Trump’s deal is a catastrophic capitulation to Iran’s aggressors, leaves Israel vulnerable and constrained

An earlier version of this Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

On March 2, the third day of the US-Israel war against Iran, US President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff gave an interview to Fox News in which he explained why the administration’s efforts to negotiate a deal with the regime in Tehran earlier in the year had failed.

He and Jared Kushner, Witkoff recalled, had been tasked with seeking an agreement under which Iran would halt its nuclear program, dismantle its ballistic missile program, cease its support for proxies, and eliminate its navy “so we can have freedom of the seas.”

Far from entertaining a willingness to compromise, despite having been battered in the June 2025 12-day war, said Witkoff, the Iranian negotiators bragged that their obduracy and duplicity had been paying off. On the nuclear front, they gloated, they had amassed 460 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, which, Witkoff noted in his interview, could be turned into weapons-grade within 10 days.

“In that first meeting, both the Iranian negotiators said to us directly — with no shame — that they controlled 460 kilograms of 60% [enriched uranium] and that they’re aware that could make 11 nuclear bombs,” Witkoff recalled, aghast. The Iranians, he exclaimed, “were proud that they had evaded all sorts of oversight protocols to get to a place where they could deliver 11 nuclear bombs.”

Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition

by email and never miss our top stories

By signing up, you agree to the terms

They also claimed to have “an inalienable right” to enrich their nuclear fuel,” he noted, saying that he and Kushner had responded, robustly, by declaring “that the president feels we have the inalienable right to stop you dead in your tracks.”

Fast-forward three and a half months, and the US will on Friday formally sign a memorandum of understanding with Iran, already signed digitally long-distance, that resolves none of the goals of the war — none of the goals that Witkoff and Kushner attempted to resolve in their negotiated effort to avert the war.

According to a draft of the text obtained by The Times of Israel, CNN and Bloomberg on Wednesday, the 14-point MOU potentially grants the regime hundreds of billions of dollars — which it will doubtless utilize to help keep its restive population in line, to massively fund Hezbollah, Hamas and its other terrorist proxies, and to spend as needed on its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. (The White House said later Wednesday, without elaboration, that the draft text “does not reflect the language of the actual MOU.”)

The draft agreement provides for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz — the vital waterway Iran seized and leveraged to push Trump into this deal — but with no long-term commitment by the regime to keep it open and toll-free.

And it pushes the entire subject of Iran’s rogue nuclear program into a 60-day negotiation period, during which the regime can be relied upon to be as uncompromising and dismissive as its negotiators were when facing Witkoff and Kushner in January.

Incredibly, the draft text of the MOU already rewards the regime for its intransigence: The draft document states that Iran’s “nuclear needs” will be addressed in those 60 days; the US negotiators apparently could not even persuade the regime to include the words “peaceful” or “civilian,” to at least keep up the pretense that it has legitimate nuclear requirements.

During the 60 days, the MOU draft text continues ridiculously, “Iran will maintain the status quo on its nuclear program.” What status quo would that be? The “status quo” under which Iran has run rings around the UN’s nuclear inspectors, to the point where, as its negotiators boasted to Witkoff, it amassed enough near-weapons-grade uranium for 11 nuclear bombs, an underground stockpile that survived the US Army’s B-2 bunker busters last June?

Last month, a senior Israeli military official warned that if the stockpile was not removed in the wake of the war, the campaign should be considered “one big failure.” And here we are. The official also warned that if that central goal was not met, Israel would need to launch another operation in Iran to achieve it. The draft text of the MOU would prevent Israel from doing so.

US sources have vouchsafed in recent days that CIA Director John Ratcliffe has warned Trump and his key officials that the regime is playing a double game. The CIA chief has reportedly explained that evidence gathered by US intelligence agencies raises serious doubts that Iran would be willing to make the nuclear concessions that the US wants in any final deal. “The intelligence reflects that the Iranian intentions are not in line with their commitments under the deal,” one US source told Axios. “Not in line with their commitments.” What magnificent understatement.

Of course, the Iranians have no intention of making any concessions that would strategically thwart their path to the bomb. Of course, they’re lying. They cheerfully told Witkoff in January that they’ve lied their way to their 60% stockpile.

The danger now, as realistically seen by Israel, is that they will use the 60-day “status quo” to accelerate toward nuclear breakout.

And yet, the same US administration negotiators who recoiled in horror at Iran’s obduracy in January have now yielded to it in June.

The MOU directly endangers and constrains Israel, with terminology that binds Israel to a ceasefire it had no part in negotiating

The deal manifestly empowers and finances a mass-murdering regime. It elevates the Islamic Republic to a regional powerhouse. It abandons the Iranian people to whom Trump promised that help was on its way.

