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The deal Trump signed to end his war refinances the men who wield the whip and run the gallows in Iran.

The performance was a quiet thing. As reported by AFP, Parastoo Ahmadi stood on a dim stage in a restored caravanserai, a Persian carpet under her feet and a few musicians in black behind her, and sang to an empty hall. She wore a long gown and red lipstick and no headscarf, which in the Islamic Republic is enough to turn a song into a crime. The anthem she chose, “Az Khoon-e Javanan-e Vatan” (From the Blood of the Nation’s Youth) — is a patriotic lament for the young Iranians who have died for their country. For singing it, a court in Qom sentenced her and eight of her musicians and production staff to 74 lashes each, with two-year bans on leaving the country and on making any more music.

The sentence came down in the week Trump put his signature, at Versailles, to the memorandum that ended his war.

Parastoo Ahmadi’s punishment is the gentle end of the spectrum. Under the cover of the war, the regime has been busy with its internal enemies, real and imagined. Amnesty International counts more than 6,000 arbitrary arrests since the US-Israeli bombing began on February 28, and at least 39 political executions — protesters, dissidents, men condemned for espionage on the strength of confessions wrung out in the dark. The trials are fast and foregone: teenagers seized in the January protests have been interrogated, convicted, and marched to the gallows within weeks. The Center for Human Rights in Iran reports that political hangings have surged to levels unseen since the 1980s — which in Iran is not a neutral decade to invoke, but the decade of the prison massacres.

Amnesty’s researchers told NPR the killings amount to an “arbitrary deprivation of the right to life,”a judiciary using the noose to remind a restless country who holds the rope. At least 78 more wait on death row. The United Nations has asked for the killing to stop. It has not stopped.

The war only helped the regime to ratchet up its repression. Amnesty says plainly that the authorities used “wartime conditions” as the pretext for the arrests, the sham trials, and an 88-day internet blackout, the longest on record.

None of this is a departure: The Islamic Republic is behaving exactly as it was built to behave, and I said as much in February, when I argued that Tehran does not capitulate. The defiance was never really about Trump. A militarized clerical elite that has walled itself off from its own people does not fear an American carrier group; it fears an unveiled woman singing the nation’s grief in a language the nation understands. The headscarf law now being enforced on Ahmadi is the same one that killed Mahsa Amini in custody in 2022 and drove a generation into the streets under the banner of Woman, Life, Freedom.

The law is an afterthought, a costume. Moein Khazaeli, a human-rights lawyer with the Iranian legal group Dadban, told LBC that a woman’s singing is not criminalized under Iranian law in the first place; the charge of “immoral content” is fabric stretched over a verdict the state had already reached. Bahar Ghandehari of the Center for Human Rights in Iran put the timing where it belongs, calling the sentence a reminder that conditions have not changed, “despite the authorities’ wartime propaganda” about a softer, reformed Iran.

Set that beside what Trump actually signed. The memorandum lifts the sanctions on Iran’s oil, unblocking a revenue stream worth hundreds of billions, and dangles as much as $25 billion in frozen assets and a reconstruction fund in front of the same government that just ordered a singer whipped. The deal may, at some later stage, get inspectors back to the centrifuges. It does nothing at all about the gallows. Trump went to war to take a bomb away from this regime. He is ending it by handing the regime its bank account back, with a handshake from the President of the United States on top. The centrifuges were always the smaller danger. The state itself was the larger one, and the state has just been refinanced.

This is what the President has never managed to see, through three and a half months of bombing. The thing he was striking grows harder under pressure and richer under relief. Lawrence Freedman, in Foreign Affairs, called the war a strategic dead end, a draw dressed up as a rout, and he is right about the strategy. But there is a darker entry on the bill. The one surrender that was ever going to matter — the regime’s, to its own people — is no nearer than it was in February. Trump has simply bought it time and money that it will spend on whips and ropes.

Ahmadi’s lashes have not fallen yet. The sentence can be appealed, and the world is watching, a fact that sometimes stays the regime’s hand. But the message is already sent, to her and to everyone like her. A woman sang for the youth of Iran, and the men who bury that youth sentenced her to be flogged for it. Somewhere far away, a President is calling this peace, and wondering why anyone could be ungrateful enough not to thank him.