DAY 449 | Déjà-vu

Trump lured millions of Iranians into the streets with promises of help. 40,000 Iranian civilians were slaughtered. Help was never coming.

What was it all for? US-Iran agreement brings bitter rivals full circle

A 60-day deadline for Iran to make a nuclear deal as the threat of US force looms. President Donald Trump saying he hopes for a deal even as Tehran’s leadership talks tough, and as Israel pushes for more military action.

Sound familiar? While déjà vu is technically an illusion of the mind, the above has happened once before. Trump wrote to Iran’s then-supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in March 2025, suggesting a two-month deadline to make a nuclear deal, or force could follow.

Two key questions remain for this White House: What has been gained from the past year of war in the Middle East, and has each cycle made an Iranian nuclear weapon more, or less, likely?

Iran surely would — after the assassination of its supreme leader and much of its top security cabinet, together with the onslaught against its conventional arsenal — want a nuclear weapon more than ever. But it is likely further out of reach than in April 2025, when Iran’s enrichment was at a peak, facilities unscathed, and scientific expertise mostly alive. Any bomb now would have to be rushed together under intense US and Israeli scrutiny, with enriched material or equipment retrieved from under the rubble.

Iran has now extended its security umbrella to its proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon, after it struck back at Israel on June 7, following an Israeli strike on Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahieh, a Hezbollah area. It was the first time, analyst have noted, that Iran has hit Israel for attacking another country. The concept of Iran being a protector may, to many Lebanese, seem laughable, given that Lebanon was dragged into conflict by the rash actions of the proxy militia when it joined Iran’s war against Israel in March. But the June 7 Iranian attack showed peak strategic confidence in Tehran, when really it should be in a trough.

Fourth is the damage to Trump’s personal reputation. He has begun a war of his own choice that has hacked away at support from his MAGA political base, hit US pocketbooks hard ahead of midterm elections, removed his ability to claim to be the Nobel-aspiring peacemaker, and left him looking a little desperate to get the Iranians to consent to surrendering their nuclear trove.

There is no dispute that US retains the might. The question — as we enter into perhaps the same cycle of 60 days of talks ahead of military action — is whether their wash-and-repeat policy is right, or whether it has left the Middle East, Israel and the United States less secure, and requires a radical reboot.

— June 16, 2026

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