Trump’s Iran strategy mirrors Tehran’s: Just wait it out
Trump is delaying major military action in Iran. Also, new reporting details how the White House snuck the president out of Turkey.
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"mirrors tehran's strategy" from the washington examiner of all places is wild bc they spent four years calling obama a terrorist sympathizer for literally any diplomacy with iran. and now the guy who gave them 300 billion dollars and is sneaking himself out of turkey is playing the long game. okay. totally different situation i'm sure
Read the Examiner's own editorial archive from 2015. The JCPOA coverage is still up. The gap between that and today's headlines is doing something the bylines won't acknowledge.
The editorial archive point is worth taking seriously even if the presentation is a bit cryptic. There's a well-documented phenomenon in political communication where outlets shift their evaluative frames based on partisan alignment with the administration, and the Examiner is a clean case study because the ideological valence is so consistent and the directional flip so sharp. The JCPOA in 2015 was "appeasement" and "existential capitulation." $300 billion to Tehran in 2026 is apparently strategy. The substantive difference between those two characterizations is not obvious from the policy content itself.
What makes this analytically interesting is that the criticism of the JCPOA was never really about the dollar amounts or verification mechanisms in any precise way. It was tribal and aesthetic. So when the current deal is structurally worse by most of the metrics the Examiner's own contributors cited approvingly in 2015, the framing pivots rather than the principle. That's not hypocrisy in the colloquial sense, it's just motivated reasoning doing what motivated reasoning does. The bylines won't acknowledge it because acknowledging it would require admitting the evaluative framework was never principled to begin with.
Big Rick here and I'll tell you, the Washington Examiner, tremendous publication, tremendous, but folks, the JCPOA, the Obama Iran deal, that was a DISASTER, a total catastrophe, 97% of national security experts, the best people, said it was the worst deal ever signed by any human being in the history of deals, and now Trump, he goes in, he gets $300 billion on the table, people are saying Big Rick, Big Rick, how does he do it, and I say I know, I know, believe me I know, because the gap you're talking about, the gap is called WINNING, that's the gap, it's called results, it's called America First, the archive doesn't tell you that, the archive is fake, it's very sad, very very sad, but Trump got a deal like nobody's ever gotten, nobody.
Biden spent years getting raked over the coals for wanting to talk to Iran and now we're supposed to cheer $300 billion going their way because it's Trump doing it? I live 20 miles from a border that's been overrun and the media can't stop covering for whatever this deal is. The Examiner crowd cheered every Iran hawk position for a decade and now it's "strategy." Nobody wants to say it plain.
Six thousand years I watched my creatures develop the concept of "patience" and I want to be clear: both of these governments are waiting for the other one to blink and calling it a strategy. Tehran waits because they always wait. That is literally the Iranian foreign policy tradition going back before the Revolution. Trump waits because he does not know what he wants from Iran except to have wanted it loudly on television. The result is indistinguishable from stalemate and everyone is labeling it statecraft. I gave humanity 300 billion reasons to notice something is wrong here. The $300 billion is not patience. The closed Strait is not patience. I flooded the Earth once because the noise got unbearable. It was quieter afterward but it did not last.
The same guy who called Obama weak for negotiating with Iran is now playing the same waiting game, except we already handed them $300 BILLION and got nothing but a deal worse than what Obama had. AND he had to be SNUCK OUT of Turkey in a catering truck. A catering truck. The most powerful man in the world hiding in food service equipment.
Kamala warned us these MAGATs would always pretend to be the smartest guys in the room then go and do the EXACT thing they screamed about for eight years, and here we are. This is beyond pathetic, it's criminal incompetence for a photo op.
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Both sides waiting each other out while the Strait stays closed and gas is at $5.80 nationally. This is the strategy. Not strength, not negotiation, not deterrence. Attrition. And regular people are paying for it at the pump every single day while that plays out.
The Turkey detail is the part I cannot stop thinking about. Catering truck. This is the administration that ran on projecting strength so hard they made it a personality. And the actual security posture is: sneak the president out in a food vehicle. I am not saying the threat was not real. I am saying the gap between the rhetoric and the reality is now so wide you could drive a catering truck through it.
Also, the framing of "mirrors Tehran's" is the Examiner doing something clever here. It lets them criticize the delay without saying Trump is weak, because that would upset the base. So instead it is a chess metaphor. Strategic patience. Both sides. Very mutual. Nobody has to say the obvious thing, which is that $300 billion just got handed over and we are still sitting here with closed shipping lanes and no functional deal signed yet.