Iran Lost. We Didn’t.

Before you call it a loss: the US-Iran deal, and why I am not buying the sellout story

Jun 23, 2026

“A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.” (Ecclesiastes 3:8)

This is my opinion. I want to say that plainly at the top, because what follows is not a bill breakdown with a verdict stamped on it. It is where I landed after weeks of reading the actual text, the damage assessments, and the history, instead of reacting to a subject line. You can study all of it right alongside me and still come out somewhere different. That is fair. But this is where the reading took me.

Our goal in Iran was always simple. Keep them from building a nuclear weapon. That was the point, going back decades and across both parties. So before anyone calls this deal a loss, a sellout, or a surrender, I think we owe it to ourselves to look honestly at what actually got done. Because what got done was enormous.

What actually got done

Start with the missiles, because that is the threat aimed straight at Israel and at our troops.

Iran walked into 2026 with roughly 2,500 ballistic missiles rebuilt and around 480 mobile launchers, according to the Alma Center’s assessment. By the time the shooting stopped, that arsenal had been cut to somewhere between 1,000 and 1,200 missiles, and the launchers were gutted from about 480 down to roughly 100 still serviceable. That is two-thirds to three-quarters of Iran’s ability to actually launch, gone. The commander of US Central Command said Iranian missile fire dropped roughly 90 percent once the campaign began. The Israeli Air Force flew more than 1,600 sorties into Iranian skies and ran over 4,700 strikes against the missile program alone. Hundreds of missiles were destroyed before they ever left the ground.

We did not dent that machine. We took apart something Iran spent 45 years building.

On the nuclear side, the United States and Israel hit the three crown-jewel enrichment sites, Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, not once but twice, in June 2025 and again in early 2026. Operation Midnight Hammer alone dropped fourteen 30,000-pound GBU-57 bunker-busters on Fordow and Natanz and put more than two dozen Tomahawks on Isfahan, delivered by B-2 stealth bombers built for exactly this. Independent analysts at the Institute for Science and International Security assessed the program as largely destroyed.

Now the honest part, because I promised you reading and not cheerleading. Estimates of how far the program was set back range widely, from a leaked low-confidence US assessment that said only months, to outside analysts who say a year or more. And Iran kept its stockpile of enriched uranium. The IAEA assessed that the material was not moved out of those sites. Hold onto that fact, because it matters for where I think this is all going.

Then the leadership, and this is the part that is hard to overstate. The opening strike of the 2026 war killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei himself. In the 2025 war, roughly 30 Iranian generals and at least 14 nuclear scientists were killed in the first hours. Across both campaigns the IDF counted at least six more senior commanders dead. That is not harassment. That is decapitation.

And the proxies. Hezbollah, the crown jewel of Iran’s “ring of fire” around Israel, had its leadership shattered and its second-strike threat neutralized after years of Israeli operations. Hamas has been hollowed out. The Axis of Resistance that Iran spent four decades and untold billions assembling has been, in the words of one Washington assessment, substantially broken.

That is not nothing. That is the worst beating Iran’s war machine has taken in decades.

Now look at what this deal even is

Here is what most of the people screaming “sellout” are missing. This is a memorandum of understanding. It is not a treaty. Nothing permanent has been signed into binding international law. The memorandum sets a 60-day window in which the hardest terms, the entire mechanism for handling Iran’s nuclear material, still have to be negotiated before any final agreement exists at all.

So the folks calling this a surrender are reacting to a framework, not a finished deal. They are reviewing a rough draft as if it were the signed contract. The nuclear endgame, the sanctions schedule, the enforcement teeth, all of that is still being fought over right now. Judging the war by the ceasefire memo is like grading a season by the coin toss.

And the proof is happening in real time. As I write this, the two sides are sitting across a table in Switzerland, at a resort on Lake Lucerne, with Pakistan and Qatar mediating. On June 22 they announced a road map toward a final deal inside the 60-day window, stood up working groups on the nuclear file, on sanctions, and on monitoring, and built a deconfliction cell to hold the Lebanon ceasefire. Iran even agreed to let international nuclear inspectors back into the country. None of that is a finished deal. It is the hard bargaining that the critics already declared lost, still very much underway, with American leverage still on the table.

