The next Iran War starts now

Everyone is arguing about Trump’s deal. The real story is what every player in the region will do during the pause before the fighting begins again.

Everyone is already writing the obvious piece on Trump’s Iranian MOU. I don’t need to. The obvious is true: the agreement is bad, dangerous, and humiliating. It rewards survival, claims retreat as success, and gives Tehran a way to claim victory without surrendering the missiles and proxies that made the war inevitable in the first place. It also financially boosts them in ways Tehran would never have believed possible before the war. What a mess.

The far harder question is what comes next; how does the Middle East find its way out of this disaster? Allow me to suggest ways forward.