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I am noticing how, when you make your list of Trump's different objectives, you dodge away from the actual text from Trump that I provided as a reference point to an incomplete ("various explanations...including") Wikipedia summary so that you don't have to concede that the United States dealt a severe blow to Iran's ability to project naval power, an objective that was reiterated by Hegseth on March 2 in case you just thought it was a one-off.
But most of your evidence for a resounding Iranian victory is the same evidence there is for a resounding American victory: namely, extrapolation from the MOU (that may not hold) onto a final state that has not been achieved yet and could resolve in a way that is relatively favorable for either Iran or the United States. I think your argument is passable enough: it seems very plausible to me that Trump got in deeper than he anticipated and was looking for any out that let him save face and was willing to settle for something he could have mostly gotten via conventional negotiations. But it also seems plausible to me that the US will be able to notch some Ws in the post-MOU negotiations on top of the degradation of Iranian military they have achieved. It also seems quite plausible to me that negotiations will break down and we'll see the resumption of military strikes in earnest.
As I said previously, "[i]t's possible that the war will end in a way that makes it easy to determine the winner, but it also seems plausible to me that the war will end with both sides claiming victory and the real measure of that victory will be measured in subsequent behavior over years or decades."
We're in the "both sides claiming victory" stage now and I think saying anything "clear" at this stage is premature.
I don't dodge it, I just deem it to be a cope. What "project naval power"? How was Iran ever a credible naval force? For years of reading about the Iranian Question, I don't remember ever seeing a serious concern about their growing naval capabilities specifically. IRIN was always doomed to sink at the first contact with the USN, at least I believe so, the USN has crushing advantages in every aspect; and Iran wasn't preparing to go on some aggressive expedition, so there was no great incentive to do it now. Russia, itself mediocre in naval projection, also wiped out Ukrainian naval capabilities early on in the war (which it's arguably losing now); this changed very little. The success here had been overdetermined, but that's also why it couldn't have been the goal – it couldn't endow Iran with a credible coercion/deterrence tool in the way that threatening Hormuz or Israeli desalination plants or South Pars field does. (Moreover the MOU doesn't say they can't rebuild their Navy if they so choose, and with the reconstruction funds and lifted sanctions they'll be able to afford it. Though it'd still be of little irrelevance.)
I see a pattern where Americans overstate their investment in impressive but strategically irrelevant feats just because these are things they can actually do. It's a cheap way to pad the metrics by announcing a thing you're confident about as the goal. Murdering Khamenei and other guys, destroying the Navy, "infiltrate Iranian land space and build an airstrip". So? What does this gain for you as a nation, relative to a scenario where you didn't do it? Not having to do it a bit later? It's a good flex on its own technical terms, but why should I believe these flexes were strategic objectives rather than instrumental moves in service of some cogent strategic objective? For all other goals, from "regime change" to "stopping missile and drone production" and even "steal oil", I see the answers. For nukes, I also see the answer but again, Iran was willing to compromise on the nukes from the start, the war at best changed something on the margins of the JCPOA 2.0 (and seemingly not in favor of the US). For the navy and assassinations… eh.
Before you accuse me of motivated reasoning, consider how the defenders of the war – and you – also apply Straussian lens to Trump's communications, correctly assuming that he's untrustworthy (just in a different direction) and his Actual Intentions (like reasons to sign such an MOU) must be deduced from first principles.
…All that said, ultimately my thinking is simpler. The US is a vastly superior power, and chipping away at the margins is beneath it. The real «objective of the war», universally and sometimes openly understood and lobbied for over decades, spelled out by Netanyahu, evident in the bulk of Trump's and Hegseth's communication too, was a generic Neocon/Zionist intention to «finally solve Iran». Remove it from the regional calculus, deny its resources to proxies, and make it unable to threaten Israel in the long term, by whatever means work: aiding an organic power transition, installing a pro-American/Zionist puppet regime, collapsing the nation into civil war, imposing treaty terms that defang it relative to the status quo, or "bombing it into stone age". Iraq, Syria, Venezuela… And Iranian objectives, on the contrary, were to survive, preserve the status quo, and hopefully improve on it by getting sanctions relief. In this sense, the present situation indicates Iran overachieving on its objectives, whereas the US has not just failed but made its position worse.
Agreed that this is very premature given previous fake-out "deals". But I do think that the MOU is qualitatively different, and American eagerness to sign it, allows me to say that Iran won. If, say, negotiations break down and the US resumes high-intensity strikes, that'll be a separate arc. I'm not saying Iran won forever.
I would agree that it's a cope to point to it as a success if the other elements of the settlement end up poorly for the US, but if the US had said "our only goal is to sink the Iranian navy," the operation would be a success goals-wise (not necessarily a strategic victory in the big scheme of things, since succeeding at dumb goals can be bad). So if that was a goal, it ought to be counted.
And omitting it is a cheap way to overstate your case and obscure the actual outcomes of the war, the same as when pro-Trump people omit the damage done to US bases by Iranian ballistic missiles.
Wouldn't you say that Iran also intended (and quite plausibly still hopes) to establish a strait toll regime as a war goal? I would agree with you if you said that it was a stretch goal or seemed like part of a motte-and-bailey play, but don't you think that was also on their bucket list as a war objective?
On this we agree.
