Do-Over Do-It-Worse Diplomacy: How White House Hubris Haunts This Hollow JCPOA Sequel
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He began with bombast: dismantling the architecture of arms control in the name of strength. He ends in the same room he left in a fit of pique, as he proposes virtually the same concessions he once scorned—except his adversary has far accelerated. This is the Trump Doctrine in action—tear down the deal, torch the treaty, then tiptoe back in with a flimsier framework and a swaggering smirk. Call it the Do-Over Do-It-Worse Diplomacy, a tired pageant of provocation and retreat that has left America’s allies aghast, its adversaries amused, and the rest of the world warily watching the unraveling of U.S. credibility.
When Donald Trump tore up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018, he declared the accord a “disaster” and a “surrender,” a badge of weakness pinned by Barack Obama onto America’s proud chest. His supporters cheered, convinced that maximum pressure would break Iran’s will and force the Ayatollahs to kneel. Yet, here we stand, seven years later, and the tune has changed. Though the song remains the same, as ever with The Trump Doctrine. In 2025, the Trump team is offering a new deal, a less comprehensive, less enforceable cousin of the JCPOA, permitting Iran to enrich uranium on its own soil. The very enrichment he once called intolerable is now, apparently, acceptable—so long as it bears his name.
The Re-Deal’s Rotten Core
This is not a new chapter in American diplomacy. It is a palimpsest (it’s a FANTASTIC word when used correctly, trust us), overwriting yesterday’s logic with today’s expediency. It’s a scrawling of slogans where there should be strategy: shocking, right? Trump’s 2025 offer allows Iran to maintain a low-level enrichment program under international monitoring—a proposal that, in substance, looks suspiciously like the deal he abandoned in 2018. The new twist? A “regional enrichment consortium” that would theoretically oversee the work. A phrase as hollow as it is novel, designed to distract from the fact that this is, in essence, a retreat disguised as a recalibration.
Iran’s Supreme Leader has dismissed it out of hand, calling it an insult to Iranian sovereignty. Tehran’s diplomats have denounced the deal’s vagueness and the meager economic relief on offer. And why wouldn’t they? Having been burned by an abandoned full faith and credit bucking by this administration, Tehran sees no reason to trust a White House that can’t keep its own promises for longer than a news—or social media—cycle. This is not a breakthrough. It is a face-saving exercise for an administration that blew up the bridge it now seeks to rebuild, using scorched timbers and wishful thinking.
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From JCPOA to JCP-No-Way
The original JCPOA was BY FAR no ideal deal. But to stitch together such a coalition to bring it into force took a carefully calibrated balance of restrictions and relief, hammered out in marathon talks between Iran, the U.S., Europe, Russia, and China. The very utterance of that sentence of transnational forces together in agreement seems laughable today given the state of the world.
However, as a refresher, it capped Iran’s enrichment at 3.67 percent, slashed its stockpile of fissile material by 98 percent, and subjected every square inch of Iranian nuclear facilities to the most intrusive inspections ever negotiated. For these concessions, Iran received phased sanctions relief—an economic breathing space in exchange for a verifiable halt to its weapons program.
Trump’s withdrawal—without any cause—in 2018 shattered that framework. He argued the deal didn’t cover Iran’s missile program or its meddling in the region. Fair criticisms, perhaps—but what he offered in its place was a vacuum, not a vision. Sanctions piled up, tensions soared, and Iran resumed enrichment beyond JCPOA limits. And now, he’s back to the table, offering Tehran something far less robust, with far less buoyancy from America’s allies. The mullah’s see this. And are acting in accordance from what we would expect in such an about-face.
The Do-Over’s Flimsy Foundations
The new proposal hinges on two illusions: that Iran will trade strategic sovereignty for vague promises, and that America’s word—so blithely broken in 2018—carries weight in 2025. It also hinges on an art of the deal that believes endlessly redoing the same negotiation (see: NAFTA, USMCA, whatever it’s called now) is the way to solve problems, as if the world’s flash points can be solved by a real estate developer’s mercurial polarity can guide anything forward.
Iran’s leadership has grown adept at survival. They have reoriented trade eastward, deepening ties with Russia and China. They have kept centrifuges spinning in defiance of U.S. threats, showing the world that pressure alone cannot break a regime that sees its nuclear program as existential. And so they treat Trump’s new offer not as an olive branch but as a boomerang—thrown in haste, sure to return with predictable consequences.
