Greetings, Dear Reader,
Well the “memorandum of understanding” (MOU) has been (digitally) signed.
In 60 days, a more formal ceasefire/peace deal is supposed to emerge with Iran.
Until then, I’m still tentatively a wait-and-see guy.
AN IRANIAN RECEIPT
The vicious “America First” nationalists among us might want to take a beat and thank globalism, but they won’t.
There’s no doubt in my mind that at the center of the 14-point MOU sits the interconnectedness of the international economy, particularly around oil being a global commodity. In fairness, there has been some balkanization of the markets. There’s reason to believe three distinct oil-producing regions have emerged, or at least, been further defined in the wake of Trump’s Shock and Awe 2.0.
That might ultimately be to the US’s advantage, as the biggest of those emerging markets.
But I digress.
You can read the MOU for yourself and probably come away with the same sense that I have. Iran promises to behave. Iran swears to Allah (and Trump) it will behave. In return, Trump and the west will reconsider certain sanctions AND start a development fund to help rebuild certain parts of the Iranian block fort they spent three months kicking over.
Reactions range from tepid to outraged. Liberals call the $300 billion dollar fund a pay off on America’s dime, which isn’t technically true, but recall they are the “men can be women actually” crowd. How the international development fund will play out remains to be seen, but it’s certainly not pallets of cash.
Conservative reactions are muddled. The neocons are pissed, obviously. The natcons are pissed as well. Why’d we even do this?
The primary problem at the center of all this is very simple: What did we get for all the trouble?
Promises from Iran are like receipts from Blockbuster Video. Or Pizza Hut.
Even I, who quite loves vulgar, violent displays of American might, wonder if the promises contained on this piece of paper were actually worth all the trouble in the first place.
JD is doing a bit of a speedrun on major media networks attempting to explain the results of the conflict. Outside of him, historically speaking, I don’t think anyone this side of Trump has been a clearer voice on what America First actually means.
That said, I’ve listened to all his soundbites and so far, I’m still trying to figure out what Iran’s receipt shows we bought.
No nukes? Uranium inspections? Don’t mine the strait?
None of this is new.
Maybe we spent three months, ~100 billion, and 13 American lives just to flick a couple Iranian leaders and their military gear off the checkerboard. Maybe that was it. Steep cost.
Regardless, nobody in the admin seems to have a clear, non-cliche answer for what the receipt actually shows that might be novel and not a rehash of previous tired promises from a backward regime.
We’ll see if that changes as the 60-day window comes to a close.
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What we got was pretty simple. Take off the TDS glasses.
https://amuseonx.substack.com/p/peace-through-subtraction-how-trump?r=6em1o&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
"So what, concretely, did America win? Across the navy, the submarine force, the combat-aircraft fleet, the helicopter inventory, the ballistic-missile stockpile, and the drone arsenal, over 80% of Iran’s conventional military was destroyed, together with nearly all of the manufacturing capacity that sustained it. Replacing what was lost, at world-market prices, would run on the order of $40 billion for the conventional forces alone, and closer to $50-$55 billion once the nuclear infrastructure is counted. Set that bill against Iran’s real means. SIPRI placed Iranian military spending in 2025 at about $7.4 billion, which means the reconstitution cost equals roughly 5.3 years of the regime’s entire defense budget, and that figure politely ignores the sanctions premium, the inflation, the smuggling markups, the gutted factories, the dead engineers, and the cratered airbases that drive the true cost higher still.
Yet the dollar figure, vast as it is, is not the prize. The prize is time. A full conventional rebuild is a 10 to 15 year undertaking, and its pace is set not by the cheap categories but by the impossible ones. Iran can, given working factories, mass-produce drones and missiles again within a few years, for these are the kindling of its arsenal, quick to gather and quick to burn. It cannot replace its submarines, which were Russian imports it never had the capacity to build, and it cannot replace a modern fighter fleet it could never manufacture in the first place. "