President Donald Trump and his team had several red lines that they used to justify the U.S. war against Iran. At a press conference on Wednesday, Trump largely brushed them aside.
Explaining his decision to agree to an interim peace deal, Trump repeated his insistence that the country would never get a nuclear weapon. Yet he went on to suggest that Iran should have the right to enrich uranium, be allowed to develop ballistic missiles, and get access to billions of dollars in frozen funds.
Those three things have been at the center of the debate around how to approach Iran for years, dating to the 2015 agreement that the U.S., under President Barack Obama, and other great powers signed with Iran to limit its nuclear program.
Not only that: Trump had repeatedly cited those issues as reasons why Obama and past presidents had failed so badly in containing the threat posed by the regime in Tehran.
In a head-spinning turn of events, Iran hawks including former Vice President Mike Pence and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley lamented Trump’s new vision, while some of the president’s most vehement critics cheered.
“It’s doing a lot of the things that Trump criticized Obama for doing,” Christian Whiton, a State Department adviser in the George W. Bush and first Trump administrations, said of the president’s comments. “And whether or not he means it, he has expressed to them he will not resume military operations because doing so will cause the worst recession since the great depression.”
The National Iranian American Council, meanwhile, cheered what it saw from Trump.
“The measures in this agreement should not be read as concessions but rather corrections to a decades-old policy of coercion that was an abject failure and made war inevitable,” the group said in a statement.
Hours later, at the palace of Versailles near Paris, the president signed the so-called memorandum of understanding to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
To be sure, he has a history of taking a hard stance only to reverse it days — sometimes even hours — later. And Iran hawks may not need to worry too much: The interim deal opens the door for 60 days of negotiations and Trump hasn’t given anything away yet.
The Trump administration also has said Iran has been so weakened economically and militarily that the U.S. has achieved its goal of threat reduction and even opened the door to the country rejoining the global economy, if its leaders choose that path.
But there was plenty in the press conference that surprised even the president’s supporters.
Take Iran’s ballistic missile program. Days after the U.S. and Israel launched the war with Iran in late February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the U.S. objective was to “destroy the missile threat” posed by Iran.
