The Daily Populous Friday June 19th, 2026 morning edition
Authored by theatlantic.com and submitted by theatlantic

The Iran deal has been described as a “humiliation” for the United States, since the upshot is that America gets little that it didn’t already have before the war, and Iran gets security guarantees and a big pile of money. Donald Trump’s agreement leaves Iran a theocratic state free to arm itself with ballistic missiles and drones and to murder its own citizens. Its terms suggest that this much-despised state will, after a 60-day period of free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, have the ability to regulate maritime traffic.

Normally one would have to pay a lot of money to a discreet professional to be humiliated this badly. Watching Trump and his aides sell the deal is in some ways as humiliating as the deal itself. “If other countries have” ballistic missiles, Trump said at the G7 conference yesterday, “it’s a little bit unfair” for Iran “not to have some.” Elimination of those missiles was one of the primary aims of the war, and thousands of Iranians, as well as more than a dozen Americans, died contesting it. Trump began his remarks today by stressing that the United States could have kept up the bombing if it wished “for another three weeks, two weeks, four weeks, two years. You would never have the Hormuz Strait open.” Keeping the strait open is one of the main purposes of the United States Navy, so these words sound a lot like an admission that the military of the United States cannot do its job, and might be equally vulnerable elsewhere, too.

Jonathan Chait: All the sad hawks

Humiliation, however, is distinct from defeat. Only the United States was humiliated; both countries have experienced a catastrophic loss. The defeat for the United States is the more obvious of the two: a loss of standing and the confirmation that even a rich country cannot force its will on a poor but determined one. For Iran, the defeat is subtler. Bordering countries once considered it a problem neighbor and now know it to be an outright threat. They are arming themselves accordingly and seeking ways to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s economy has been a disaster for about 15 years and is now a total wreck. Sanctions relief will help, but who exactly will want to invest in a country whose government is sustained by brutality and ruled according to the whims of a junta led by a mangled religious fanatic?

The best defense of this deal, from a U.S. perspective, is probably one that takes into account these economic and political headwinds facing Iran, and notices that they are more likely to change the regime than any further military action. You don’t need to huff and puff to blow down the house when the weatherman is predicting a typhoon tomorrow.

Another possible defense is that, like all deals made by Trump, and most deals made by the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is not much of a deal anyway, because both parties intended to break it before it was even signed. An anonymous U.S. official told CNN yesterday that “people shouldn’t read too much into the language” of the agreement, because the core of the agreement is “understandings we have with each other.” This statement goes against all legal advice ever given. (Read the contract; ignore what the other guy tells you while he watches you sign it.) Much of what’s in the agreement is so vague as to be meaningless. We know what a nuclear deal looks like, because Barack Obama got one, and it established detailed and invasive inspections that are most certainly not delineated in any document leaked or mentioned by Trump officials. The deal might have been reached only because both sides wanted to stop fighting, and both were willing to add vague terms because they didn’t want to be bound by precise ones.

The same U.S. official’s other comment to CNN was assurance that the “language” of the document—the same language the official encouraged his domestic audience to ignore—is calibrated to let Iranian officials “say what they need to say for their domestic politics.” This intriguing comment reflects a view of Iranian leadership I have heard from officials in previous administrations, including Democratic ones: that they are susceptible to flattery, and that they regard the exasperation and humiliation of the Americans as an end in itself.

Daniel B. Shapiro: What did you expect?

The humiliation is the point. Iran got the United States to sign a document that even Americans described as degrading, mortifying, a total capitulation. Who cares if the deal never really happens, or if each part turns out to be a little less sweet than it first appears? Iran has never before won a war, and even the blows it has struck against the United States, Israel, and its own citizens have up to now been pathetic and furtive, taking the form of terror attacks and indirect action through proxies. The existence of an understanding, with humiliating terms for America, is a heap of symbolic and emotional capital that no Iranian regime has enjoyed since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Now it is time to see how Iran will use the dividends from this humiliation. The $300 billion in investments is hardly the biggest opportunity for Iran to cash in. Far more valuable would be a pivot by the regime’s leadership away from some of the dogmas of its past, and toward reform. No previous leaders have had the ability to make such a pivot, and they probably did not want to make one anyway. The current leaders, however, have positioned themselves as saviors of the Islamic Republic, and with that credibility could institute certain changes that are widely known to be necessary and desirable, but that would have looked counterrevolutionary if proposed by anyone else.

Iran has won the war, or at least not lost it. The peace is up for grabs.

thegalli on June 18th, 2026 at 17:45 UTC »

/u/theatlantic when you post your own articles here you should make them a gift article. Also you need to make a submission statement.

Coolerguy317 on June 18th, 2026 at 17:08 UTC »

I think the lessons from the fighting are fairly universal. Cheap precision weapons, drones, dispersed infrastructure, and constant ISR make denial and defense much more effective than many people expected. As seen in Ukraine as well.

Beyond that I think it’s fair to say Iran forced the US into a corner. But let’s not go too far. Iran didn’t force America out of the Gulf nobody stepped in to stop the US and none of americas major structural advantages really changed. People were already trending toward anti interventionism before this war. Beyond that what actually changed?

IdeasOfOne on June 18th, 2026 at 17:05 UTC »

Nah, Trump humiliated himself...