Peloni: The current trajectory of the Trump administration secures the Iranian regime, prolongs the suffering it promotes around the world, including in the US, and makes certain that the Armageddonist death cult ideology in Tehran is given a further license on pursuing its nuclear ambitions by simply outlasting the will of those who have the means to stop them, while lacking the will to secure such a victory.
We Fought the Islamic Republic for Thirty-Nine Days and We Were Winning. The Memorandum in Islamabad Hands That Victory Back. And It Sells the Iranian People to Do It.
Gregg Roman | MEF | June 17, 2026
For thirty years the Middle East Forum has argued one unfashionable proposition: that civilizational threats are not managed, they are ended. We were told this was naïve. Then came the war, thirty-nine days of fire, in which American and Israeli power did to the Iranian war machine what three decades of “engagement” never could. The blockade closed Iran’s economy. The regime that had spent a generation threatening to shut the Strait of Hormuz could not keep its own ports open. For the first time since 1979, the theocracy was not managing us; we were ending it. And at that precise moment, the hour victory required only that we keep our nerve, we are preparing to sign it all away.
The document drafted in Islamabad is being sold as a peace agreement. It is not. It is a surrender, executed by the victor, on the terms of the vanquished. Read it not as a treaty but as a ledger, and the ledger is grotesque. Count what Iran surrenders and you will count to roughly zero. Count what the United States surrenders and you will run out of fingers.
What does Iran give? It “reaffirms” that it will not build a nuclear weapon: the same reaffirmation it has offered for twenty years while burying centrifuges under mountains. It agrees to “dilute” some of its enriched stockpile on its own soil, under the same inspectors it has expelled, deceived, and locked out before. That is the sum of the Iranian concession: a promise it has already broken, and a chore it will supervise itself.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.