An irony of the Iran war is that Donald Trump, whose patience for written texts and policy details is famously negligible, came to grasp the reality of the situation more quickly and clearly than his neoconservative supporters who spent years obsessing over the issue. Trump, recognizing that America has suffered a historic defeat, has abandoned his demands for unconditional surrender, and is trying to buy his way out with a memorandum of understanding that reportedly promises Tehran billions of dollars to restore the status quo ante. By contrast, the neocons, the coterie of interventionists who long ago developed a reputation as the brains of the conservative movement, have been rather slow on the uptake. 'I suspect the MOU may be less awful than the administration's disastrous sales pitch,' Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies posted on X yesterday. (Later he conceded the deal was not better at all but, in fact, 'even worse than I assumed.') The pundit...
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