"IT'S GOING TO FAIL" — The Terrifying Flaw In Trump's New Iran Deal | Prof Jiang Xueqin

Okay, Sunday morning CBS Face the

Nation. Margaret Brennan is interviewing

Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the most

consistently hawkish voices on Iran in

the entire Senate. A man who has spent

years pushing for exactly the kind of

pressure campaign that led to this war

in the first place. This is not a

senator who shows up on Sunday shows to

undermine his own party's foreign policy

for fun. And when Brennan asks him about

the deal his own president just signed,

the 14-point memorandum ending the war

with Iran, Graham doesn't hedge. He says

let's try the diplomatic solution. And

then almost in the same breath, he says

he thinks it's going to fail. Not might

fail, not could run into problems, going

to fail. And then he says something even

more specific. If it does fail, he

expects Trump to take the Strait of

Hormuz over by force and charge a fee

for passage through it. That's not an

opposition senator trying to score

points against a White House he

dislikes. That's one of Trump's own

staunchest allies on national television

eight days after the signing ceremony

telling the country the backup plan for

this peace deal is military seizure of

the world's most important oil choke

point. Eight days. Not eight months of

slow erosion, not a gradual unraveling

anyone could see coming gently. Eight

days and the man who has spent years

arguing for maximum pressure on Iran is

already describing what comes after

diplomacy fails in the past tense as if

it's already decided. And while that

interview was airing halfway around the

world at the G7 summit in France, Trump

was busy denying that one of the central

provisions of his own signed agreement

even exists.

I want to argue to you today that those

two things happening within the same

news cycle aren't a coincidence. They're

the same flaw showing up twice in one

weekend. Okay, let's get into it. The

Hill ran the Graham interview straight,

framing it as a senior Republican

publicly predicting failure for his own

administration's signature foreign

policy achievement. Vance, meanwhile,

was out praising what he called a

record-breaking flow of oil through the

Strait, insisting there was no evidence

Iran had actually shut anything down,

even as Iranian officials kept pointing

to continued Israeli attacks on Southern

Lebanon as their justification for

keeping the pressure on. Energy

Secretary Chris Wright went even further

into the specifics, telling reporters

that 67 ships had passed Strait on

Saturday alone, with another 55 vessels

making it through a separate southern

route on Friday with the help of US

military escorts. And former Vice

President Mike Pence, a man who spent

four years as Trump's own running mate,

summarized the whole agreement in five

words that are now getting repeated

everywhere. A plan to make a plan. Okay,

four different reactions from four

people who all, in theory, want this

administration to succeed. A senator

predicting failure and naming the

military fallback, a vice president

praising the numbers, an energy

secretary counting ships one by one like

a man trying to convince you a glass is

full when you can see exactly how much

water is actually in it, and a former

vice president dismissing the entire

document as not really a plan at all.

The wrong question, the one almost every

outlet is asking is whether this deal

will hold. The right question is why the

people who should be its loudest

defenders can't even agree.

Eight days in on what was actually

signed or whether it's already failing.

And today, I'm going to show you three

things. First, the actual contradiction

sitting at the center of this deal, the

one Trump himself created over the

weekend. Second, why Graham's failure

prediction matters specifically because

of who's making it, not just what he

said. And third, why this exact failure

mode, a government publicly disowning

the terms of a document it signed, has a

long and not particularly reassuring

history. Does that make sense? All

right, let's go one at a time. First, I

need to give you a framework because

once you see this pattern, you'll notice

it everywhere in this deal. I call it

the Schrodinger clause. You've probably

heard of the famous thought experiment,

a cat sealed in a box with a mechanism

that might or might not have killed it,

and until somebody actually opens the

box and looks, the cat is treated as

being simultaneously both alive and dead

at once.

The point of the experiment was to

describe something strange about quantum

physics, but it turns out to describe

something just as strange about

diplomacy.

A Schrodinger clause is a provision in a

signed agreement that exists and doesn't

exist at the same time, depending

entirely on who's asking and what it

costs the person answering to admit it's

real. The clause is sitting right there

in the document in plain text for anyone

to read, but whether it counts as a real

commitment changes from sentence to

sentence depending on whether

acknowledging it helps or hurts the

person being asked about it that day.

Move one, the $300 billion fund. One of

the 14 points in the memorandum states

plainly that the United States

undertakes with regional partners to

develop a definitive plan with at least

$300 billion

for the reconstruction and economic

development of Iran. That's not a rumor.

That's not a leak. That's literal text

inside the document Trump's own

administration negotiated and signed,

the kind of specific quantified

commitment that doesn't end up in a

14-point memorandum by accident. Numbers

that precise get fought over line by

line during negotiations precisely

because everyone involved knows exactly

how much weight they'll carry afterward.

And at the G7 Summit in Evian-les-Bains,

when reporters asked him about it, Trump

dismissed the entire thing as fake news,

insisting the United States has no

involvement in any such fund and isn't

investing in Iran at all, framing it

instead as something private investors

might choose to do entirely on their own

with no American government role

whatsoever. He asked the reporters

directly, "Do you want me to say

nobody's ever allowed to invest in a

country?" as if the only thing in

dispute was whether private citizens

have freedom to invest anywhere they

want rather than whether his own

government

in writing to develop and help arrange

that specific funding itself. It's a

clever rhetorical move answering a

question about uh government commitment

with a defense of private investment

freedom, two completely different things

that only sound similar if you're not

paying close attention to which one was

actually being asked about. This is the

Schrödinger clause in its purest form.

