President Donald Trump has boasted about the overwhelming military success achieved in Iran. According to an opinion piece on Fox News, he will present the emerging Iran agreement as vindication of peace through strength, arguing that American military might forced Tehran to the negotiating table.
Trump announced a new deal that would open the Strait of Hormuz in conjunction with the U.S. naval blockade being lifted. After the opening, the U.S. and Iran will enter 60 days of nuclear negotiations.
Robert Maginnis, a national defense analyst and president of Maginnis Strategies LLC, wrote the opinion piece. He argues those military victories do not necessarily produce strategic results.
"And that's the rub. What it will appear is that we are going to return to some form of what was in 2015, the JCPOA deal that Barack Obama struck,” Maginnis says.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) deal was signed by Iran and several world powers including the U.S. in 2015, where Iran agreed to limit their nuclear program in exchange for lifted sanctions.
Maginnis points out in the Fox News article that the JCPOA didn’t resolve the Iran nuclear question, as Iran used the time after to enrich their uranium. He believes that Iran will play the same game during the upcoming negotiations, buying “time through incremental compliance.”
Maginnis says Tehran's strategy has always been survival.
“They acknowledge that they have lost their Ayatollah, but they still have a new Ayatollah, albeit the son of the former one. They have survived, and there is always the outside chance that they can rebuild their nuclear leverage," Maginnis states.
However, he points out a larger concern.
"It's whether America won tactically while Iran survived strategically, and I think that the real scorecard will be written by historians, who will eventually use this to judge this war,” says Maginnis. “I don't think that the costs that we bore — given what is likely to be the outcome — are worth what we end up with."
Maginnis explains what it comes down to: while America has demonstrated overwhelming military power in this war, Iran has demonstrated political endurance.
