Neither side can make a credible commitment to honor promises

It’s almost too on the nose: last Wednesday, a militarily victorious president of the United States signed a peace “deal”—negotiated in a vacuum, without consulting Congress, and without making any attempt to generate support from the American people—at Versailles. On his return to the United States, at least Woodrow Wilson had the decency (words I never thought I’d write) to ask the Senate to ratify and the American people to acquiesce in the deal he’d brokered. President Donald Trump has nowhere indicated a similar intent.

That’s the silver lining of this surrender deal with Iran, at least from a strategic perspective. While the republic weeps at the president’s blatant disregard for constitutional process and abdication of democratic statesmanship, those very defects likely condemn Trump’s deal to the same fate as President Obama’s JCPOA, which Trump famously tore up in his first term. An unpopular deal, without congressional consultation or sanction, is about as credible a long-term commitment as Iran “reaffirm[ing] that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons,” a non-concession Tehran has repeatedly made since its Natanz facility was first exposed.

To steelman the Trump administration’s case, the “memorandum of understanding” is not intended to be the last word. Vice President JD Vance and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian have each praised the “very general document” as merely an “important step.” According to Vance, this step includes allowing “the Iranians [to] get the benefits of the bargain”—including the immediate end of the U.S.-imposed blockade, the issuance of sanctions waivers to allow Iranian oil sales, and the protection of Tehran’s proxy, Hezbollah—while postponing discussion on such “technical” topics as a return to extortion-free navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, the disposition of Tehran’s highly enriched uranium, and the future of Iran’s missile arsenal. What Trump announced as a “Great Deal” in fact amounts to little more than the parties’ manifestation of an intention to negotiate definite and enforceable terms at a future date. Such “agreements to agree” are known to first-year law students by their technical name: “not a contract.”

But if the final agreement does track the outline provided by this MOU, the war with Iran will end in an outcome bleaker than the JCPOA, which Trump (rightly) lamented as “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.”

The good news, such as it is, is that any emerging settlement will likely prove at least as ephemeral as the JCPOA, because neither side has given the other sufficient cause to believe it intends to keep its promises.

Iran has earned our mistrust by following the classic authoritarian rules of diplomacy: entering negotiations in bad faith, drawing them out to relieve pressure and buy time, extracting concessions from U.S. officials eager to make a deal for its own sake, and then relitigating the meaning of written agreements once in place. It’s a blunt, replicable, and apparently effective approach. Less predictable in this latest round of diplomatic rope-a-dope, however, is who exactly from the Iranian regime is playing this duplicitous game, which will only make it easier for Tehran to renege on promises and all the harder to tailor penalties for violations.

Unfortunately, Washington suffers from two credible-commitment problems of its own: one stemming from the administration’s disregard for constitutional process, the other a consequence of the president’s capriciousness.

The administration seems poised to continue a now-well-established tradition of substituting executive agreements for ratified treaties. Like Obama’s JCPOA and the Paris Climate Accords—both of which Trump gleefully and lawfully withdrew Washington from in his first term—Trump’s MOU is not a treaty. And there’s no sign that the president intends to submit a treaty to the Senate for advice and consent, as is required by Article II of the Constitution. (Congress may get a chance to review the deal under the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, but absent a veto-proof supermajority, its opposition would not block the deal.)

Treaties, once the primary instrument of American statecraft, are what the Constitution calls “the supreme Law of the Land.” Today, they have been almost entirely eclipsed by executive agreements, congressional-executive agreements, and nonbinding international agreements, diplomatic devices mentioned nowhere in the Constitution.

Treaties are fairly insulated from the vicissitudes of public opinion and the preferences of presidential successors. Even if courts are unlikely to enjoin a president from abrogating a treaty signed by his predecessor (though, it bears noting, the Supreme Court has never actually decided that the executive may so abrogate one), presidents face high political hurdles to violating or outright terminating a treaty. Despite Trump’s obvious disdain for NATO and threats to withdraw, for example, he has made no effort to do so.

Executive agreements, by contrast, have the same domestic legal force and effect as executive orders. In other words, they are invitations for a newly elected president of an opposing party to prove that “elections have consequences.” Nobody knows this better than Donald Trump. In his first term, he swiftly and effortlessly abandoned U.S. obligations under the JCPOA and the Paris Climate Accords. This January, he withdrew the United States from a slew of international arrangements, many of which rested on fragile executive agreements alone. As an enormous scholarly literature shows, leadership turnover—an inevitable consequence of our quadrennial referendum on the White House occupant—undermines the durability of foreign-policy commitments.

