At any given moment in time, there are numerous wars taking place, all over the world. We are busy with our own political issues, our own economic and social news; we don’t have time for wars that don’t concern us.
We do, however, pay attention to our own wars, and one has been dominating the headlines for the past year: the one in Iran.
After four months of hammering, in which we (along with our amazing allies, the Israelis) have utterly destroyed Iran’s navy, air force, nuclear program, and most of its munition factories, along with wiping out roughly the top two tiers of government officials, ruling mullahs and generals, we are now sitting down to the negotiating table to discuss some kind of treaty.
And from what we’ve seen and heard about the June Memorandum of Understanding so far, it seems impossible. Outlandish. On first read, it makes no sense whatsoever, so the agreement is being assaulted from all sides. Naturally.
We are the winners, by any definition, but the fourteen points released by the White House read like a capitulation.
This White House doesn’t capitulate.
So, before attacking the document on its own, in a vacuum, we need to think about more than just the fourteen points themselves. What went into this MOU, what do we expect to get from it, how long do we expect it to last before it’s broken, and perhaps most importantly, do we really expect any of the unacceptable items in this document to actually come to pass?
To figure this out, we need context.
The History
Persia has been a prominent nation – a world power – off and on, virtually throughout recorded history, so we could make a case for starting almost anywhere in the past four thousand years or more, but to make this manageable, we’ll just go back to the end of the 1970s.
The Pahlavi dynasty was on the throne, and Shah Reza Pahlavi had worked very hard to modernize Iran, in an effort to make it the most western-facing nation in the middle east. To the extent possible, all religions and ethnicities were welcome. There were muslims and Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, Bahaiis and more, in a shia-majority state that attempted to be pluralistic and roughly secular (the requirement of hijabs and burkas was ended in the 1930s) while still satisfying the general idea of being shia muslim on paper.
With the revolution of 1978-79, however, all that came to an end. The ayatollahs took over the country, forcibly ending the secular trend and establishing a radical sharia law driven state for the next half century.
The ayatollahs designed a government in which the shia clerics (ayatollahs, mullahs, etc.) ruled with an iron fist, while a shia-led army enforced a police state, and a parliament was kept around primarily for appearances, since the ayatollahs really held all the cards.
The ayatollahs immediately declared war on the United States, on Israel, on virtually the entire civilized world, and have spent the past 47 years at war with us – while we largely left them alone rather than responding as we could have.
They started by taking our embassy hostage, shaming the feckless Carter administration for over a year. They spent the next half century attacking us all over the world, both directly and by proxies, by terrorism, by attempted assassinations and more.
The Iran regime, which has considered itself at war with us for its entire history, has been the cause of continual, bloody, and costly damage, to us and to the entire world, throughout the past 47 years. We may not have responded; we may have just gone about our day without reacting proportionately or even at all, but that doesn’t change the fact that we have been at war.
We didn’t start this war. It only takes one side to have a war, and the shia tyrants of Iran started it.
The President
President Donald J. Trump has only been in public office for a decade. Prior to that, he was a developer, an investor, an entertainer, an author, a businessman. But throughout that time, he was also vocal, whenever he got the chance, to remind people of the foreign nations with which we are at war, and of the need for our government to respond. He has been consistent on the matter throughout this half century.
Last year, as President of the United States, he took action. Working closely with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, his administration started taking the decisive action that we’ve needed all this time: accepting the reality that we are at war with Iran, and addressing the threat.
No government project goes exactly as hoped at the start; there are always surprises along the way. But this action has degraded the Iranian regime magnificently, and we have reached – passed, really – the point at which one would expect the opponent to sue for peace. So we are at a talking stage, and President Trump is doing it his way. And his way is unusual.
What Should Peace Look Like?
The “should be” is simple, and obvious. The regime of Twelvers needs to be eliminated. Not degraded, not pacified, not defanged, but terminated. Iran needs a new government, led by non-Twelvers.
(For those unfamiliar with the term – Twelvers are the most vicious, most horrible branch of their “religion;” they believe that massive death and destruction will bring back an imam who’s been waiting in a cave for 1300 years. This belief justifies the most horrific behavior, and causes Twelvers to be absolutely unfit as rulers).
So peace – real peace – requires a new pluralistic government, punishment for the torturers and killers who’ve ruled for 47 years, and an end to all the evils that their regime has committed, from sponsoring terrorism to spreading insurgencies to terrorizing their own people to attacking world commerce.
