America fought a war with Iran to sign a worse deal than before

The humiliating MoU starkly contrasts with Barack Obama’s JCPOA, scrapped by Donald Trump in 2018, which restricted Iran's nuclear capacity without a single bomb being dropped

The resumption of the Iran war, with a dramatic escalation of tit-for-tat military operations, has laid bare the realities of modern warfare. In hindsight, perhaps the US was itching to show the world that the MoU that inaugurated the truce was not the strategic disaster it was widely perceived to be. After all, the invading coalition launched “Epic Fury”, premised on overwhelming force and decisive transformation, but the military campaign was regarded as an Epic Failure — a textbook example of how muddled objectives, fundamental misreading of adversaries, and alienation of international partners caused the offensive to boomerang on its orchestrators.

Rather than executing the regime change that was rashly announced as the principal objective, the war paradoxically fortified the targeted nation, expanded its geopolitical prestige, and left the international coalition pausing the conflict on significantly worse terms than when it began. The volatile 60-day negotiation framework that officially commenced on June 15, when US Vice President J D Vance and Iranian Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf signed a 14-point MoU, has collapsed, though peace talks are being attempted in Oman. Still, the war underscored the severe limitations of coercive military power in an era where asymmetric capabilities can disrupt global superpower superiority.

The primary turning point that shattered the coalition’s military calculus was the sudden and highly effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz. For all the technological prowess brought to bear by Western forces, naval and military planners quickly discovered that in an era dominated by low-cost drone warfare, re-establishing total control over a critical maritime chokepoint is a challenging endeavour once an adversary has laid mines offshore and prepared its defences. By leveraging a simple yet far-reaching deterrent, the defending nation successfully held the global economy hostage, forcing a desperate rush toward diplomacy.

The resulting MoU, in exchange for merely returning to the status quo ante and allowing shipping lanes to reopen temporarily, granted sweeping concessions, including massive phased sanctions relief, Iranian export of over 40 million barrels of oil, the unfreezing of tens of billions of dollars in foreign assets, and the establishment of a historic multinational reconstruction fund, while details of the nuclear deal remain unclear. All this could have been achieved at the negotiating table without resort to war and without devastating the world economy. A core demand of the invasion, the eradication of Iran’s ballistic-missile capacity, was omitted from the MoU, leaving the invaders to crow about reopening a waterway that was not even closed before their war began.

The humiliating MoU starkly contrasts with Barack Obama’s JCPOA, scrapped by Donald Trump in 2018, which restricted Iran’s nuclear capacity without a single bomb being dropped. By replacing nuanced diplomacy and international verification with reckless bombardment, the US removed the primary mechanisms of international oversight. Renewed bombing gives Iran a compelling incentive to rapidly accelerate toward full nuclear weapon status. After all, developing nuclear capacity attracted attacks; but North Korea actually has nukes, and is handled with kid gloves. Lesson: Get the bomb!

The collapse of diplomatic negotiations is due to the continuing Hormuz dispute. Flushed with its regional leverage, Iran attempted to institute a unilateral security mechanism to extract mandatory shipping transit fees from commercial vessels. This move has been firmly rejected by most of the world, who cite international freedom of navigation to block such extortionate demands over a natural waterway. (The Panama and Suez Canals are man-made and charge for services; straits like Hormuz or Malacca require no human intervention and are recognised in international law as global commons.) Iranian attacks on vessels attempting to evade the tolls provoked the latest US attacks, and now the renewed US blockade. The US charging tolls — a threat that Trump has now backed away from — is as unwelcome as the Iranians doing so.

The US retaliatory attacks have targeted coastal surveillance, air defence networks, drone and missile storage infrastructure, and logistics hubs (including tactical railway corridors and bridges) along Iran’s southern coast to blunt its capability to obstruct maritime traffic. Iran immediately responded with a coordinated wave of drone and ballistic missile attacks against US bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Jordan.

The strategic failure has also exposed the fallacy of leadership decapitation. While initial strikes successfully targeted and eliminated high-ranking political and military figures, the entrenched institutional structure of the Iranian state proved remarkably resilient. Rather than inducing moderation or domestic collapse, the systematic assassination of the ruling elite simply cleared the path for a new, younger generation of leaders who are demonstrably more radical, fiercely angry, more sophisticated, and committed to regional dominance.

The economic ripple effects of this miscalculation extend far beyond the immediate combat zones, inflicting a ruinous toll on the Global South. Iran estimates that the conflict has set back its economy by roughly $200 billion, but energy-dependent nations like India have been hit almost as severely. As the conflict choked off regional trade, skyrocketing oil prices and rampant inflation severely strained fiscal balances, driving up import costs and weakening the rupee, compromising the economic security of millions who had nothing to do with the war.

The international community’s endorsement of an integrated ceasefire across multiple fronts (and the MoU’s failure to end regional proxy funding) had effectively formalised Iran’s right to intervene politically and militarily in neighbouring states to protect proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. This is another reality the resumed attacks seek to undo.

Washington realises the conflict has severely diminished the geopolitical authority and credibility of the superpower that initiated it. Hence Trump’s threat that 1,000 US missiles remain “locked and loaded” for immediate unleashing. Domestically, the architects of the war face intense public backlash for failing to deliver on promises of rapid peacemaking and minimal inflation, while internationally, global actors increasingly view the US not as a stable anchor but as an unpredictable risk to the global equilibrium. The disastrous current situation serves as a stark historical warning that military hubris, when detached from coherent objectives and historical reality, inevitably yields a fractured international order, severely compromised allies, and a dramatically more dangerous world.

The writer is a fourth-term Member of Parliament (Lok Sabha) for Thiruvananthapuram and chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs