No. of Recommendations: 10
Krugman has an interesting take on this: “Can a guy who won’t even admit Joe Biden won the 2020 election ever be able to admit he lost a war?”
I think not. Therefore, Tehran has to give up, eventually, or Trump has to be swept out of office, sooner rather than later.
Not true. There is a third option. Trump "loses" the war but simply doesn't admit it. He claims the U.S. won the war. Heck, he's already announced that we've won several times already.
What it means to "lose" this war will be hotly disputed, and Trump's supporters - and the GOP broadly - will have every incentive to claim that we have "won" regardless of the outcome. All Trump needs to do is get an outcome that is different than the JCPOA, and everyone will carry the water to argue that it's both better than the JCPOA and that it was worth the fight to get it. That seems very implausible to me, if only because the JCPOA reflected a lot of effort and negotiation into the very complicated enforcement mechanisms and the role of international monitoring that the U.S. and Iran simply don't have time to negotiate with the strait on lockdown. An agreement negotiated in a week or month, especially if negotiated without the international nuclear power experts needed to attend to the details, will have tons of loopholes that Iran will be able to exploit, if they choose.
Regardless, if there's an agreement to end the war, it will likely cover one or several topics that weren't part of the JCPOA (by design), and thus allow Trump supporters to claim that it was better. Even if it leaves Iran in a vastly better place than they were under the JCPOA or if we had cut a deal in February.