The Founders anticipated this problem of strategic whiplash and provided mechanisms, such as the Article II treatymaking process, to mitigate it. The Constitution’s drafters vested treatymaking power in the Senate because that institution would enjoy some stability. As Senator Henry Cabot Lodge put it in 1903, presidential “administrations come and go, Houses assemble and disperse, Senators change, but the Senate is always there.” He attributed this happy fact to the foresight of “that remarkable body of men who, in the summer of 1787, framed at Philadelphia the Constitution.”

One of those men was Gouverneur Morris, who, alongside Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and others, advocated lengthy terms for senators. Morris complained that the fledgling Union could form few foreign relations, owing to what Hamilton called its “constantly fluctuating” legislative bodies. To Morris, the Senate’s chief virtue was its capacity to check the “changeableness” inherent in all democratic regimes. Changeableness threatened the nation’s ability to conduct effective diplomacy. “If we change our measures,” as the annually rotated members of the Confederation Congress often did, “no body [sic] will trust us,” he warned. Ask Great Britain to “explain her refusal to treat with us,” and London would say it “sees no stability” in our institutions and has “no confidence” that promises America made today will be honored tomorrow. Changeableness undermined U.S. credibility abroad, prevented the formation of treaties, and thus frustrated the infant nation’s search for security and prosperity. But “by avoiding a change of men,” which the Senate would do more than our other political institutions, the country could “avoid a change of measures,” and thus earn the confidence of foreign powers needed to conclude durable agreements.

Indeed, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention very nearly assigned the Senate the exclusive prerogative to negotiate and conclude treaties. They contemplated doing so, in part, for fear that “ambitious & corrupt Presidents” might perpetuate self-aggrandizing wars by impeding favorable peace offers or instead purchase peace by bargaining away the nation’s vital interests. While the Convention’s delegates ultimately brought the executive into the treatymaking process, they emphatically did not authorize presidents to start and end wars sua sponte.

The Founders shared the peacemaking power among the branches not only because the president might obstruct peace or negotiate self-serving terms. They also feared a good bargain could be squandered if it relied on presidential discretion alone for its effectuation. An advantageous peace deal shouldn’t be subject to revision or reversal by a subsequent president eager to embarrass his predecessor. By vesting the power to approve treaties in the Senate—whose members would serve longer terms, rotate on staggered cycles, and face no term limits—the Constitution gave American commitments a durability no president, or any individual for that matter, could supply. America’s treaties, James Wilson predicted at the Convention, would enjoy more “permanency than a monarchical government,” where an agreement’s continuation “must always depend on the temper of the man.”

Yet by supplanting treaties with executive agreements, the credibility of our national word now depends on the temper of Trump. A man whose net worth varies with his mood, who changes the country’s tariff schedule like his socks, and who has repeatedly declared “mission accomplished” in Iran only to resume hostilities hours later cannot easily persuade our adversaries that his signature will outlast his next grievance. His mercurial mind—his predictable unpredictability—has some foreign-policy benefits, to be sure. He has successfully exploited his erratic reputation to purchase deterrence on the cheap: he just might strike your power plants or even destroy your “whole civilization” if you disrupt the safe passage of some tankers through the Strait. The problem with the madman theory of diplomacy is that it undermines the credibility of the madman’s commitment to withholding punishment, a necessary ingredient of coercive diplomacy: the Iranians must believe that, if they abide by U.S. demands as recorded in a deal, they will be spared pain. Without that assurance, not even the “very rational” folks now leading Iran have reason to comply.

So, aside from doubts about whether a deal will transcend a change in presidential leadership, the Iranians must reasonably wonder whether it can even survive Trump’s remaining term of office. Just as Trump denounced NAFTA as “the worst trade deal probably ever made,” renamed it the USMCA, called it the “best agreement we’ve ever made,” all before finally lambasting the buffoon who brokered the USMCA, one can imagine President Trump asking of his own Iran deal in 2028: “Who would ever sign a thing like this?”

None of this is to say that the Islamic Republic deserves a regime-saving deal, or that it will comply with one (even one on the exceedingly generous terms Trump seems prepared to offer). A regime whose raison d’être relies so heavily on hostility to America and Israel is a poor candidate for détente or performance-based agreements. But when the deal inevitably collapses, it would be nice to think we wouldn’t have to share the blame.

Alas, here’s the grim consolation: by bypassing constitutional process in pursuit of an appeasing, opaque, and easily reversible deal with Iran, Trump will have all but ensured that his surrender deal suffers the same fate as the JCPOA he killed.

