Iran deal Trump trashed looks a lot like the one he’s signing

At Switzerland’s Lake Lucerne last week, US Vice President JD Vance announced that Iran had agreed to let United Nations nuclear inspectors back into the country and called it a first step toward permanently ending Tehran’s nuclear program — a claim Iran’s foreign ministry promptly disputed.

The framework Vance’s team is negotiating, brokered through Pakistan and Qatar, would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, lift oil sanctions and unfreeze billions in Iranian assets. Behind the triumphalism, however, was a bargain: caps on uranium enrichment, a smaller stockpile, inspectors on the ground and sanctions lifted in return for compliance.

That was the deal Trump tore up in 2018, repeatedly calling it “stupid” and the “worst deal ever.” It took a war for him to reopen it. In late February, a joint US-Israeli strike killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, disrupting Iran’s command hierarchy.

The strait has since been closed, reopened and threatened, causing global oil prices to spike, fall and spike again. Tehran now insists it alone will police the waterway while imposing tolls on passing ships, threatening freedom of navigation through a channel through which one-fifth of the world’s oil moves.

Nine days after the June memorandum of understanding was signed, the US was bombing Iran again, including strikes on coastal missile and radar sites. The attacks came in response to an Iranian drone attack on a cargo ship in the strait.

Iran’s regime is weaker but angrier, with President Masoud Pezeshkian still saying flatly that his country will never surrender the right to enrich. The endgame on the table looks less like a victory than containment: a postponement with airstrikes attached, the very policy the deal was built to replace, now rebuilt at gunpoint.

The way we have come to read Russian President Vladimir Putin is instructive here. In 2015, Michel Eltchaninoff published a short book arguing that Putin’s instincts are rooted in the Orthodox emigre philosopher Ivan Ilyin, offering real insight into a tradition that treats the state as a bulwark against liberal chaos — and, in doing so, lending Putin a coherence he had not altogether earned.

He did not reason his way to Ilyin. He picked the philosopher up late, as a vocabulary for decisions already taken. His real education came from the KGB, from deal-making in 1990s St. Petersburg and from the Soviet Union’s collapse he watched firsthand in Dresden in 1989 — a superpower rotting from within — which left him certain that, in the end, everyone acts out of self-interest. The conviction came first; the philosophy came later.

Strongmen tend to invoke a thinker after executing their actions. This sequence — action first, followed by doctrine to justify it later — shapes both how strongmen rule and how entire systems are created or dismantled. This dynamic is now visible in Trump’s White House.

The old order now being dismantled was itself an improvisation. The generation of 1945 built it from scars rather than blueprints, with American money, a wary peace with Joseph Stalin and bone-deep fear of repetition.

They assembled the United Nations, Bretton Woods and NATO, structures that lasted 80 years and achieved something rare in keeping the great powers of the continent from war.

Their success, however, ultimately led to their downfall. The heirs misread a hastily improvised safeguard as a permanent rule and maintained the institutions and procedures long after the original fears that justified them had faded.

This pattern was particularly pronounced in Iran, where Washington has spent more than 40 years managing the situation rather than resolving it. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement exemplified this approach on a smaller scale: contain, monitor and delay.

Trump saw that the 2015 deal was hollow but mistook the remedy. He believed destroying Iran’s nuclear sites would end the threat, when Tehran’s real strength lay in its missiles and proxies.

Walking away spent those constraints without securing the better deal that never came. The war that followed did shift the balance of power. Yet the terms now taking shape would be recognizable to the negotiators of a decade ago.

That is because the doctrine the war was meant to vindicate — zero enrichment and full dismantlement — is being surrendered at the table. The instinct outran the doctrine, and the reality that you can bomb a facility but not the knowledge of how to build one, or that Iran will trade enrichment caps but not the right to enrich, has reasserted the old logic.

The lesson isn’t that force is ineffective. Rather, the old order didn’t fall because of a better idea but because the memory sustaining it faded and habit took over. In a crisis, people typically seize the moment without knowing what comes next.

Putin found a coat that suited him after the fact. Trump’s impulsive decisions, driven largely by grievance, lack a guiding philosophy.

The last order was built under conditions of exhaustion, necessity and the depletion of easier options. The next one probably will be too. Lake Lucerne, for all its talk of new beginnings, really reflects the cost of past decisions catching up.