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As President Donald Trump announced on Sunday night, the U.S.-Iran deal to end the war will soon lift the naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and 25% of the world’s seaborne oil trade will flow freely again.
“Ships of the World, start your engines,” Trump wrote Sunday. “Let the oil flow!”
The president, however, made no mention of a central reason he has cited for launching military strikes against Iran in late February: its nuclear program and pursuit of enriched uranium. Nuclear security expert Farah Jan notes that the Trump deal does not cap Iran’s uranium enrichment, unlike the 2015 deal that Trump abandoned in 2018. The bigger issue, she writes, is that the U.S. wants zero uranium enrichment, while Iran says that enrichment is a sovereign right.
So what was the war actually for, and what did the U.S. achieve? Jan explains why, in her analysis, the U.S. sits exactly where it began on nuclear deterrence. Meanwhile, Iran has learned that controlling Hormuz has proved a better deterrent than the nuclear bomb.
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