Neither side can make a credible commitment to honor promises

It’s almost too on the nose: last Wednesday, a militarily victorious president of the United States signed a peace “deal”—negotiated in a vacuum, without consulting Congress, and without making any attempt to generate support from the American people—at Versailles. On his return to the United States, at least Woodrow Wilson had the decency (words I never thought I’d write) to ask the Senate to ratify and the American people to acquiesce in the deal he’d brokered. President Donald Trump has nowhere indicated a similar intent.

That’s the silver lining of this surrender deal with Iran, at least from a strategic perspective. While the republic weeps at the president’s blatant disregard for constitutional process and abdication of democratic statesmanship, those very defects likely condemn Trump’s deal to the same fate as President Obama’s JCPOA, which Trump famously tore up in his first term. An unpopular deal, without congressional consultation or sanction, is about as credible a long-term commitment as Iran “reaffirm[ing] that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons,” a non-concession Tehran has repeatedly made since its Natanz facility was first exposed.

To steelman the Trump administration’s case, the “memorandum of understanding” is not intended to be the last word. Vice President JD Vance and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian have each praised the “very general document” as merely an “important step.” According to Vance, this step includes allowing “the Iranians [to] get the benefits of the bargain”—including the immediate end of the U.S.-imposed blockade, the issuance of sanctions waivers to allow Iranian oil sales, and the protection of Tehran’s proxy, Hezbollah—while postponing discussion on such “technical” topics as a return to extortion-free navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, the disposition of Tehran’s highly enriched uranium, and the future of Iran’s missile arsenal. What Trump announced as a “Great Deal” in fact amounts to little more than the parties’ manifestation of an intention to negotiate definite and enforceable terms at a future date. Such “agreements to agree” are known to first-year law students by their technical name: “not a contract.”

But if the final agreement does track the outline provided by this MOU, the war with Iran will end in an outcome bleaker than the JCPOA, which Trump (rightly) lamented as “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.”

The good news, such as it is, is that any emerging settlement will likely prove at least as ephemeral as the JCPOA, because neither side has given the other sufficient cause to believe it intends to keep its promises.

Iran has earned our mistrust by following the classic authoritarian rules of diplomacy: entering negotiations in bad faith, drawing them out to relieve pressure and buy time, extracting concessions from U.S. officials eager to make a deal for its own sake, and then relitigating the meaning of written agreements once in place. It’s a blunt, replicable, and apparently effective approach. Less predictable in this latest round of diplomatic rope-a-dope, however, is who exactly from the Iranian regime is playing this duplicitous game, which will only make it easier for Tehran to renege on promises and all the harder to tailor penalties for violations.

Unfortunately, Washington suffers from two credible-commitment problems of its own: one stemming from the administration’s disregard for constitutional process, the other a consequence of the president’s capriciousness.

The administration seems poised to continue a now-well-established tradition of substituting executive agreements for ratified treaties. Like Obama’s JCPOA and the Paris Climate Accords—both of which Trump gleefully and lawfully withdrew Washington from in his first term—Trump’s MOU is not a treaty. And there’s no sign that the president intends to submit a treaty to the Senate for advice and consent, as is required by Article II of the Constitution. (Congress may get a chance to review the deal under the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, but absent a veto-proof supermajority, its opposition would not block the deal.)

Treaties, once the primary instrument of American statecraft, are what the Constitution calls “the supreme Law of the Land.” Today, they have been almost entirely eclipsed by executive agreements, congressional-executive agreements, and nonbinding international agreements, diplomatic devices mentioned nowhere in the Constitution.

Treaties are fairly insulated from the vicissitudes of public opinion and the preferences of presidential successors. Even if courts are unlikely to enjoin a president from abrogating a treaty signed by his predecessor (though, it bears noting, the Supreme Court has never actually decided that the executive may so abrogate one), presidents face high political hurdles to violating or outright terminating a treaty. Despite Trump’s obvious disdain for NATO and threats to withdraw, for example, he has made no effort to do so.

Executive agreements, by contrast, have the same domestic legal force and effect as executive orders. In other words, they are invitations for a newly elected president of an opposing party to prove that “elections have consequences.” Nobody knows this better than Donald Trump. In his first term, he swiftly and effortlessly abandoned U.S. obligations under the JCPOA and the Paris Climate Accords. This January, he withdrew the United States from a slew of international arrangements, many of which rested on fragile executive agreements alone. As an enormous scholarly literature shows, leadership turnover—an inevitable consequence of our quadrennial referendum on the White House occupant—undermines the durability of foreign-policy commitments.

