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Former US national security advisor Jake Sullivan has claimed that Donald Trump’s peace deal with Iran is an “unalloyed win” for the Islamic Republic.
Speaking with UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers, Sullivan said the Memorandum of Understanding signed by Iran and the United States on Wednesday gave “significant advantages” to Iran and indicated that “the United States has basically lost this war.”
The agreement signed between Trump and Iran says the Islamic Republic will never have a nuclear weapon, and commits to the re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz and an end to the US blockade, as well as the creation of a $300 billion fund for Iranian reconstruction. However, Sullivan said that the US was now effectively paying “reparations” to Iran and has “ended up in a worse position today than we were before the war started”. He added: “Essentially what you’re looking at here is a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz with a massive financial windfall to Iran, and then a commitment to negotiate a set of nuclear issues that at present are completely unresolved.”
Sullivan served as the US national security advisor from 2021 to 2025 under former president Joe Biden, and previously helped negotiate the Obama administration’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which limited the Islamic regime’s stock of nuclear material and relieved US sanctions on the country. Trump derided the agreement as the “worst deal in history”, and withdrew the US in 2018 during his first presidential term.
In the UnHerd interview, Sullivan argued that the Obama deal had put Iran’s nuclear programme in a “box”, and that Trump’s withdrawal allowed Iran to “move forward again”. Yet with the MOU, he said, Trump has been forced to recognise “the same reality we had to acknowledge a decade ago”, namely that Iran will not accept a complete end to its nuclear enrichment programme. The MOU’s reference to Iran’s “nuclear needs”, Sullivan stated, was a pullback from Trump’s previous declaration that the country could not have a civilian nuclear programme.
“We have to recognise that the US actually could have gotten all of the statements Iran made on its nuclear programme in this deal before it went to war,” he said. “And [the US] wouldn’t have had to pay to reopen the Strait of Hormuz because the Strait wouldn’t be closed.”
While Sullivan celebrated the end of the war, he cautioned that Israel may attempt to “spoil” negotiations due to widespread opposition to the deal. Further, pointing to Trump’s deal to end the war in Gaza, where second-phase peace plans have stalled, he argued that the Iran peace deal may be left “open-ended”.
“Maybe they reach some interim deals about specific things like down blending the stockpile, but I don’t think you’re going to see a comprehensive nuclear deal,” Sullivan said. “I think that will just drag indefinitely.”
He’s a Democrat and previously professionally involved in negotiating with Iran. His professional reputation is at stake. How can he be unbiased? However the Spectator’s leading article today makes similar points but more assertively. Hard to see how Trump could paint this as a win, but he’ll try.
It will be amusing to see how Trump tries to present this unnecessary humiliation as an essential victory.
National security advisor to the president when Hamas invaded Israel and Russia invaded Ukraine, not to mention the shockingly ignominious rout in Afghanistan. Totally credible!
Jake Sullivan is the last person whose assessment of the situation should be taken into account.
Right, he ran a big part of Biden’s brain that was dead.
He was an advisor: not a decision-maker. Perhaps his advice was sound, but his boss didn’t listen.
That’s one possibility.
Well, There are two comments as I write this and both are ad hominem attacks on Sullivan and therefore say nothing regarding the merits of what he says.
His analysis is pretty good, if somewhat shallow. But considering what I see on unheard comment sections, it’s probably all most here are capable of listening to.
I am of the school that the nukes were only a casus belli for our being at loggerheads with Iran. The sanctions, attempts at regime change, forever wars, US support for Israel are all much more pertinent issues. In these, the US has basically bent to Iran’s desires and that indicates that we lost this war.
I myself think that in this particular case, a lost for the Neocon’s, which have run this country in opposition to most of the populace, is actually a victory for John Q. Public. Yes, a powerful Iran which dominates the region may mean a problematic future, but the Neocon’s have been running us into the dirt and the evils of an Iranian victory, are not too big of a price to pay for breaking the neocon stranglehold on power in this country.
I have no idea whether Sullivan’s assessment is shrewd, informed, judicious, insightful , or anything else. It doesn’t really matter and “only time will tell”, to mint a cliche. What does matter is that the Mullahs were the only ones this Administration could deal with, and they have held their own against the militarism of the USA and Israel, have inflicted their own measure of punishment and retaliation, way beyond probably way beyond what most in the Trump Administration
could imagine. There really is no victory here, or maybe any victory even possible, because the mullahs , whoever/whatever is left of them, are the only valid parties to negotiate with, and part of their deal is NOT that they are going to relinquish their hold on power and influence. “Regime Change” , as fondly held in the imaginations of millions everywhere, has receded into the mist , maybe for the foreseeable future……or beyond.
I was not sure about the deal, but when Jake Sullivan assures us that Trump has handed Iran victory, I feel relieved.
Mr Sullivan was the architect of the 2015 deal with Iran – when he worked for Obama – and was a senior aide for Biden. For sure he was going to give an independent assessment of Trump’s deal.
Remember, his boss Obama spied on the Trump campaign in 2016 and sicced on the FBI to entrap Michael Flynn on bogus charges, costing him $1m in legal fees – the DOJ later dropped the case – and ensnare Trump in the Clinton campaign paid for dossier on Trump. Btw, the Clinton campaign lied about this, claiming the costs paid for this were allowable legal expenses. Her campaign paid a fine of $113,000 https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/30/politics/clinton-dnc-steele-dossier-fusion-gps
The New York prosecutor (Alvin Bragg) who went after Trump for claiming expenses paid to his lawyer amounted to felonies because they wre linked to the 2016 election, somehow missed this.
Under Sullivan’s later boss, Biden, the DOF launched an (illegal) raid on Mar a Lago, raided Trump’s wife’s drawers and posted pics of so called illegally held secret files.
Short. Nothing prominent Democrats say about Trump can be believed, as their track record of lies is so long.
It’s interesting that in none of the discussions that I have read is there much discussion of how geography affects, and has always affected, strategy. Go back to Mackinder’s concept of a‘world island’ and Spykman’s idea of the Rimland states, and that area of Iraq and Iran keep cropping up. If it was not accepted that Trump is not much of a reader I might wonder if he’s overdosed on Mahan’s view of naval superiority.