Washington has a habit of dressing up its foreign policy in the language of moral purpose. Presidents invoke democracy, human rights, and the rules-based international order as if they were divine mandates rather than rhetorical conveniences.
So there is something almost refreshing — and certainly clarifying — about watching the Trump administration conclude a deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran that is unapologetically transactional, stripped of Wilsonian pretense and justified almost entirely on the grounds of what it delivers for American interests.
The agreement announced on June 14 — confirmed by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who served as mediator — commits both sides to an immediate and permanent end to military operations, with the Strait of Hormuz set to reopen upon the formal signing in Switzerland. The details remain to be filled in, with sixty days of follow-on negotiations expected to address sanctions relief and Iran’s nuclear program.
Critics on the left will complain that Trump bombed his way to a negotiating table he could have reached diplomatically. Critics on the neoconservative right will complain that he stopped short of regime change. Both critiques contain a grain of truth. Neither quite captures what actually happened.
What happened, stripped of the spin, is a classic exercise in coercive diplomacy — the application of military force not as an end in itself, but as a means of altering the strategic calculus of an adversary.
US and Israeli strikes in 2025 targeted Fordow and Isfahan, significantly setting back Iran’s nuclear program, while the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz disrupted global trade and sent shockwaves through energy markets. Both sides absorbed costs they could not indefinitely sustain. A deal became rational.
This is realpolitik in its most classical form — not Kissingerian elegance, but the rougher American variant that Nixon might have recognized: leverage applied, concessions extracted, handshakes exchanged, ideology parked at the door.
Whatever one thinks of the means, the logic is coherent in a way that the Bush-era “axis of evil” framework never was. That framework demanded transformation; this one demands compliance.
The analogy that comes to mind is not Munich — the inevitable rhetorical grenade that hawks will lob — but rather Nixon’s opening to China. That too was a deal with a regime that Washington had spent decades demonizing. That too was denounced by ideological purists. And that too reflected a hardheaded assessment that the alternatives were worse.
One need not celebrate the Islamic Republic to acknowledge that a negotiated settlement of a conflict that was disrupting one-fifth of the world’s oil supply, killing thousands, and straining American alliances across the region is preferable to its continuation.
That said, the realist in me reaches for the appropriate caution. Neither side has shared the exact terms of the deal. It remains to be seen whether it resolves major differences over Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, the Strait of Hormuz,and Israel’s wars with Iranian proxies.
The Iranian side has shown considerable skill over decades at signing agreements, banking the concessions and revisiting compliance at moments of convenience. The Trump administration, for its part, has shown that it prizes announcements over implementation: The signing ceremony in Geneva will be theatrical, whatever the substance.
And then there is Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has said Israel is not a party to the negotiated deal, while stating that he and Trump are in “full agreement” that Iran must not be permitted to obtain nuclear weapons — a formulation that manages simultaneously to endorse the goal and distance itself from the method.
The Israelis, who wanted a more comprehensive dismantlement of Iranian power, are reported to view the deal in its current form as a deep disappointment. This matters. A deal that leaves Israel feeling strategically exposed creates its own set of pressures on the durability of any arrangement.
The broader regional architecture also remains unsettled. Iran’s network of proxies — battered by years of Israeli strikes, weakened by the fall of Assad in Damascus and stressed by the events of the past months — has not been dissolved by this agreement. The realist knows that power vacuums invite filling.
None of this is reason to condemn the deal. It is reason to be clear-eyed about what it is and what it is not. It is a ceasefire, not a peace. It is a memorandum of understanding, not a strategic settlement. It is a beginning of a negotiation, not the end of one.
But sometimes a ceasefire is precisely what the moment requires. The alternative — continued fighting, a closed strait, spiraling energy prices and the ever-present risk of escalation into something far larger — was not a serious strategic option for a United States that still has other theaters to manage, an economy to tend to and a China challenge that dwarfs anything Tehran can muster.
Trump’s foreign policy critics have long accused him of having no strategy, only tactics. On Iran, there is something that at least rhymes with strategy: maximum pressure to compel maximum concessions, then a deal when one becomes available. Whether the follow-on negotiations produce durable arrangements on the nuclear question and sanctions relief will determine whether this goes down as a genuine strategic achievement or merely a very loud pause.
The Washington foreign policy establishment — wedded to its own form of ideological rigidity, whether neoconservative or liberal internationalist — will struggle to credit this administration with any genuine accomplishment. That is its own form of motivated reasoning.
Realpolitik, practiced competently, does not require ideological consistency. It requires a clear view of interests, an accurate assessment of power and the flexibility to take a deal when one is on the table.
Whether Trump has those qualities in adequate measure is, as always, a genuinely open question.
Originally published on the author’s Global Zeitgeist, this article is republished with permission.