The Founders anticipated this problem of strategic whiplash and provided mechanisms, such as the Article II treatymaking process, to mitigate it. The Constitution’s drafters vested treatymaking power in the Senate because that institution would enjoy some stability. As Senator Henry Cabot Lodge put it in 1903, presidential “administrations come and go, Houses assemble and disperse, Senators change, but the Senate is always there.” He attributed this happy fact to the foresight of “that remarkable body of men who, in the summer of 1787, framed at Philadelphia the Constitution.”

One of those men was Gouverneur Morris, who, alongside Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and others, advocated lengthy terms for senators. Morris complained that the fledgling Union could form few foreign relations, owing to what Hamilton called its “constantly fluctuating” legislative bodies. To Morris, the Senate’s chief virtue was its capacity to check the “changeableness” inherent in all democratic regimes. Changeableness threatened the nation’s ability to conduct effective diplomacy. “If we change our measures,” as the annually rotated members of the Confederation Congress often did, “no body [sic] will trust us,” he warned. Ask Great Britain to “explain her refusal to treat with us,” and London would say it “sees no stability” in our institutions and has “no confidence” that promises America made today will be honored tomorrow. Changeableness undermined U.S. credibility abroad, prevented the formation of treaties, and thus frustrated the infant nation’s search for security and prosperity. But “by avoiding a change of men,” which the Senate would do more than our other political institutions, the country could “avoid a change of measures,” and thus earn the confidence of foreign powers needed to conclude durable agreements.

Indeed, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention very nearly assigned the Senate the exclusive prerogative to negotiate and conclude treaties. They contemplated doing so, in part, for fear that “ambitious & corrupt Presidents” might perpetuate self-aggrandizing wars by impeding favorable peace offers or instead purchase peace by bargaining away the nation’s vital interests. While the Convention’s delegates ultimately brought the executive into the treatymaking process, they emphatically did not authorize presidents to start and end wars sua sponte.

The Founders shared the peacemaking power among the branches not only because the president might obstruct peace or negotiate self-serving terms. They also feared a good bargain could be squandered if it relied on presidential discretion alone for its effectuation. An advantageous peace deal shouldn’t be subject to revision or reversal by a subsequent president eager to embarrass his predecessor. By vesting the power to approve treaties in the Senate—whose members would serve longer terms, rotate on staggered cycles, and face no term limits—the Constitution gave American commitments a durability no president, or any individual for that matter, could supply. America’s treaties, James Wilson predicted at the Convention, would enjoy more “permanency than a monarchical government,” where an agreement’s continuation “must always depend on the temper of the man.”

Yet by supplanting treaties with executive agreements, the credibility of our national word now depends on the temper of Trump. A man whose net worth varies with his mood, who changes the country’s tariff schedule like his socks, and who has repeatedly declared “mission accomplished” in Iran only to resume hostilities hours later cannot easily persuade our adversaries that his signature will outlast his next grievance. His mercurial mind—his predictable unpredictability—has some foreign-policy benefits, to be sure. He has successfully exploited his erratic reputation to purchase deterrence on the cheap: he just might strike your power plants or even destroy your “whole civilization” if you disrupt the safe passage of some tankers through the Strait. The problem with the madman theory of diplomacy is that it undermines the credibility of the madman’s commitment to withholding punishment, a necessary ingredient of coercive diplomacy: the Iranians must believe that, if they abide by U.S. demands as recorded in a deal, they will be spared pain. Without that assurance, not even the “very rational” folks now leading Iran have reason to comply.

So, aside from doubts about whether a deal will transcend a change in presidential leadership, the Iranians must reasonably wonder whether it can even survive Trump’s remaining term of office. Just as Trump denounced NAFTA as “the worst trade deal probably ever made,” renamed it the USMCA, called it the “best agreement we’ve ever made,” all before finally lambasting the buffoon who brokered the USMCA, one can imagine President Trump asking of his own Iran deal in 2028: “Who would ever sign a thing like this?”

None of this is to say that the Islamic Republic deserves a regime-saving deal, or that it will comply with one (even one on the exceedingly generous terms Trump seems prepared to offer). A regime whose raison d’être relies so heavily on hostility to America and Israel is a poor candidate for détente or performance-based agreements. But when the deal inevitably collapses, it would be nice to think we wouldn’t have to share the blame.

Alas, here’s the grim consolation: by bypassing constitutional process in pursuit of an appeasing, opaque, and easily reversible deal with Iran, Trump will have all but ensured that his surrender deal suffers the same fate as the JCPOA he killed.