Although President Donald Trump is infamous for telling lies, he sometimes just blurts out the truth in a way few politicians ever would. Such was the case when he recently said he had to end the war in Iran because he didn't want to become Herbert Hoover. Hoover was, of course, the president who was in office when the depression began in 1929. While the stock market crash was not directly his fault, the public held him responsible and soon voted him out of office. (People were so mad that when homeless communities starting forming, they often referred to themselves as "Hoovervilles".) By making this statement, Trump was feely admitting that he wanted to end the war in Iran because of the possible economic fallout the country was facing from it, especially from high gas prices, which would hurt his party in the upcoming midterm elections. His approval ratings have already plummeted to new lows mainly because of the war, a fact he seems to be both aware of and in denial of.
His desire to end the war would probably explain why he and his administration trumpeted a recently agreed to framework of a deal that called for a sixty day cease fire, among other things. The deal will inevitably be compared to a similar deal that the Barack Obama administration made back in 2015 that Trump later threw out in 2018. But the Obama deal was around two hundred and fifty pages long and was the result of years of negotiations; Trump's is a page and a half and was negotiated basically on the fly. This may explain why one part of it is an odd provision that Iran will get three hundred billion dollars for reconstruction costs, but with no explanation as to who would pay that enormous amount (to put that number in perspective, a quick Google search reveals that the entire Iranian economy in 2025 was around three hundred and fifty six billion). Trump has insisted that that money will not come from the US, but has provided few other details. It will also end sanctions on Iran, which will result in billions of dolars in revenue for the country, something that the earlier Obama deal was harshly criticized by Republicans for doing. Even the future of Iran's nuclear weapons program, the crux of the whole war according to Trump, is not certain. While section eight of the deal states "The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons", the actual negotiations around that weapons program and what to do with Iran's store of enriched uranium are upcoming. Even the Iranian shutting down of the Straits of Hormuz may eventually continue, with the Iranians only agreeing to open up the straits for sixty days before charging some kind of tolls to ships passing through it.
So the repressive Iranian regime that Trump wanted overthrown is still in power, the country still holds the uranium that it could someday use to make a weapon with, and it stands to make billions from the end of sanctions, with the possibility of a toll in the Straits of Hormuz bringing in even more. To put it simply, the terms of this agreement have put Iran in a stronger place, overall, than they were before the war began. Even though the US bombing killed over three thousand Iranian people and their economy has been decimated, their resistance in the face of the world's largest military power has emboldened them, as they showed that by shutting down the flow of oil and fertilizer in the straits, they could hurt the entire world's economy. But don't just ask me, listen to what many conservatives have said about this agreement: Republican Senator Bill Cassidy called the war and the agreement the “worst foreign policy blunder in decades.” Ted Cruz, another Republican Senator, said that “History teaches that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is not a good idea." Even on Fox News TV host Lawrence Jones said "I don't think it serves our audience by sugar coating it, there is some real dissent when it comes to this deal right now.” And Israel, our lone ally in this war, was also angered by the deal, so much so that they seemed determined to undermine it by launching a new wave of attacks on Iranian proxies in Lebanon, which could jeopardize the whole agreement. Trump himself has even joked that if the deal works out, he will take the credit, but if it fails he will blame Vice President JD Vance.
Put simply, this whole ill conceived war has an outright disaster for our country. Trump fell for the absurd lies of an easy victory from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, failed to explain the need for the war to the American public or the world, made no attempt to gather any allies for the war except for Israel, downplayed it as just an "excursion", even as thirteen American soldiers lost their lives, brought on a black lash from Iran that has hurt both America's economy and the world's, and has wasted forty billion dollars (at least) all to get an agreement that was worse than the one that Barack Obama got back in 2015 that Trump himself so stupidly threw out in 2018. No wonder a majority of the American public has never supported this war from the start. Like the entire Trump presidency, it has made the country and the world a worse place.
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