Trump’s Iran deal could place his legacy in the hands of Tehran | US-Israel war on Iran

It all started with the fate of the hostages.

Donald Trump’s First entry into politics recorded This movement was sparked by the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Tehran, where 52 American diplomats were held incommunicado for 444 days.

The incident set the stage for more than forty years of torturous relations between the United States and Iran. It may also have begun Trump’s long journey to the White House, which now risks being defined by his decision to attack Iran’s Islamic regime.

By October 1980, the standoff that had begun a year earlier had become a national trauma; The hostages were still in captivity, and then-President Jimmy Carter was holding out in the face of Iran’s intransigence. Trump made a harsh statement in an interview on NBC with Rona Barrett, one of the most well-known gossip columnists in the USA at the time.

“It is absolutely and completely ridiculous that they are holding our hostages,” he told Barrett, and argued that the crisis should be resolved by a military invasion. “For this country to sit back and allow a country like Iran to hold our hostages is, in my opinion, appalling, and I don’t think they would do that with other countries.”

Carter, who became the symbol of the weakness of the United States when Iranian revolutionaries chanted “America can do nothing”, was defeated crushingly by his Republican rival Ronald Reagan within a month.

Forty-seven years later, the psychic ripple effect of this searing international drama may have been at its highest in Trump’s mind as he made the inevitable decision to launch a war against Iran that he predicted would end quickly but quickly spiraled out of control.

He cited the hostage crisis on the first day of the war as he tried to justify a campaign for which he had done almost nothing to prepare the American people in advance.

Trump also repeatedly evoked Carter as a model of the president he could never be: a man who allowed his presidency to be defined and ultimately ruined by a second-rate power that should not rival the United States.

But three and a half months after Washington launched a war aimed at solving the Iran problem once and for all, Trump now finds himself in a position uncannily similar to that of his despised predecessor.

A series of unpalatable options (especially the unacceptably high political costs of deploying ground troops) have rendered American military power moot, as it did in Carter’s day when a hostage rescue attempt in the desert ended in disaster.

Even more humiliating, Trump is filling the same role of obstruction previously given to the hapless Carter by an ideological Islamic regime unsure of its standing at home but determined to remain in power.

The 1979-81 embassy siege, initially carried out by militant students acting without approval from above, was embraced by Iran’s spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as a way to defend the fledgling Islamic Republic from internal rivals.

Likewise, Trump’s miscalculated war, with its estimated 1,700 civilian deaths and devastating attacks on civilian infrastructure, serves as a renewed source of legitimacy for a regime facing an existential crisis after killing many more of its own citizens in last January’s mass protests.

After the first military attack in which religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed on February 28, Trump called on the Iranians: televised address to stand up and “take over your own government”.

Whether out of shock at the attack on their country or fear of a brutal regime, the Iranian people refused to heed this call. Trump, who had hailed Khamenei’s death, changed his tone and said it “would be a pleasure” to meet his son and supposedly more uncompromising successor, Mujtaba.

From the would-be regime changer who promised demonstrators that “help is on the way,” Trump—like Carter before him—has gone from reluctant endorser of the theocracy to its claims to rule.

This role is clearly evident in the memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed on Wednesday. Article 2 of the text states, “The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran undertake to respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and not to interfere in each other’s internal affairs,” in language that appears designed to satisfy the regime’s desire for security guarantees, according to a statement provided by US officials.

Diaspora Iranians, many of whom criticized Barack Obama for signing the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran and embraced Trump as the last best hope for regime change, are baffled. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former ruler who was ousted in the 1979 revolution, eloquently summed up the mood in Washington recently, criticizing the White House for “mixed signals” that were “confusing everyone.”

But the backlash from disgruntled Iranians pales in comparison to the fissures in Trump’s own base. Vocal America First-ers in the President’s Maga movement were against the war from the beginning, seeing it as a betrayal of his promise to eliminate the habit of “endless wars” in the Middle East that he had repeatedly condemned previous presidents.

Traditional Republican Iran hawks who loudly support the war are realizing something worse in Trump’s eyes: weakness. According to them, the dictator president gave up his influence over Iran’s nuclear program just to secure the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before the war began.

On top of this insult, Trump now has to endure insults from some of the most prestigious US media outlets declaring defeat, including the New York Times editorial with the following headline: “President Trump Lost This Battle”.

After leaving office to the bitter soundtrack of the hostage crisis, Carter’s reputation slowly recovered and was bolstered by his post-presidency work as a human rights advocate. But Iran, which transformed from ally to mortal enemy under his watch, tarnishes his legacy to this day.

Whatever the short-term political dividends of lower fuel costs with the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, given the country’s geostrategic weight, Trump now faces similar slander.

Humility would certainly lead him down a more cautious path. Alongside Carter, Iran nearly derailed Reagan’s presidency after it was revealed that he had traded arms to the Islamic regime in exchange for helping free US hostages held by its Shiite proxy Hezbollah in Beirut; thus providing an incentive for him to capture more hostages.

Even George W. Bush, seen as a leading proponent of “forever wars” after embarking on open-ended campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, heeded historical past and steered clear of direct conflict with Iran.

Not so Trump, who boasts of doing what no president before him had the courage to do.

Now this has put him in uncertain territory and at risk of looking like the thing he despises most: a loser as Iranian leaders claim victory.

There is a catch. The sustainability of the MoU agreement depends on reaching a final agreement on Iran’s uranium enrichment activities within a 60-day period. The issues are complex and mutual distrust is common. Iran’s fears – voiced by hardliners but also by more pragmatic negotiators such as parliament speaker Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf and foreign minister Abbas Araghchi – are that the US’s seemingly generous terms are a ploy designed to lull Iran into a sense of security before military offensives resume.

Just like in 1979, Iran’s leaders are still on high alert. But this time they have a much more powerful tool than the long-closed US embassy: control of the Strait of Hormuz and the ability to make or break the global economy.

Trump faces a new hostage drama, two generations after the geopolitical psychodrama that first drew him to politics. But this time, the figure at the center of the incident is himself and his own political fate, which seems to be in the hands of Iran. It might have looked familiar to Carter.