(As just one example of their attack on world commerce: Iran has directed their Houthi clients in Yemen to close the Red Sea and Suez Canal to commerce for almost three years now, at a cost estimated at over a billion dollars per day. This one act alone has cost the global economy a trillion dollars so far).
The Twelvers’ regime cannot be rewarded or compensated in any way; it must be obliterated, and to the extent that any financial compensation is owed, it’s the Twelvers’ regime that owes it – to their own domestic victims of the past 47 years of repression, to the neighboring countries they’ve undermined and attacked, and to the global commerce that they’ve stunted.
Whatever the final, permanent peace deal looks like, it cannot leave the Twelvers’ regime in place. We can be generous to the replacement regime, in time, but not to the incumbent regime.
We aren’t talking just about the crimes of a century or two ago; we are talking about crimes as recent as this very year. The Twelvers’ regime murdered tens of thousands of their own citizens for the “crime” of unarmed demonstrations in the streets; they mowed down at least 30,000 Iranians (some estimates place it much higher) in the first quarter of 2026 alone.
There is too much emphasis on the nuclear program. Yes, Iran’s capability to attain nuclear weaponry must be eliminated. But Iran has committed mass slaughter and horrendous destruction for half a century without nuclear weapons, so these too must be terminated. We cannot proudly declare that their nuclear ambitions are kicked twenty years down the road and call it a day.
What “Points” Belong in a Deal?
1. A commitment to never pursue nuclear power or nuclear arms (because the one enables the other, and they have proven they cannot be trusted to stop at the former), with both external verification and internal punishment for those who pursue it.
2. A commission (similar to Nuremburg) prosecuting and punishing (yes, with capital punishment as a likely sentence) all still-living politicians, mullahs, and military leaders who have ordered or voted for orders to torture or kill Iranian demonstrators over the past year.
3. A commission prosecuting and punishing (yes, with capital punishment as a likely sentence) all still-living politicians, mullahs, and military leaders who have ordered or voted for orders to fire on their neighboring countries – outside the legitimate context of actual, normal, declared war (such as the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s).
4. The immediate end to all financing, training, supply or other support of Iran’s external surrogates/subordinates/allies, such as (but not limited to) the Houthis in Yemen, the Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Israel’s Gaza Strip, Homeland Justice in Albania, etc.
5. The immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and a commitment to permanently end the charges of tolls or tribute for passage. (if they want to make money off the transit of ships past their shores, they can earn it the way normal, responsible countries do: by competing for legal logistics and maintenance services in their ports).
6. A new constitutional government of Iran that returns it to the western-facing, pluralistic, economically libertarian approach of the pre-Ayatollah period. The new government must be tolerant – more, it must provide full, normal citizenship rights – to the non-muslims (Jews and Christians, Zoroastrians and Bahaiis, etc.) in their nation, just as Iran did before the 1979 revolution. The people of Iran deserve at least the freedom their parents and grandparents enjoyed under the Shah.
7. Recognition of Israel, and of Israel’s right to exist in the community of nations.
8. Conditional relaxation of limits on the oil trade immediately, only because the rest of the world needs it. But absolutely no relaxation of any other sanctions at all, until all points in this agreement have taken place, and even then, only with care and patience, since so many Iranian politicians and alleged businessmen have proven to be in the service of their homicidal tyrants in the past.
9. No money from the United States government, no tax dollars to be paid, loaned, or granted in any way. The Twelver regime owes countless billions to the rest of the world, for all the damage they’ve done, economies they’ve wrecked, and people they’ve killed over the past half century. We may not be able to get money back from them, but we certainly have no moral justification for giving money to them. In our hungry pursuit of a peace deal, we must not forget all the crimes that Iran has done, both internally and externally, not just in the distant past but this very year. Every billion dollars in gifts would appear to be a reward for murdering thousands of their own citizens in cold blood, just a few months ago.
