World

In the midst of yet another faltering agreement with Iran to bring Donald Trump’s war to an end, the producers of MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” compiled embarrassing video footage of the president optimistically claiming “Iran wants to make a deal” — dating back multiple weeks.

Coming out of a commercial break, the president is seen telling Fox Business host Larry Kudlow, “I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I know one thing. They want to make a deal. They wouldn't talk to anybody else, but they're talking to me,” during a February 10 interview.

President Donald Trump seems to be denying a key reality in the war in Iran, and it's costing him at the negotiating table, according to one columnist.

Bob Kagan, a columnist and neoconservative scholar, discussed the war in Iran on a new episode of "The Bulwark Podcast" with host Tim Miller on Wednesday. Kagan argued that Trump doesn't seem to accept the reality that the U.S. lost the war back in March, and that Iran is basically "shaking Trump down for money" at the negotiating table.

Donald Trump has handed Iran a stunning victory while simultaneously raising questions about his stability to American allies with a proposal so "divorced from reality" that it exposes the administration's complete lack of strategic planning.

So wrote New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, a Middle East expert, who said on Tuesday that Trump's misguided Iran war strategy has already inadvertently given Tehran a far more potent weapon than any nuclear capability: the realization that it can hold the global economy hostage at will with no end in sight.

Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gambled that multibillion-dollar weapons systems could bomb Iran into surrendering its nuclear program. They relied entirely on Netanyahu's promise that the Iranian regime would collapse like "a house of cards after a few weeks of heavy bombing," Friedman wrote.

Instead, they enabled Iran to discover what Friedman calls a weapon of "mass disruption" — cheap drones capable of closing the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most critical oil chokepoint.

"Now, and forever, Iranians will know that we know that Tehran can shut off the world's most important oil tap anytime it wants. This new source of leverage for the Iranian regime is priceless," the columnist explained.

Trump's latest proposal in a Truth Social Memorial Day post exposed the catastrophic consequences of waging war without scenario planning or expert input with the president writing that he is "mandatorily requesting that all Countries [in the region] immediately sign the Abraham Accords."

The columnist pointed out that Trump even claimed allies told him they "would be honored" if Iran itself joined the accords. "If Iran signs 'it will be the most important Deal that any of these Great, but always in Conflict Countries, will ever sign,'" he wrote. "Nothing in the past, or in the future, will surpass it."

Friedman posed the question: "On what planet of the Milky Way Galaxy would this regime in Tehran, which is practically founded on hatred of Israel, just up and make peace with it after this war?"

The proposal was so unexpected and so divorced from Middle Eastern political reality that Friedman labeled it as "unhinged" and a cause for concern.

The number of goals Donald Trump set out on Feb. 28 when he launched the unprovoked attack on Iran was held up to the light by MS NOW’s David Rohde on Tuesday morning, who made clear the president's war so far has been a failure.

Well beyond the Strait of Hormuz stalemate that has the Trump administration grasping for an answer, Rohde singled out five claims that the president made when he announced the attack, with only one coming to fruition -- and even that appears doubtful after this weekend's events.

Middle Eastern nations that were on the receiving end of a threat from Donald Trump over the holiday weekend called his bluff because he no longer carries the weight he thinks he does.

That was the claim made by MS NOW host Joe Scarborough and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius on Monday morning after the affected nations balked.