Max Boot agrees with me

In my previous post a week ago, I said we were "Crawling our way back to Obama's Iran nuclear deal." That's the deal that Trump abandoned in 2018.

Writing this morning in the Washington Post, columnist Max Boot agrees:

So now Iran has the world over an oil barrel. Trump hasn’t achieved his overly ambitious war aims, and he isn’t going to. Nobody even talks anymore about Iran ending its missile program or its support for regional proxies. The best Trump can hope for is that Iran will reopen the strait without tolls and accept limits on its nuclear program backed by international inspections. That would basically re-create the conditions that existed under Obama’s nuclear deal.

Despite the devastation its economy is suffering, you can almost imagine Iran wants to drag out the pre-negotiation negotiations, for the sheer pleasure of making Trump squirm. And squirm he should, if he were smart enough to understand where oil inventories are heading, and what that portends for the global economy.

The main question of the moment is who is most responsible for holding up the "Memorandum of Understanding" we've been waiting for these past weeks: Trump, seeking whatever face-saving provisions can be salvaged, or Iran, enjoying its stranglehold on the world economy, and wanting to maximize the return on that leverage. What is certainly true is that Trump is in no position to dictate terms.

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