The treaty nobody actually lost

You will hear that Israel “got cut out.” I want to take that one apart, because it rests on something that is not true.

We do not have a formal mutual defense treaty with Israel. We never have. Not a NATO-style pact, not the kind we have with Japan or South Korea. Israel is a Major Non-NATO Ally and a Major Strategic Partner, but there is no treaty obligating America to fight for it, and there never has been.

And part of the reason is Israel’s own choice. Israel’s entire security doctrine is that it defends itself, by itself. A binding treaty cuts both ways. It can tie strings to that independence, give Washington a veto over Israeli action, and trade away the very freedom of operation Israel guards most fiercely. On top of that, any real treaty would have to clear two-thirds of the US Senate, which is a mountain all its own.

So when people act like Israel got robbed of a treaty in this deal, they are mourning something that does not exist and that Israel itself has long been wary of signing. You cannot be cut out of a chair that was never built.

And no, it is not worse than Obama’s

I keep hearing this compared to 2015, usually by people who cheered 2015. So let us be fair and clear-eyed.

The Obama deal, the JCPOA, left out Iran’s ballistic missiles. It left out Iran’s proxies. It was built with sunset clauses that let the key restrictions expire on a timer. And it unfroze tens of billions of dollars in Iranian assets, with the often-cited figure running near $100 billion, plus a $1.7 billion cash settlement that critics never let anyone forget.

So if your complaint about the new memorandum is that it punts the missiles and the proxies to a later negotiation, fine, but understand that the deal you are nostalgic for never touched them at all.

Here is the difference, and it is the whole difference. Obama’s deal came without a single bomb falling on a single Iranian facility. Ours came after we flattened them. One handed Iran relief from a position of leverage. The other handed Iran a ceasefire from a position of rubble. I know which negotiating table I would rather sit at.

The legislation that actually protects us

Here is what I wish more people were watching instead of the ceasefire headlines. The upcoming legislation on US-Israel defense technology and partnership is extremely important, and the President is working to make sure it happens.

This is the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative tucked inside the $1.15 trillion 2027 defense bill. It would knit American and Israeli work together on the exact capabilities this war just proved we need most: counter-drone systems, missile and air defense, artificial intelligence, and cyber. We just watched cheap drones and ballistic missiles define an entire war. Israel has the most combat-tested defenses against both on the planet. Folding that into our own systems is not charity to Israel. It is insurance for us.

If that partnership gets built, it protects American families and American troops for the next round. And make no mistake, there will be a next round.

My hard truth

So here is where my reading finally left me, and it is not comfortable.

I do not think this ends. I think we are going to have to keep coming back, again and again, to set back the next regime that decides it wants a bomb and a martyr complex to go with it. Iran kept its enriched uranium. Its leadership got replaced within days. Its scientists who survived are already rebuilding, pouring new roofs over old sites and digging fresh tunnels under granite. The will did not die when the buildings did.

And the threat to do it again is already out loud. Just this week, with negotiators in the same room in Switzerland, the President warned that if Iran did not rein in Hezbollah he would hit Iran very hard again, only harder. Senator Lindsey Graham said it even plainer: if Iran keeps attacking Israel and Lebanon, the new policy is that we hit Iran. To me that is not saber-rattling. That is the new normal being said into a microphone.

My honest guess for who is next? Syria. And after that, someone else. Because none of these regimes are going to wake up and decide to stop chasing nuclear weapons or stop aiming them at Israel and at us. That is the world as it actually is, not the world we wish it were.

Which is exactly why I am not willing to call this a loss. A loss is when the threat wins. This was the threat getting broken, bought down to a stub, and put on notice, while America kept its own people out of an occupation it did not need. It is not the final word. There is no final word with people who do not believe in one. But it is a hard, real blow landed, and a President saying out loud that he struck it for America.

Read the whole thing before you rage about it. That is all I am asking. I did. And this is where it left me.

Peace in the chaos. Grounded in Christ and way too much coffee. ☕ Rebekah, Winter Haven, Florida. At the kitchen table. Obviously.

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