The Iran Deal Trump Signed but Didn’t Write
America can still destroy almost anything. It can no longer decide what comes after.
Grüezi!
1 Rules. Based.
When Charlemagne died, he handed his son an empire that stretched from the Atlantic to the Elbe. His grandsons broke it to pieces. The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, Roman nor an empire, goes the old joke.
The rules-based order is heading the same way, breaking apart not because of dynastic squabbles but because its proprietor would rather rent it than run it.
Under Donald Trump it is neither rules-based nor an order, and – on the evidence of the Iran settlement – no longer America’s to dispose of.
The reckless spending of American primacy is not a smooth dynastic succession to a single heir, this is not Athens passing the baton to Rome, or Westminster to Washington. It is partition: separate settlements, each underwritten by a power that is not the United States.
No one has felt that shift more keenly, or misread it more completely, than Shimon Riklin. He fronts a nightly hour on Channel 14, Israel’s reliably pro-Netanyahu broadcaster. Before he found television, he founded settlements.
Riklin was an enthusiastic backer of the war and thanked God on air the night Trump won in 2024. This week, before American and Iranian negotiators were due to sign, he spoke with the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner in shock.
Trump had lifted the blockade, dropped the sanctions and offered to help rebuild a country Israel had spent the spring trying to break, on terms far milder than the 2015 deal he had spent a decade deriding.
Why? Reaching for a reason, Riklin settled on astrology – the President is a Gemini, and Geminis cannot be counted on: “How did [Israel] become the bad guy, and the Ayatollah is the good guy?”
What Riklin saw was a daring Israeli plan against an implacable Iranian enemy, thwarted at the last by America’s loss of nerve.
Israel had meant to do to the Islamic Republic what no one had dared since 1979: not contain it but end it, dismember and disable it, and stand something pliable in its place.
The plan was bold, and it rested almost entirely on hope.
It needed crowds to fill the streets of Tehran the moment the Supreme Leader fell. It needed a government-in-waiting with enough standing to be believed. It needed militias to march in from Iran’s neighbours – Kurds out of the Turkish and Iraqi borderlands, Baloch out of Pakistan.
But none of it could happen without an American president who would want all of it as badly as Netanyahu did.
And getting Trump to say “yes” was Netanyahu’s biggest mistake.
2 What actually happened
Trump took the plan, and he took it fresh from Caracas, where an American operation had just removed a sitting president and seemed to show that toppling a country’s leader could be quick and clean.
In Venezuela, Washington took its prisoner and restored a compliant oil supplier, chavismo shed the one man it could no longer afford and kept everything else.
Within weeks the sanctions had eased, the oilfields had opened for industry executives to visit and a president no one had elected had Washington’s blessing.
But Caracas also offered a warning. America did the dirty work; the regime kept the state. Maduro – the figurehead, and the trophy Trump wanted – was the prize, and the apparatus beneath him closed ranks and raised his vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, into his place.
That was exactly what happened in Tehran. Except there was no deal.
Trump basked in the spectacle and mistook the operation’s success for vindication. It would cost him.
3 The Mistake
His own people did not believe Iran would follow suit. We know that from the Situation Room accounts leaked to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. Advisers judged Israel’s regime-change scenario farcical and said so, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs warned the campaign had been oversold, but the President overrode them on a hunch.
And the opening blow landed exactly as intended. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, was killed in a strike of real audacity – the single most spectacular thing either side managed in the entire war.
Then nothing happened. The crowds didn’t gather under air attacks. Reporters who reached Kurdish militia commanders found them where they had always been, on their own side of the border, waiting.
Erdoğan did not want emboldened Kurds on the march anywhere near his own south-east, and Pakistan did not want fighters from its Baloch minority drawing the lesson that armed secession could pay.
Reza Pahlavi, the exiled prince the plan had cast as Iran’s next ruler, kept to the sidelines.
In Tehran the regime did what its counterpart in Caracas had done, only without the American deal: the Revolutionary Guard closed ranks and raised the dead man’s son, Mojtaba, into his father’s place.
4 The Intaglio Imbroglio
With no one willing to cross a border there were no fighters to do in Iran what had been done in Syria. And then there was the question any junior analyst might have raised at the very outset.
Would Iran’s neighbours actually welcome its violent dismemberment?
It quickly became clear that they would not. And they said so by refusing to let boots appear on the ground.
Once the ground phase died, the gamble had nowhere left to go. What remained was a war of attrition running the wrong way for Washington: America’s expensive ordnance and missile stocks diminishing by the week, and the oil price climbing as Iran did what every intelligence assessment had forecast since the 1970s and shut the Strait of Hormuz.
The pain did not fall on Iran’s enemies alone. It fell on every nation from Europe to East Asia that takes oil, gas or chemicals through the strait, which is almost all of them.
There is a printer’s word for what the war kept out of view. On a banknote the marks that authenticate it are not the portrait raised off the surface but the lines cut down into the plate beneath – the intaglio, incised rather than embossed, holding ink no forger can lift clean.
The fighting was the raised relief, photographed from every angle.
