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There is no alternate universe in which Trump’s disastrous war could have gone differently.

Long before the first American bomb fell on Iran this February, the US military had already fought this war dozens of times — on paper, in classified exercises, in rooms full of officers pushing markers around a map. It kept losing. Across more than two decades of these games, the script bent the same way every time: once the shooting started, Iran reached for the Strait of Hormuz, the channel that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil, and the global economy seized. The most famous of them, the Millennium Challenge of 2002, ended with the retired general playing the Gulf adversary crippling much of the American fleet using little more than small boats, couriers on motorbikes and the element of surprise. The umpires refloated the sunken ships and ran it again.

So when Iran shut the strait within days of the opening salvo, the only people who appeared genuinely startled were the ones who had ordered the attack. That is the fact to keep in view as Donald Trump puts his name to a memorandum of understanding with Tehran: this was not a misfortune that befell him. He chose it, with his eyes open.

Let me declare an interest. In the spring of 2015 I argued that Barack Obama’s nuclear deal was a poor bargain — that lifting sanctions would hand the regime the means to widen its wars from Lebanon to Yemen. I assessed Iran as a petro-state in waiting, one that would pour its unfrozen billions into Hezbollah, the Houthis and Bashar al-Assad. I have not revised that view. Which is why what Trump has now produced should trouble even those of us who never mourned the accord he walked away from in 2018. He has given Tehran more money than the old deal ever did, a tested weapon in the Strait it can pick up again whenever it likes, and — this is the part that ought to sting his admirers — no firm ceiling on the nuclear program that was supposed to be the entire point.

Trace it backward. In 2018 Trump scrapped an agreement that had held Iran’s enrichment to a few percent and put international inspectors inside its facilities. RAND, hardly a nest of liberals, warned at the time that walking away would cut Iran’s breakout time from about a year to a matter of months and leave those inspectors blind. The warning was neither obscure nor partisan, and it came true to the letter: Iran went from a few percent to twenty, then to sixty, and stacked up a stockpile it had no civilian use for. Richard Nephew, who spent years negotiating against Tehran and now teaches at Columbia, has said the withdrawal had “a significant accelerating effect” on the program. By the time Trump returned to office, Iran sat roughly a fortnight from a bomb’s worth of fuel — a clock his own decision had wound.

He chose to stop that clock with high explosive, in the middle of a negotiation that was reportedly making headway. When American and Israeli aircraft struck on February 28, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and much of the leadership around him, Omani mediators were reporting progress in indirect talks and Iran had floated concessions. Trump said he was “not thrilled” with the diplomacy and went to war instead. The declared aim was regime change; within hours he was on social media telling ordinary Iranians to rise up and seize the country for themselves.

Tehran did the thing the games had always predicted. It mined and harried the Strait of Hormuz, tankers stopped sailing, and crude lurched toward prices the world had not seen since the 1970s. The decapitation strike that was supposed to shatter the regime did the opposite. (I have argued in this space that the constant infighting in Tehran is a mark of the system’s durability, not its fragility.) Killing Khamenei did not bring the Islamic Republic down. It handed the country to the hardest men in it — his son Mojtaba and the Revolutionary Guard commanders who had always wanted the bomb and never wanted the talks. Barbara Leaf, who ran the State Department’s Middle East bureau until recently, called the administration’s read on the regime’s staying power “disastrously unrealistic.” On the evidence, she was being charitable.

To get the strait reopened — to spare American drivers and the world economy the bill — Trump gave way on nearly everything else. The terms now surfacing waive oil sanctions, free up frozen Iranian funds, and float a reconstruction package some reports put at $300 billion. Iran keeps its hand on Hormuz and the right to bill passing ships; its missiles go unmentioned. The deal also blesses a ceasefire in Lebanon that Hezbollah is already selling as a triumph. Even some of the war’s loudest cheerleaders are appalled: Mike Pompeo, Trump’s own first-term secretary of state, called the emerging bargain “not remotely America First,” and Senator Bill Cassidy called it “the worst foreign-policy blunder in decades.”

There is a serious rebuttal, and it deserves a hearing. The RAND analyst Raphael Cohen has insisted the war is “a dilemma, not a debacle” — that the strikes did real damage to Iran’s program and that Washington still holds cards worth playing. Fair enough. The bombs did set the nuclear effort back, and this is not the fall of Saigon. But a setback bought with thirteen American lives, a worldwide oil shock, and a hardened regime that surrendered no missiles and signed no binding limit on its enrichment is not a bargain anyone would choose having read the file. And the file existed.

That is what separates this from an honest tragedy. A tragedy is something nobody saw coming. This one, anyone with open eyes could see coming from a mile away. Trump chose not to see, and the outcome is America’s humiliation before the open eyes of the wide world.