National Review writer Philip Klein argued this week that the Iran memorandum of understanding represents a significant retreat from positions Trump held throughout the campaign and for the past decade, citing Trump’s own February statement urging Iranian protesters to take over their government because help was on the way, his decade of criticizing the Obama nuclear deal specifically for failing to address Iran’s ballistic missile program, and his G7 comments suggesting it would be unfair to deny Iran missiles when Saudi Arabia has them.
Andrew Latham, senior Washington fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy and professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess the settlement on its strategic merits as objectively as possible.
Latham said the United States entered this conflict with three core objectives: ending Iran’s nuclear weapons program, severely curtailing its ballistic missile capability, and stopping its support for regional proxies including Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. A fourth objective, reopening the Strait of Hormuz, was added only after the war began and Iran used the strait as leverage. He said the current memorandum addresses only that fourth, newly created problem and does essentially nothing to resolve the three pre-existing strategic issues that have persisted for decades and that the original JCPOA also failed to adequately address. Worse, by extending sanctions relief and unfreezing some Iranian financial assets, the agreement reduces American negotiating leverage heading into the sixty-day window meant to resolve those deeper issues. His grade for the overall process: a C-minus or D-plus.
On why the administration never followed through on forcibly reopening the strait through Project Freedom, which would have eliminated Iran’s primary source of leverage permanently, Latham said his read from outside the room is that the administration attempted exactly that and discovered quickly it was not feasible. American forces destroyed Iran’s major naval surface combatants and much of the IRGC’s naval force, but the small fast boats that can evade American firepower remained a problem, and the United States had mothballed most of its minesweeping capability in recent years, leaving no effective tool against Iranian mine-laying. He said you do not need to fully close the strait to make it functionally impassable. Elevated insurance rates and threat assessments from tanker and freighter owners accomplish the same practical effect, and that reality likely forced the administration to abandon the forcible reopening strategy and pivot to negotiation.
He said the flip side worth acknowledging is the genuine damage inflicted on Iranian military and industrial infrastructure, including ballistic missile manufacturing and storage facilities that reportedly took Iran eleven years to excavate and build. Even accounting for the disappointing settlement terms, Iran has been set back militarily for what could be seven to fifteen years or more, a meaningful generational delay even if not the complete strategic victory Trump originally promised. The complicating factor is that the United States is running low on bunker-buster munitions and other precision-guided weapons with the penetrative capability needed to finish destroying remaining Iranian infrastructure, meaning Iran’s path to a kind of victory simply requires hunkering down and outlasting American military patience, which appears to be exactly what is happening.
On the China dimension, Latham said Trump’s decision to publicly thank Xi Jinping and Putin for remaining neutral and not arming Iran obscures a more complicated picture. The People’s Liberation Army has been studying American military performance and limitations in real time throughout this conflict and will calibrate its own force planning accordingly. More significantly, China has positioned itself as a reliable partner to the Global South generally and to Iran specifically, providing dual-use technology and diplomatic cover throughout, while American credibility as a dependable strategic partner has been called into question by the entire episode. He noted that China brokered a detente between Saudi Arabia and Iran in late 2024 that had meaningfully reduced regional tension, a diplomatic win that the current conflict has now reversed, leaving China looking like the responsible regional fixer while America appears erratic and driven by domestic political considerations rather than allied interests.
On the broader strategic competition, Latham said China is also watching how vulnerable global maritime chokepoints are to disruption and will likely accelerate efforts already underway to diversify transportation routes away from chokepoints like Hormuz and the Strait of Malacca, including pipeline development across Saudi Arabia to the Red Sea and increasing reliance on the Arctic Northern Sea Route along Russia’s coast as ice recedes, a route with no chokepoints as long as Beijing maintains good relations with Moscow.
On whether Gulf state support for the settlement reflects genuine confidence in its terms or simple resignation, Latham said the Gulf states above all want the shooting to stop and oil flowing again, but are not buying the narrative Vance is selling about a strategic victory. He said they recognize that the United States lacks the appetite to follow through on more aggressive options, and that European nations are not going to backfill that gap either, leaving acceptance of this settlement as the only realistic path forward regardless of how favorably it actually addresses the underlying threats.
On historian Niall Ferguson’s more optimistic framing, comparing the situation to Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which looked promising on paper but failed in implementation and contributed to the conditions for World War II, Latham agreed the implementation details and contingencies over the coming sixty days will matter enormously. But he said his honest assessment is that Iran is far better positioned to simply ride out the negotiating window than Washington is, having concluded that limited concessions paired with patience will ultimately get them most of what they want.