President Donald Trump declared victory over Iran dozens of times during the 110-day conflict that ended June 17 with a memorandum of understanding at the Palace of Versailles, yet critics and allied governments have described the outcome as a strategic loss that left Tehran regionally empowered and U.S. alliances frayed.
According to a column published June 23 by Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and a Guardian US columnist, Trump said “We’ve already won” on day eight of the conflict and “The war is very complete” on day 10. On day 12, Blumenthal wrote, Trump proclaimed he had won five times in 13 seconds, stating, “We’ve won, let me say we’ve won. You know, you never like to say too early you won, we won, we won the bet in the first hour it was over.” On day 39, he tweeted, “Total and complete victory, 100%. No question about it.” Blumenthal tallied Trump raising the prospect of a peace deal 38 times over the course of the war.
The June 17 MoU came at a venue rich with historical irony — the Palace of Versailles, where the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I was signed. “Versailles is not gold leaf — Versailles is the real deal,” Trump remarked, according to Blumenthal. The agreement lifted oil export sanctions on Iran, opened access to tens of billions of dollars in frozen assets, and committed the U.S. to a $300 billion “Reconstruction Plan,” the funding source for which Blumenthal described as “mysteriously” unspecified. The memorandum also set 60 days of negotiations to limit Iran’s nuclear program — a program the U.S. sought to contain after Trump withdrew from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2018, which he had called “a horrible, one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made.”
Blumenthal reported that at a press conference before the signing, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood “stone-faced” while Trump commented about Vice President JD Vance — who Blumenthal said was initially “queasy about the whole venture” but has been assigned to defend it publicly: “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD.” The next day, Vance insisted the war was a “win” and said lifting oil sanctions is “not a new benefit” for Iran, a claim Blumenthal described as false. Vance also directed criticism at Israel, saying, “If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.”
MSI previously reported that Vance said the Iran deal was a U.S. win “no matter what happens next” in a June 18 article, and separately told Israeli critics that Trump was “your only ally left” in the same period.
The Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom — described by Blumenthal as “a mouthpiece for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu” and published by Miriam Adelson, who Blumenthal noted gave more than $100 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign — addressed the president directly in a lead editorial on June 18: “Mr. President, you have gravely harmed the human interests of the enlightened world, and you may be remembered forever as the president who brought about America’s humiliation. You betrayed us, the Israelis.”
Blumenthal wrote that the conflict’s course had been decided from the start. Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz on the first day of U.S. and Israeli airstrikes, achieving what Blumenthal termed “asymmetric strategic superiority” through control over a key global oil chokepoint. On day 43, Trump tweeted, “The United States has completely destroyed Iran’s Military, including their entire Navy and Air Force, and everything else.” Blumenthal argued Trump “confused bombs and bombast with the mission” and that “the more he bombed, the more he lost the plot.”
Blumenthal’s column catalogued what he described as the war’s strategic consequences: elevating the Iranian regime into a regional hegemon and a power in the world economy; persuading Gulf states that the U.S. is an unreliable ally; increasing Chinese influence; and alienating European allies.
The column also traced a dramatic rhetorical shift in Trump’s stated war aims. On day 39, Trump tweeted that the U.S. had achieved “Complete and Total Regime Change” in Iran, predicting “something revolutionarily wonderful can happen.” But on June 16 — the day before signing the MoU — Trump described the Iranian regime in starkly different terms, according to Blumenthal: “You talk about regime change. I never cared about regime change. It [was] never a part … And we’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. They were nice to deal with. They were strong people, smart people.”
Blumenthal wrote that Trump — whom he described as launching a “war of aggression without a casus belli” and losing it in “short order” — found himself trapped in what he termed a “Caligula Trap” from which he “cannot extract himself.” He compared Trump to Roman Emperor Caligula, who, according to the historian Suetonius, marched his legions to the English Channel to invade Britain, then ordered soldiers to gather seashells as “spoils” of war before staging a celebratory return.
Blumenthal noted that Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Republican member of Congress, posted on the day Trump signed the MoU: “Congratulations to all for almost achieving peace to the war that is not a war, spending hundreds of billions of US tax dollars again for another foreign war after we voted no … This, apparently, is what winning looks like.”
On June 18, when asked by an Axios reporter what the war had taught him about “the limits of his ability to exert power,” Blumenthal wrote that Trump replied: “There are no limits. I haven’t learned that lesson yet. I know there are, but there are no limits.”