And it directly endangers and constrains Israel, with terminology that binds Israel to a ceasefire it had no part in negotiating: “The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States, together with their allies in the current war, declare upon the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding an immediate and permanent end to the war on all fronts, including Lebanon, and undertake that from now on they will not launch any hostile action against each other, and will refrain from the threat or use of force against each other (italics added).”

Trump asserted in remarks at the G7 summit on Tuesday that Israel should be showering him with gratitude, since it is only thanks to him that we were not already eliminated in an Iranian nuclear assault.

“If it weren’t for the United States of America — with me, because Obama was the opposite — Israel would not exist right now. Israel would have been blown off the face of the earth, 100 percent. And every smart person in Israel knows that,” he declared. “Without us, without the United States, there would be no Israel. Without me, there’d be no Israel, because no other president was willing to do what I did [in tackling Iran].” Iran, he said, was “two weeks away” from having a nuclear weapon.

But he has now struck a deal that fails to definitively close off Tehran’s practical capacity to complete its nuclear program, and removes US military leverage to deter it from doing so.

And that’s not all.

Let Syria take care of Hezbollah?!

Trump at the G7 also took public aim at Israel for its ostensibly disproportionate military action against Iran’s Hezbollah terror proxy in Lebanon.

Using the language of Israel’s bitterest critics, he charged that “Israel is fighting Hezbollah too long and too many people are being killed.” Elaborating, he snapped that “you don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody. Because there are a lot of people in those apartment houses. And they’re not all Hezbollah, that I can tell you.”

So he wants both a shorter war, and also a less damaging war, to tackle a vast terrorist army, emplaced within civilian areas, directed by Iran to batter northern Israel these past weeks. A terrorist army dedicated, like Iran, to destroying Israel, and one that will invade northern Israel if given half a chance.

Warming to his reality-challenged theme, Trump prescribed that Israel “let Syria take care of Hezbollah. Because to be honest with you, I think they’d do a better job of doing it.” That would be Syria under Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former jihadist who had a $10 million US bounty on his head until December 2024, but over whom Trump has gushed since their first meeting in Riyadh last May. “Very capable,” he said of Sharaa on Tuesday. “And very good to me.”

In upside-down Trump world, Israel is the ingrate for not appreciating his heroic interventions on our behalf, and the illegitimate aggressor for seeking to complicate his submission to Tehran and its terror proxies. But the fact is that Trump gave up on the war when it became clear that winning it — first and foremost by thwarting Iran’s Hormuz takeover — would likely cost numerous American lives. That was, of course, a legitimate consideration, but one he should have weighed before starting the campaign. Facing enemies bent on its destruction, Israel knows it must put lives on the line to survive in this treacherous region.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, frozen out of the negotiations, was needless to say not present at the G7 in France either — too toxic to the assembled notables, and perhaps also at risk of ICC-ordered arrest. Dissembling furiously, he is left trying to assert that the failed war was a success, falsely asserting on Monday night that the Iranian nuclear threat has been defused, that Iran’s economy has been devastated, and that the campaign against Iran “did not go wrong at all.” For his strenuous efforts to avoid a public showdown with Trump, the US president has repaid him by calling him “fucking crazy” and publicly declaring that “he has no fucking judgment.”

Iran’s leaders, in their current iteration, by contrast, “are very rational people” in Trumpland. “They were nice to deal with. They were strong people, smart people… They’re not radicalized and they’re, you know, looking to help their country,” he assured us all on Tuesday.

But, hey, even if they’re not, it turns out that he “never cared about regime change” anyway. This, from the president who, on February 28, as the US-Israel airstrikes began, told the Iranian public that, when the bombs stop, they need to “take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

The 2026 US-Israel war against the Iranian regime was necessary. The Islamic Republic had been gunning down its own people in the tens of thousands. It was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, reviving its ballistic missile production, rebuilding its terror proxies.

When the US and Israel struck, it had no hesitation in extorting the world via the Strait of Hormuz, and targeting anyone and anything it perceived to be vulnerable to attack, not only Israel (of course) but also its own regional neighbors, while lamenting that it did not (yet) have the capacity to strike directly back at the United States.

The war was lost through inadequate strategic planning by the US and Israel, and subsequent US presidential weakness. Trump’s capitulation is a betrayal of the Iranian citizenry. It will come back to bite America. It leaves Israel more vulnerable than before it began, with a new US-Iran ceasefire agreement that aims to deny Israel the freedom to protect and defend itself.

The terms that the regime held out for and won indeed show its leaders to be “very rational people.” The same, with dire implications for the security of Israel and its people, cannot be said of Trump.