Analysis: Trump’s Iran agreement may be a dud, but he’s getting what he wants | CNN Politics

• President Donald Trump signed an agreement to end the Iran war, citing fears of economic catastrophe and stock market turmoil.
• Critics warn the agreement cedes nearly all US leverage and grants Iran billions in sanctions relief before key nuclear talks.
• Trump's admission that economic costs drove his decision may signal to adversaries they can use similar pressure tactics against Washington.

Donald Trump insisted last month that he didn’t think about Americans’ finances when negotiating with Iran.

He’s clearly changed his mind.

“I didn’t want to see economic catastrophe. If you kept this going, that could have happened,” Trump said Wednesday, in seeking to explain what critics see as a deeply flawed agreement to end the war.

Trump’s comment, in France, was a revealing moment. It shows how, under political pressure, he often grasps for short-term advantage over the long-term strategic grind. And it underscores his reverence for the wisdom of the markets, which he said were “more brilliant” than any of his advisers “other than me, of course.”

But Trump’s embrace of a peace plan that one Republican senator warned had Ronald Reagan “rolling over in his grave” risks weakening the US position going into critical 60-day talks that could define Iran’s nuclear destiny.

The agreement, designed to pave the way to those meetings, seems to cede almost all US leverage and hands Iran billions of dollars in revenues up front by waiving sanctions. It may therefore dent Trump’s self-conjured mystique as the world’s great dealmaker — which lifted him from reality TV to the White House.

So why did he make it?

Rescue workers search for bodies in the rubble of a residential building following a hit in an airstrike in the early hours of March 27, in Tehran, Iran.

The president tried to bomb Iran into submission for weeks. He issued dire threats to destroy its civilization. And when diplomacy stalled, he sent US bombers and missiles back aloft last week.

But in his epiphany about the cost of the war, he might finally have found what he’s been looking for almost since launching the conflict in February: a way out.

Sometimes, amid his cacophony, Trump produces candor that is rare in a president.

After the G7 summit, Wednesday, he confided that he’d studied how the stock market “shot up like a rocket ship” every time he spoke of possible peace with Iran and then would dip “very, very big” when headlines augured against a deal.

“The one president I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover,” he said, referring to the 20th-century commander in chief blamed for the Great Depression that wiped out investors and pitched millions of Americans into destitution.

The blowback from the Iran war hasn’t been as extreme, and the US economy remains robust. But the war sent gasoline prices soaring, helping to spike inflation, and its consequences appeared certain to deepen quickly.

Trump’s approval ratings, meanwhile, have dropped into the 30s, and the economic fallout from the war made him seem even more oblivious to the affordability crisis stalking many voters — which he again on Wednesday blasted as a smear campaign by Democrats.

The potentially grave strategic consequences of Trump’s Iran agreement

Trump’s reasoning for ending the war is remarkable in many ways.

It will embolden critics who believe that the president often designed his various statements about the war — especially early in the week — to create a reaction on the stock market and to lower oil prices.

More seriously, his admission appeared to validate Iran’s strategic insight that the cost of the conflict would be more than Americans could bear once an initial US and Israeli aerial onslaught settled into a stalemate. This means Tehran’s new trump card — the capacity to shut down oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz — just got even more powerful.

Residents swim in the waters of the Strait of Hormuz as a small motorboat passes cargo ships and other commercial vessels offshore near Bandar Abbas, Iran, Wednesday, June 17.

Trump warned Wednesday that if Iran didn’t live up to its side of the agreement, he’d “drop bombs on their head.” But a relentless weekslong air war didn’t bring about regime change or force the Islamic Republic into a deal that favors Washington. So it may logically conclude Trump wouldn’t risk stock market routs and oil price hikes to enforce his demands. And a threat to bomb Iran again seems to be a contravention of the first clause of the memorandum of understanding (MOU), which bars the US from using “the threat or use of force against each other.”

Earlier in the conflict, the president seemed susceptible to critiques of Republican senators who feared he’d gone soft on Iran. But with the MOU signed, it will be harder for him to back out or change its terms.

The problem is not that Trump is wrong to end the war. If the fighting stops now, many American and Iranian lives may be saved. And an easing of economic fallout would make a measurable difference to the lives of many working Americans.

But there’s a big reason why some Republicans are so critical — including former Vice President Mike Pence, who on Tuesday told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins the emerging agreement felt like “appeasement.”

By paying such a high price to stop the fighting, Trump is effectively sending a message, not just to Iran but to other adversaries, that Washington’s resolve in military conflicts can be undermined if they find ways to turn up political heat through economic warfare.

He also appears to have abandoned Iranians after assuring them at the war’s beginning that it offered their “only chance for generations” to overthrow their brutal government. In a huge concession to Tehran, the memorandum commits both the United States and Iran to “refrain from interfering in each other’s internal affairs.”