This is where I disagree. I actually think it's too soon to rule out a Venezuela-like ending to this thing, for Iran. Not that I would bet on it, necessarily. I think both countries are basically going to try to get as much as they can out of the post-MOU bargaining and possibly they are both betting that the other guy will blink on some things they really want.
And maybe this is why I disagree: from my point of view, the MOU is a temporary ceasefire instrument to be replaced by something more permanent or (as Trump and I think also Iran) have warned, a return to war.
This is a fair outsider perspective but I stand by my arguments for why it's valid to omit.
There has, to my knowledge, never been a serious Iranian discussion of the toll regime (as opposed to just closing the Strait) before this war which they did not choose. They rolled out tolls as a financial cope and negotiating tactic well under attack, after they learned that Hormuz denial is indeed very effective even though their fleet is gone. I tend to agree with Noah Smith of all people that "Before the war, Iran didn’t control the strait, simply because it didn’t realize it could. Drone technology had advanced to the point where Iran was able to shut down Hormuz, but Iran didn’t know that until the U.S. attack forced it to try the risky and desperate move of actually shutting down the strait.". Of course, war aims can change, so now they pursue legitimization of the toll booth through MOU negotiations, because come on, it's an awesome new revenue source and influence lever. But it was not part of their core objectives and strategic thinking (and neither was sinking their Navy for the US). To be clear I think they might win this, too, but I wouldn't weigh it heavily either way.
Guess I have to agree to disagree. The MOU is extremely close to the original Iranian counter-proposal they published in response to Kushner&Witkoff's "deal" (terms of capitulation). That the US saw it fit to sign on to this shows that the US is really weary of the war and willing to end it on net unfavorable terms. Of course, Trump being Trump, he might just ignore the reputational damage and risks of Iranian gains solidifying for a few weeks of open Strait and US forces regrouping, and secretly intends to defect on most terms. But on the sum of evidence so far (eg Israel and Lebanon related noises), I do believe he strongly prefers to not continue in the short-medium term, so it is an end to, at least, the First US-Iran war, and the actual terms of it having been concluded.
Well, Noah Smith (at least judging by this paragraph) is wrong to frankly an almost unbelievable degree. Iran has been aware that they could threaten to close the strait since the 1980s (at least), because you don't need drones to do that when you have mines. There was a major flare up where they specifically threatened to do so during the Obama administration. And they have been kicking the idea around of tolling the strait seriously since 2019 (at least).
I think if the US was really desperate to end the war we wouldn't keep striking Iran.
Noah is sloppy but this is irrelevant. Mines are, well, mines. Their control right now is qualitatively different, they can flexibly threaten ships, do it on and off, and importantly even while the USN is around and the country is getting bombed.
From your own link
How has that worked?
And I agree with Smith that they didn't know it would, and indeed thought it wouldn't.
Iran's ability to use aircraft to attack ships in 2026 is not qualitatively different from their ability to use aircraft to attack ships in 1986. If anything it is quantitatively different.
(The point of this link was to reference the fact that Iran has been kicking around the idea of tolling the strait for years).
Why would you think this? The fact that Iran could substantially disrupt traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has been known and discussed and acknowledged publicly for decades.
Are you for real. Their aircraft from 1986 is destroyed. The question is of what they can do and plan for in 2026. It turns out that their new "aircraft" works very well for this purpose. I think they didn't know it will, just like Americans didn't know it'd be so hard to shut down.
Or do you think there was an expectation that as soon as the US fails to topple Iran by killing some dudes, we'll enter this morass with strait blockade?
My sentence is expressing the fact that their ability to destroy ships with aircraft in the strait the year 2026 is not qualitatively different from their ability to destroy ships with aircraft in the strait the year 1986. It has nothing to do with whether their aircraft from '86 are still surviving or not. In a Strait scenario, a Shahed is not really qualitatively superior at destroying ships than the smart weapons technology Iran had purchased from the US during the Cold War, including strike fighters with precision-guided weapons and radar-guided anti-ship missiles.
The main advantage, I think, is quantitative: they have a lot of Shaheds, which are cheap and simple to operate.
While I think the exact degree to which they would be able to achieve this against US defenses was murky pre-war, I definitely do not think that US defense planners did not anticipate the possibility or fail to correctly assess that Iran had the ability to threaten strait traffic. The US government gambling that Iran wouldn't rather than that Iran couldn't seems much more likely to me.
(And again, Iran's actual capability to "close the strait" has been demonstrated to be marginal, so if the US Navy warplanners assessed that they would be able to clear the strait and escort ships through in the face of Iranian defenses, they were probably correct for a certain degree of risk - it would not surprise me if the Pentagon got the capability assessment of Iran more or less right but fumbled or failed to consider as outside of their area of competency the question of what degree of risk would be acceptable to the civilian market.)
I highly recommend reading up on some of the US Navy's problems with Iranian and Iraqi mines in the area to get an idea of the background and mindset the US military would be going into this with. The Iraqis laid a big minefield in the Persian Gulf during the Gulf War and successfully hit a cruiser and an amphibious assault ship (basically, a pocket carrier). Those are essentially next-bests if you can't actually hit a real aircraft carrier.
On a quick Google, initial mineclearing operations in the Persian Gulf took nearly two months to clear lanes for shipping and mopping up took the better part of a year after the war concluded. So that gives you an idea of "how long will it take to clear the strait of mines" baseline the Pentagon would be operating from (although I suspect they have fancier tech now).
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