The memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran was read aloud to reporters this week by an administration eager to call it a victory. It settles almost nothing it set out to settle. No agreement on the nuclear program. No agreement on the missiles. No agreement on the proxies.

The fate of Iran’s enriched uranium — the stated reason for the war — is deferred to a final deal that may never be written, and President Donald Trump has said the bombing can resume if it isn’t. After three months of war, Washington and Tehran have agreed to return to the table they walked away from.

The verdict crosses the spectrum. Ian Bremmer calls the war the administration’s largest foreign policy failure and still judges that reopening the Strait of Hormuz was the least bad option left. The Center for Strategic and International Studies finds that both governments will claim victory, and both have lost. The Independent reads the president’s G7 performance as that of a man who knows the deal is weak. In the Washington Post, a National Review writer predicts Vice President JD Vance will be made its scapegoat. When analysts who agree on nothing else agree on this, the conclusion is arithmetic, not ideology.

To understand how we arrived here, start in 2018.

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In May of that year, the United States withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — an agreement Iran was honoring, as repeatedly verified by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The deal was imperfect. Its limits carried sunset clauses, and it left missiles and proxies for another day. It also did the one thing it was built to do. Under its terms, the time Iran would need to produce enough material for a single weapon stretched beyond a year, under the most intrusive inspections ever negotiated.

We discarded the only constraint that held. Within a year, Iran breached the stockpile cap. It enriched to 20%, then to 60%, installed centrifuges that the deal had banned, and amassed a stockpile many times the size allowed. By the eve of war, independent analysts put the time until its breakout at weeks, down from more than a year. Ernest Moniz, who negotiated the accord, has said its genius was verification. Verification is what we threw away. We did not slow Iran’s path to a weapon. We cleared it.

What replaced the deal was economic warfare, and its architects described it plainly. This February, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the Senate Banking Committee that American policy had created a dollar shortage inside Iran and driven its currency into free fall — a “grand culmination,” he called it — as a major bank failed, inflation exploded, and Iranians took to the streets.

Take the boast at face value. Washington set out to destroy the savings of 90 million people and counted their desperation as a success. The protests that followed were met with gunfire — thousands killed in weeks, by the count of human rights monitors, in the deadliest repression Iran had seen in decades.

The military reflex matched the economic one. The 2020 killing of Qassem Soleimani, meant to restore deterrence, brought Iranian missiles down on American bases and, in the panic, a downed airliner with 176 aboard. The June 2025 strikes, meant to end the nuclear program, buried it deeper. Each blow was sold as the one that would finally work. None did.

On Feb. 28 this year, the war itself came. Its stated aim was to topple the government in Tehran; Trump urged Iranians to take over their own country, and his officials veered between denying that this was the goal and claiming they had achieved it. That ambition explains the method — a decapitation strike that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the opening day, along with much of Iran’s senior command.

It did not topple the system. Power passed to Khamenei’s son and consolidated in the Revolutionary Guard, a harder government than the one Washington set out to break. The war was launched without the authorization the Constitution requires, on a threat the administration’s own Pentagon briefers walked back within days, and over the objections of America’s intelligence and military chiefs — at the urging of an Israeli prime minister who had argued for exactly this war for more than 30 years.

Iran responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz, pulling the global economy into the fire. A naval blockade followed. Lebanon burned again. For three months, the most consequential waterway on earth was a weapon, and the bill came due at gas pumps a world away.

The cost inside Iran defies the language of strategy. Iran’s government puts the damage at nearly $270 billion in the first 40 days; the New York Times cites economists at nearly $300 billion; recovery will take more than a decade. Thousands of civilians are dead. Millions are displaced.

This catastrophe has more than one author. A government in Tehran that answered its people’s hunger with gunfire and has misruled them for decades. An Israeli leader who pressed for this war across four American presidencies and found in this one the partner the others refused him. An American strategy that treated the suffering of ordinary Iranians as a lever to be pulled. The people of Iran sat at no table where any of this was decided. The cost settled on them anyway.

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The administration’s defense is familiar. The old deal had sunsets, ignored missiles and let sanctions relief reach the proxies. Each charge is true, and none survives the result. You repair a flawed agreement by building on it, not by detonating it and calling the rubble strength. We traded a deal that capped enrichment at 3.67% for a war that left Iran with 60% material buried beyond our reach, and for a memorandum the administration’s own officials call a political document whose words should not be read too closely. That is the same bargain, paid in blood and a broken economy, with the hardest question still open.

The wages of unchecked power are the same wherever it operates. It rewards escalation, postpones the reckoning and sends the bill to people who were never in the room. A citizen’s first duty is to hold his own government to that standard. By it, eight years of American policy toward Iran has been a machine for turning leverage into catastrophe, and catastrophe into a press release.

The next 60 days will be called the real negotiation. A signature reopens a strait in 30 days. A broken country takes years. The grief takes longer than that. We were the stronger power at every step, and the responsibility is ours. The test is not the ceremony in Switzerland. It is whether we remember, the next time force is dressed as strategy, what it costs the people who never chose it.

Massoud Amin is the author of  “Both Your Houses: Iran, America, and the Wages of Unchecked Power.” You can read his previous Voices commentaries on the war in Iran here.

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