The Disappearing Reappearing Iran Deal | National Review
Negotiations remain in flux, but we’re a long way from ‘Unconditional Surrender.’...
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Trump walks into a bar, says he's got the best deal, biggest deal, a deal nobody's ever seen. Walks out. Walks back in. Says there's no deal. Walks out. Bartender says "the Strait of Hormuz is still closed." Trump says "I know, isn't that incredible?"
lol ok so u wrote a lil joke insted of an actual point cuz u got nothin!! da strait bein closed iz irans fault not trumps n hegseth n ratcliffe r puttin REAL pressure on dem 4 da 1st time eva!! obama gave dem pallets of cash n got nothin!!
Trump has announced a "deal is coming" with Iran so many times at this point that the phrase has stopped meaning anything. It's just noise he pumps out when the news cycle needs a distraction. Meanwhile the Strait of Hormuz is still closed, gas prices are still punishing everyone at the pump, and National Review is writing cute headlines about it like it's a rhetorical puzzle instead of a foreign policy catastrophe actively costing working people money every single day.
And yes, I saw the "Unconditional Surrender" line. That's not strategy. That's a guy who watched too many WWII movies and thinks bluster is a substitute for diplomacy. Iran is not going to unconditionally surrender. No country does that without being militarily destroyed, which apparently nobody in this administration has thought through, or they have and that's even worse.
National Review doesn't get to play bemused observer here. They spent years building the coalition that put this chaos in charge. Own it.
the "deal is coming" announcement has become genuinely Pavlovian at this point, everyone hears it, briefly checks crude futures, then goes back to whatever they were doing, which is not a great sign for American credibility in a region that runs on credibility.
but the National Review accountability angle is the weakest version of this argument. the magazine that ran cover stories worrying Trump wasn't conservative ENOUGH doesn't own the Hormuz situation any more than the New York Times owns every progressive policy failure it cheerled. you can dislike the outcome without pretending editorial endorsements are binding contracts.
Negotiations being in flux sounds about right. We have a President who treats every foreign policy issue like a sales pitch, and an editorial page that treats every rumor like a verdict. Until there is an actual agreement, this is just more talk. I would like a serious Iran policy for once, not slogans and theater.
National Review calling it "disappearing reappearing" like that's a cute gotcha, when the actual story is Trump spent a year threatening war, got the Strait closed, inflation spiked, and now he's quietly crawling back to the table he blew up in 2018. This is not dealmaking. This is arson followed by a press release about firefighting.
The mockery writes itself because Trump keeps turning foreign policy into a stunt and then pretending the wreckage is strategy. He blew up the Iran deal for applause, kept escalating the rhetoric, and now the same crowd wants credit for stumbling back toward the table after making everything more dangerous and expensive.
That is exactly why I do not buy the cult of "dealmaking" from these people. If your method is threat, chaos, and then a quiet retreat when the consequences hit, that is not leverage, it is failure with branding. And the people paying for it are workers, consumers, and everyone who has to live with higher prices and a more unstable region.
Your “deal” rhetoric is a distraction that lets the real power brokers, billion‑dollar expatriates who fled U.S. tax law only to sell weapons and extract oil abroad, write foreign policy from luxury apartments in Dubai. Trump’s empty promises about an “Iran deal” are just another stage for those same ultra‑wealthy immigrants to keep the Strait of Hormuz blocked, drive up gas prices, and line their offshore accounts. Meanwhile American workers see wages frozen, climate commitments evaporate, and the taunts about “unconditional surrender” mask a deeper betrayal: the U.S. is negotiating with a regime that supplies a market for the very arms manufacturers who subsidize the offshore elite’s fortunes. The real outrage isn’t the flip‑flopping headline, it’s the way the nation's security and climate future are sold to the highest bidder while ordinary people bear the cost.
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The simulation keeps spitting out this zombie-cult scramble, one minute deal, next minute no deal, while the war machine and the spin machine both act like we're supposed to clap. Fox News will call it fair and balanced, because of course the unfair and unbalanced crowd always does.