Donald Trump addressed the media at the G7 summit in Evian, France, on 17 June 2026, declaring his freshly signed ceasefire deal with Iran a victory. However, according to Simon Jenkins, the agreement is a clear win for Tehran. With sanctions relief and a US promise to avoid further meddling, the conflict has been settled on Iran’s terms.
Trump’s retreat from war
Trump is scrambling to escape the catastrophic war on Iran that he and Benjamin Netanyahu initiated four months ago. He is offering Tehran’s military regime a $300 billion rebuilding fund, an end to economic sanctions, and a commitment not to interfere in its internal affairs. All this is being touted as a “major win”. The next 60 days of negotiations will be tortuous and unpredictable, but they point in a plausible direction.
For once, a US president seems ready to accept defeat in a potentially forever war before it spirals out of control. Iran is not to become another Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq. Moreover, Trump appears to have soured on America’s closest ally, Israel. Furious at Netanyahu’s relentless bombing of Lebanon, Trump remarked, “You don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody,” because “there are a lot of people in those apartment houses and they’re not all Hezbollah.”
Despite this moral grandstanding, US and Israeli forces have killed more than 3,300 Iranians, including over 100 children in a girls’ school, and injured many more.
The urge to display power
Trump, like many recent American presidents, was driven by the urge to display power. With an enormous military machine deployed globally, intervention becomes irresistible. Quick and neat interventions, such as in Kosovo or Kuwait, can work, but often the giant gets trapped. Trump, once the supposed non-intervener, was elected on a pledge to avoid such temptation. Nine years ago, he gave a passionate speech in Saudi Arabia declaring that Washington interventions were over. He was cheered to the skies.
Trump’s breaking of that pledge in February appears to have been a personal decision, triggered by Netanyahu. While Israel assassinated Iran’s leaders, Trump launched a massive bombing assault intended to spark an Iranian uprising. The justification was thin: that Iran’s potential nuclear weapons threatened US national security—a repeat of the rationale for the 2003 Iraq invasion.
A strategy that beggared belief
Trump’s declared strategy for the war was unbelievable. No coherent intelligence suggested victory in “four to five weeks”. Victory was regularly redefined: it might not be an Iranian revolution, but the destruction of nuclear facilities, seizure of “nuclear dust”, or massive destruction of state property. As in Iraq, it seemed like a schoolboy excuse for war.
America’s friends must now help Trump extricate himself from this debacle. Tehran has merely repeated its promise to abjure nuclear weapons. It may have to accept that Washington cannot fully control Israel’s attacks on Lebanon. But since the settlement is a clear victory for Tehran, Iran’s leaders would be wise not to force this point.
The best outcome
The best outcome of the war would be the ending of sanctions and opening Iran to outside commerce and contact. This is more likely to dilute the regime’s grip on society than any bombing. In the long term, it is the only path to political liberty in Iran. Isolation has been counterproductive, driving Iran into the arms of Russia and China, hostile to western interests.
This war should have ended the theory that bombing other countries “works”. Since World War II, the iron law of air forces has been that bombing terrifies populations into surrender and rebellion. But this belief in terror is no different from the strategy of groups like al-Qaida. Modern air war claims precision, but bombing civilians is simply state terror. I cannot think of a single case where this achieved its political goal.
The seduction of massive bombing is clear: it is swift, noisy, televisual, and minimizes casualties on the aggressor’s side. America believed in Vietnam it could bomb the Vietcong “back to the stone age”. It failed. In Afghanistan and Iraq, ground troops were needed. Yet Trump and his war secretary, Pete Hegseth, repeated the stone age metaphor in Iran. The best that can be said is they soon realized their mistake.
Another lumbering attempt by America to recast the Middle East in its own image has ended at appalling cost. It can only be hoped that the legacy of this war will discredit all such attempts.
