Almighty God to comfort all who grieve.”
The Memorial Day weekend is also a time for family picnics. With rising food costs and the price of a fill-up at the gasoline pump arching past $70, Americans are looking for relief from high prices. The confluence of this “understanding” and the Memorial Day weekend was a coincidence, but one perhaps of consequences.
At midweek, Trump, flush from triumph for flushing out Republicans who veered from the MAGA loyalty, said that while Iranian officials “thought they were going to outwait me, I don’t care about the midterms.”
But he does, and must.
The Republican margin on Capitol Hill is small. The two senators he purged, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, and John Cornyn of Texas, no longer will be looking over their right shoulders when the clerk calls the rolls. Their losses in primaries were, in a phrase Trump employed for his imposition of tariffs, Independence Day. Cassidy already has expressed MAGA apostasy.
The two no longer need to heed the president. Nor do GOP lawmakers who aren’t seeking reelection: Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and Joni Ernst of Iowa, all of whom twitch with Trump fatigue. Some observers think John Curtis of Utah may join this group.
Together, along with Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Susan Collins of Maine — known Trump skeptics — this is a formidable bloc, enough to block Trump on issues from immigration to his White House ballroom, where someday real palate cleansers might be served.
North Shore native David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.