10. There are still a number of “frozen Iranian assets” – investments, property, stock, cash, etc. – across the West, frozen for half a century, ever since the ayatollahs killed these assets’ owners during their 1979 revolution. To give these assets to the current government would be like witnessing a mugger killing a victim in an alley, and allowing that killer to take the victim’s wallet, watch and jewelry as a reward for the murder. One of the most imperative principles of Western jurisprudence has always been that a criminal must not be allowed to profit from his crime. The Twelvers’ regime must be ended, and a new government must replace it, before any further frozen Iranian assets can be unfrozen. If that means they remain frozen another year, or five, or ten or twenty, better that than to have the heirs of the 1979 revolution be rewarded with the property of the people they murdered at the time.
These are the ten critical, imperative points that must be in any final peace agreement.
They must be the framework of the resolution of this conflict. Otherwise, the USA has lost the war, not won it.
When you look at the military record on the ground, the USA has most assuredly won, so there is no reason, no justification, for capitulation at the negotiating table. A long and patient stalemate would be preferable to compromising on any of the ten points above.
The June Memorandum of Understanding
The MOU signed this week in Europe bears no similarity to a rational peace treaty offered by a conquering power to a defeated adversary. It also didn’t include the participation of Israel, which did a great deal of the heavy lifting in this war. Objectively speaking, it is therefore illegitimate.
That being said, in analyzing the fourteen points of the June MOU, we must look deeper into context.
Many times over the past forty years, we have seen Israel offer incredibly generous gifts to the PLO and its heirs, regarding both the Gaza Strip and the region of Judea and Samaria. What has always been the result? No matter how generous the terms they offered, the muslims always turned them down in the end because it “wasn’t enough.” And in the meantime, every ceasefire has been broken by the muslims, because they are allowed to, even encouraged to, by islam itself. We must always remember that muslims not only can lie to non-muslims (taqiyya) they are literally encouraged to do so (look it up). This makes any agreement between muslims and non-muslims difficult if not impossible.
The even greater challenge here is that most muslims have at least a normal sense of self-preservation, so even if they don’t “have to” keep an agreement, they will want to anyway, if it’s in their best interest. Twelvers, however, don’t have this normal sense of self-preservation; their apocalyptic branch of islam calls for mass destruction and death in the hopes of bringing back their twelfth imam, remember? So without even a normal sense of self-interest, we cannot expect them to abide by an agreement even if it benefits them.
For these reasons, we may see this negotiation as one that recognizes reality in a way unusual in diplomacy. If the Trump administration is serious about the offers in the June MOU, signing it constitutes a betrayal. But it may well be that the Trump administration is well aware that the current Iranian government will break the agreement so fast, none of the apparent capitulations will take place. All the generosity is conditional upon Iran being honorable; if they aren’t, the sanctions relief, unfreezing of assets, and investment funds won’t happen at all. Knowing the Iranian regime, this is certainly most likely. Is that a risk we can run? The President’s team knows more than we do; perhaps they have intelligence that ensures that it would be safe to offer them anything at all, because we know they will break the agreement before the ink is dry anyway.
This seems like a risky strategy, but we must contend with American politics. We have half a country here that expects generosity and forgiveness to robbers, rapists, torturers, and murderers (just look at any of our major metro areas). They expect our diplomats to behave just as inexplicably generously to foreign monsters as their local criminal justice system does to our homegrown ones.
This MOU may therefore be intended for two reasons: to allow a pause in the war with Iran, while we can concentrate on Cuba, China, and the approaching midterms, and to give the Iranians enough rope to show their true colors again, so that we can return to the issue next year with this experience as yet another justification for tough action.
A jaded expectation, yes, but not an unreasonable one, if we keep in mind that the Iranians have never let up on calling us the Great Satan, have never stopped attacking their neighbors, have never stopped tormenting their own citizens, in 47 years of tyranny.
If we can say next year “We offered you guys the world, out of the kindness of our hearts, and still you launched missiles at your neighbors, you killed your own citizens, you refused to call off your Houthi and Hezbollah surrogates, you kept on supporting terrorism. We have the moral high ground to say, we showed you compassion and you remained monsters; now we’ll deal with you the way that monsters must be dealt with.”
There are many ways to look at this. From our vantage point outside the office, looking in, this seems reasonable. I don’t know, personally, how much of my take is propelled by optimism, but I simply cannot imagine the Trump administration capitulating the way it looks on first glance. So I am hopeful that this analysis is correct.
May Divine Providence guide the minds and hearts of the Trump administration as they move forward, on this and every task they face in these difficult times.
Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer, speaker, and consultant. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon. His trade compliance training practice is available either in person or by webinar.
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