One of our great doctrines here in the Editors’ Blog is that all power is unitary. Lose or gain it in one place, and you lose or gain it in equal measure everywhere else. That’s catching up with Donald Trump. He got into the Iran War as a way to escape the emotionally crushing experience of declining popularity and power at home. But his ebbing power went with him to the Persian Gulf. And now it’s arrived in Israel, too. This was obscured for a while by the fact that the U.S. has almost unimaginable military power and a constitution which, as it has evolved if not how it was originally intended, puts almost no short-term limits on a president’s ability to wage war. But the two were always umbilically connected. It was the pain of bad news at home that spurred Trump to jump so recklessly into his Iran debacle. And it is the same unpopularity that has him so desperate to end high gas prices and inflation before the midterms. They’re all connected.

Trump has no poker face. To live in Trump’s era is not only to see his inner life but to be engulfed by it. It’s hard to think of a case in which the deciding player between warring powers has more clearly signaled his desperate desire to get out of a conflict on almost any terms. The Iranians have internet too. And they can see all of this. They have now issued a fresh set of new demands: end sanctions, leave the region, pay reparations, release frozen assets and more — in addition to make the Strait of Hormuz a permanent Iranian toll road. More or less total capitulation.

Here in the U.S., we’re looking at the Iran War in terms of whether the U.S. should have started it in the first place, how it’s affecting oil prices, how it’s going to affect the midterms and a bunch of other things. But there’s another way to look at it, which is that Iran is putting on a global performance of standing head to head with the full might of the U.S. military and pulling it off. By their actions, we can see pretty clearly that the Iranian government does not fear Donald Trump. They’re not acting scared. If anything, they’re upping the rate of their provocations, as the state of war and effective stalemate transitions to a new normal of sorts.

It is fair to say that this is not actually the full might of the U.S. military in a theoretical sense. The president could order the U.S. military to mount a full scale ground invasion of Iran, occupy the country, dismantle the state’s system of command, control and repression. Those things are very likely possible, albeit at vast cost. But the real test of a military is not what it can do in some theoretical sense, the precise armaments it has and so forth but what the country which controls that military is able and/or willing to do in a specific economic, geopolitical, and political context. And the U.S. is clearly not willing to do those things. So in a practical sense — not the abstract power and capabilities of the U.S. military but the country’s ability to do those things — this is the full force of the U.S. military.

We seem to be in one of those very MAGA interludes in which members of Donald Trump’s base are not so much rebelling as in a process of mourning. They are struggling to find a path to discovering that up turns out to be down, or that the things that they have always professed to care about do not matter because Trump has announced they do not matter. Lindsey Graham seems to be maybe 3/4s through the process. Ted Cruz is working on it. But some of his supporters, especially a number of those who aren’t in elective politics are having a harder time, at least for now. The dynamic, the level of shock is very straightforward. Most of MAGAworld has gone along with the premise that the war in Iran, or Trump’s management of it, has actually been going great all along. Trump is underestimated, the Lamestream media, etcetera. Wait to see the final deal. Trump won’t let Iran get away with anything.

A lot of these folks are now coming into contact with the reality of the situation, from zero to 60 in two or three seconds. It’s pretty jarring. The deal as structured, from what I can tell at least, contains more or less exactly the details that Iranian state media has been reporting for weeks and which the White House claimed was IRGC propaganda. Maybe the U.S. isn’t contributing to the $300 billion Iran rebuilding fund. But it’s overseeing and guaranteeing its creation. So it’s a fairly minor distinction. There are also some odd signals from within the White House that they might pull the plug on the whole thing. For instance, JD Vance agreed with Megyn Kelly that the deal could be scrapped if Trump’s supporters had an “utter meltdown.” Trump has hinted that he might scrap the deal too but has mainly focused on attacking those who are pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, perhaps not even an agreement.

There’s no question that Trump’s Iran War has been a disaster for the United States. There’s no way around that. The U.S. can absorb the cash costs of the conflict without too much difficulty. But along with everything else Trump has done over the last 18 months, it has given the U.S. the reputation of what amounts to a rogue state. Rebuilding trust in U.S. actions and intentions at best will be a very long process. The conflict has also redounded massively to the benefit of China, the only real peer competitor to the U.S. on the global stage.

But I wanted to point out two impacts of the war which are some versions of positives even if they are secondary effects of a disastrous adventure that never should have happened.

We are still, bizarrely, having to make sense of the Iran-U.S. “deal” on the basis of two or three different texts which are circulating on an unofficial basis. Meanwhile, the U.S., at least, refuses to release the text of the so-called “memorandum of understanding.” The Iranians are being somewhat more forthcoming, at least through their quasi-official state news agencies. But President Trump being a pathological liar shouldn’t obscure the fact that the Iranian regime is rather less than a reliable narrator. There’s surprisingly little public discussion in the United States about what conceivable good rationale there is for keeping the agreement secret while the White House is at least nominally trying to build public support for it. How can you know whether the deal is a good deal if you don’t know what the deal is? This is not a rhetorical question.

We again have a possible ceasefire agreement between the U.S. and Iran presented by President Trump as a deal to end the war he started back in February. It is a great victory, he claims. What we really have is a replay of a core feature of the spring and summer of 2026, as commentators and countries try to strip away the packaging and relentless razzmatazz from the White House and see what is really included in this deal. How much skepticism will the White House face since observers have been through maybe 1o or 20 cycles of this over the last four months?

And what’s in the deal this time?