The peace was the intaglio, cut where almost no one was looking, and it is the recessed lines, not the visible ones, that tell you the real story.
5 The Deal
Trump had promised the deal dozens of times; deal-making being the one accomplishment he never tires of claiming.
But the terms of this one were not set in Jerusalem, nor in Gulf capitals, nor in Washington. They were negotiated in Islamabad, by a syndicate of interests that took in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, China and Pakistan – and only the United States signed.
It was a kind of syndicate, but of vetoes rather than aims. What bound it was not a common purpose but a common refusal.
Turkey would not have an armed Kurdish movement emboldened on any border of its own. Pakistan would not have the Baloch unleashed, nor a failed state at its western edge.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar would not have their cities and their oilfields left under an open-ended exchange of missiles.
China would not have the Gulf supply that feeds Asian industry made a hostage of someone else’s war.
These were the interests that Israel’s war party had overlooked. The same interests it had assumed that American support could brush aside.
They turned out to be the ones whose consent was needed to end it.
The groundwork for the new Middle Eastern security order had been laid a season earlier, and not by anyone in Washington.
In September 2025 Israel tried to kill Hamas’s negotiators in Doha – on the soil of a Gulf state that hosts the largest American base in the region – and though it missed the leaders and killed a Qatari officer instead, Gulf states drew the lesson about what America’s security guarantee was worth, and where each of them stood in the queue for one.
Eight days later, on 17 September, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a mutual-defence pact – the first binding of a Gulf state’s security to a nuclear-armed power, the umbrella itself left deliberately unspoken, hinted at by one Pakistani minister and promptly walked back.
When the Iran war came, Pakistan made good on its promise. Fresh from showing off its Chinese-built fighters in a spring clash with India, it arrived in the kingdom with troops, aircraft, drones and Chinese air-defence systems, set over the oilfields against whatever Iran sent.
Pakistan is not China’s client; it doesn’t take its orders from Beijing. But it is China’s customer.
And Trump, for his part, had asked Beijing for help reopening the strait back in March, which speaks to incompetence or desperation or both.
6 Turkey and India
Turkey helped kill the Kurdish march before it began – one veto among the forces that finished it, but the one that Washington could not ignore, Erdoğan taking his objection to Trump directly until the President called the operation too dangerous.
It is a NATO member, an American ally on paper, and it moved against the American-Israeli plan without apology, because Erdoğan had read two things the plan had not: that there is a hierarchy among Washington’s allies, and that under Trump that hierarchy is set by what each can do for him this week.
Turkey could do a great deal – hold post-Assad Syria together, broker on Ukraine, anchor the corridor that carries Central Asian energy past Russia and Iran – so its defiance was bought rather than punished, with the movement on F-35s and sanctions Ankara had wanted for years. Europeans lectured Trump, Erdoğan flattered him, worked the back channel and never said his name.
India chose to hedge. Washington needs Islamabad to hold the peace together; it also cannot afford to lose Delhi while it leans on Islamabad.
So it pays India in the coin India prizes most: the engine technology to build its own fighters, intellectual property Washington had shared with no one, now passing into Indian hands – the radar and missile electronics to follow.
India banks the technology and keeps every other door ajar, working BRICS and the G20 and its doctrine of multi-alignment, even as the war it is hedging around leaves its farmers short of fertiliser and its cities short of gas.
7 Where it leaves America
So consider what the United States is left holding. A settlement it did not write and cannot enforce on its own, propped up by a state whose former prime minister sits in a Rawalpindi jail cell in failing health, and whose stability is one medical emergency from the streets erupting.
Stockpiles have been run down in a war it did not win. But hardest of all to replace, the respect and fear that used to do the work for it. After the first Gulf War, American power swept the field and left a dread behind that kept rivals careful for a decade.
That dread was not fear of weaponry alone. In 1991 Washington had set a limited aim, gathered a broad coalition, massed overwhelming force, pushed Iraq out of Kuwait and stopped on the line it had drawn.
Force, diplomacy, industry and political purpose moved as one, and what frightened rivals was not the punishment but the machine: the belief that America could assemble the world around a war and decide what came after it.
This “war” took that apart, piece by piece. American air power still works. The rest of it?
The pattern is neither new nor flattering. The United States was pushed out of Afghanistan under Biden much as the Soviet Union had been pushed out before it.
Now it has tried to bend Iran to its will and failed, and contrived in the same campaign to estrange the one ally it has long prized above all others. If Riklin wondered at the mood in Washington, JD Vance said the quiet part out loud:
“Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time.”
Managing to make support sound like an admonishment.
America can still destroy almost anything it chooses – a president in Caracas, a Supreme Leader in Tehran. What it can no longer do is turn that destruction into an order it controls. The breaking is what America does. The settling up has been left to others.
Which leaves two questions.
The first is what becomes of a Middle East whose security is now too loose to govern and too important to leave alone.
The second is the bigger one, the one Riklin half-saw. If the power to destroy things no longer brings with it the power to shape what follows, then the question is no longer who inherits the mantle of the United States.
It’s whether anyone does.
Thanks for reading,
Bis bald,
Adrian