CASE STUDY The Council of Constance (1414–1418) — A Papered-Over Peace and the Echoes of Trump’s Iran ‘Do-Over’
In the autumn of 1414, a fractured Christendom gathered under the vaulted ceilings of Constance’s great cathedral. The Council of Constance was meant to end the Great Schism (1054) that had split the Catholic world: three rival popes, each clinging to legitimacy like a drowning man to driftwood. The council did what no force of arms could achieve: it deposed the rival pontiffs, installed Martin V as the sole pope, and declared an end to the schism. But beneath the grand pronouncements lay the jagged fault lines of reality—resentments unhealed, power plays unresolved, and the quiet knowledge that the next crisis was never far away.
Trump’s 2025 Iran gambit is cut from the same cloth of hollow triumphs and unresolved tensions. Like Constance, it boasts of a singular solution—this “do-over do-it-worse deal” that, on paper, re-establishes order.
But it is no healing balm. It is a bandage over a wound still festering. Where Constance papered over the theological divides of Rome and Avignon, Trump’s do-over deal covers the same old arguments—enrichment, sanctions, trust—without the painstaking architecture that made the JCPOA more than a press release.
The Council of Constance showcased the choreography of compromise: decrees passed with one hand while secret pacts were inked with the other. Trump’s team, too, trumpets its grandstanding language—“unprecedented,” “historic,” “the toughest deal yet”—while behind closed doors they rehash the very clauses they once condemned. Constance needed to show the world a united Christendom, Trump needs to show the world that American swagger still carries weight. Both settle for the appearance of unity, not its foundation.
The lessons are clear: papered-over peace is never lasting. Constance’s outward unity could not halt the next institutional challenging waves , nor the disillusionment of a laity that saw the church’s moral authority eroded by political games. Trump’s do-it-worse deal, equally hollow, will not halt Iranian ambitions nor reassure a world grown skeptical of Washington’s word. It is a spectacle, a stage play of statecraft, but the audience sees the sets wobbling in the footlights.
A Farce that Fuels the Fire
This farcical re-negotiation is not merely a matter of diplomatic embarrassment. It carries real costs for American credibility. In the eyes of the world, the United States looks like a country that cannot honor its word. In Europe, skepticism is turning to cynicism. In Asia, hedging is becoming habit. Allies who once trusted American leadership now wonder if the next tweet will bring the next about-face. In Tehran, the regime hardliners who argued the West could never be trusted were vindicated. They need no further victory. The international community does. Tehran holds all the cards. Because they were handed over back in 2018. The moderates who staked their political survival on the promise of the JCPOA have been marginalized, their cautionary tales ignored.
The 2025 redux also sends a message to would-be nuclear aspirants: hold out long enough, and you too can have your cake and eat it. North Korea is watching. So is every minor power with grand ambitions. If America’s word is as fragile as its partisan feuds, what incentive is there to disarm?
The Real Cost of Incoherence
Trump’s defenders will say he is simply a pragmatist—willing to toss old deals to get better ones. But there is a difference between tough bargaining and chaotic caprice. Diplomacy is not a casino, where the house always wins. It is a laborious craft, where trust and continuity matter as much as leverage and muscle. When Trump shredded the JCPOA, he didn’t just scrap an agreement. He upended the very notion that America’s signature means something. Now, he is reaping the whirlwind of that recklessness.
The half-baked language and half-hearted commitments are the fruits of a failed strategy. It is a “victory” in name only—a Potemkin pact to paper over a policy vacuum. And it will do nothing to halt Iran’s steady progress toward a latent nuclear capability, nor to reassure America’s friends that Washington can still be counted on when the chips are down.
So what is to be done? The answer is not to accept this hollow re-deal as a fait accompli. Nor is it to pine for the JCPOA as if it were a lost Eden. Rather, it is to learn the real lesson of the last decade: that sustainable agreements require more than slogans and strongman bluster. They require patient diplomacy, credible commitments, and—above all—political will to stick to a path once chosen.
If America wants to restore its standing, it must show that it can be both tough and trustworthy. That means re-engaging with allies, not sidelining them with sudden announcements and Twitter tantrums. It means investing in the institutions—like the IAEA—that make verification more than a slogan. And it means understanding that while maximum pressure may force a foe to the table, it cannot alone produce the kind of durable peace that the world needs.
The tragedy of Trump’s Iran policy is not that he sought a better deal—it’s that he never really understood the old one. The JCPOA was not an act of charity. It was a hard-nosed, interest-driven bargain, built on years of painstaking negotiation. By tearing it up and trying to reassemble its pieces with fewer friends and more enemies, Trump has shown the limits of deal-making without diplomacy, of swagger without substance.
What he offers now is a testament to that failure—a monument to the dangers of mistaking theatrics for statecraft. If America wants to lead, it must do more than replay the same tired script. It must write a new one.
The Do-Over Do-It-Worse Diplomacy, indeed. But it is an art that leaves behind only wreckage and regret.
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