The $300 billion commitment is

completely real when Tehran needs it to

be real, real enough to be one of the 14

core points Iran agreed to end a war

over, real enough that Iranian

negotiators reportedly pushed hard for

that specific figure during the

Islamabad talks, and it becomes

completely unreal the moment Trump is

standing in front of cameras in France

getting asked a politically

uncomfortable question about whether

American taxpayers or American

credibility are now on the hook for

rebuilding a country that until eight

days ago his own military was actively

bombing. Both versions can't be true.

Either the commitment is in the document

and it's real or it isn't and Iran got a

worthless promise. Right now, depending

entirely on which press conference

you're watching, the answer to which one

of those is true keeps changing and

nobody in either government has bothered

to reconcile the two versions for the

public. Move to the open strait that

needs military escorts. Vance's framing

was confident, even celebratory, a

record-breaking flow of oil, no evidence

of Iranian closure, and the underlying

numbers Energy Secretary Wright cited

are genuinely real. 67 ships on Saturday

is a substantial volume of traffic, the

kind of figure that sounds on its face

hopeful

as like genuine proof the worst of this

crisis is behind everyone. But notice

the detail buried inside his own

statement.

55 of those vessels needed the help of

US military escorts to get through a

separate southern route, not the main

shipping channel, a work-around route

specifically because the direct path

apparently still isn't safe enough to

use without armed protection. That is

not the description of a fully reopened,

normally functioning international

waterway. That's the description of a

waterway that's open in the sense that

the US Navy is currently willing to

personally walk ships through part of

it, the maritime equivalent of escorting

children across a busy street rather

than the street simply being safe to

cross on its own. Iran, for its part,

keeps pointing to continued Israeli

strikes in Lebanon as the reason it

hasn't fully stood down its own pressure

campaign. The exact same asterisk

doctrine pattern this series has been

tracking since the ceasefire was first

signed, where one government insists a

constraint is permanent and immediate

while the other side keeps demonstrating

through action that it never fully

accepted the constraint as binding. Both

sides are technically telling the truth

about their own version of events. The

strait is open if you count escorted

convoys on alternate routes as open. The

strait is still contested

if you count the fact that escorts are

still necessary at all, and that

shipping insurers, the people whose

entire job is pricing risk accurately,

rather than politically, are still

charging premiums on this route that

reflect genuine uncertainty rather than

confidence. Move three, the credibility

gap inside Trump's own coalition.

Pence's five-word dismissal, a plan to

make a plan, lands as hard as it does

specifically because of who's saying it.

This isn't a Democratic senator looking

to score points before midterms. This is

the man who stood next to Trump through

an entire first term, who has generally

been careful about how publicly he

criticizes his former running mate,

choosing this specific deal as the

moment to go fully dismissive. Pence has

disagreed with Trump before,

occasionally sharply, but usually on

matters of personal conscience or

constitutional process. Choosing to

dismiss an active foreign policy deal in

the middle of an ongoing diplomatic

process while American troops and

diplomats are still actively engaged in

implementing it is a different kind of

statement entirely. And Graham's failure

prediction carries the same kind of

weight for the opposite reason. Graham

has spent years as one of the loudest

voices arguing for exactly the kind of

maximum pressure approach that led to

this war. He was pushing for tougher

sanctions on Iran long before this

conflict started, and he's generally

been one of the administration's most

reliable defenders on national security

matters.

If anyone in the Senate should want this

deal to succeed enough to talk it up

rather than talk it down, it's him.

Instead, he's the one telling national

television audiences that diplomacy is

probably going to fail and naming

specifically military seizure of the

strait as what comes next. Essentially

prewriting the justification for the

next phase of conflict before the

current peace has even had a chance to

be tested for more than a week. When

your own side's most hawkish supporter

is already pricing in failure and

describing the war contingency plan out

loud, that's not normal coalition noise.

That's a coalition that doesn't actually

believe in the thing it just signed,

hedging its bets in public before the

ink has even had time to fully dry.

Move for, and this is the detail that

ties straight back to something flagged

earlier in this series.

Graham didn't just predict failure in

the abstract. He specifically said that

if the deal collapses, Trump will take

the Strait of Hormuz by force and charge

a fee for passage through it. Think

about what that means layered on top of

everything else this series has covered.

Iran's hardliners have spent months

talking about managing the strait and

collecting fees from passing ships.

Trump himself floated the idea of

American tolls on Hormuz if the 60-day

verification window collapses. And now

Graham, speaking as someone close to

this administration's actual thinking,

is describing the exact same toll booth

outcome, just with the roles reversed,

America as the one eventually charging

the fee instead of Iran. Three different

parties, over the course of just a few

months, have all independently arrived

at the same destination, a tolled

monetized Strait of Hormuz. The only

disagreement left being whose flag flies

over the toll booth. Now, before I go

any further, I want to give you the

strongest possible argument against the

framing I've built here, because I think

it deserves a fair hearing. The case for

treating all of this as normal political

noise, rather than a fatal structural

flaw, goes like this. Lindsey Graham has

criticized nearly every diplomatic

agreement he's ever been asked about

before eventually deciding whether to

support it. And predicting failure on a

Sunday show is the kind of hedge

politicians make constantly to cover

themselves either way the deal goes. If

it succeeds, he can say he was

pleasantly surprised. If it fails, he

already called it. That's not a

courageous prediction, that's political

risk management. And treating it as some

kind of devastating insider admission

probably reads more into it than Graham

himself intended. Trump's fake news

framing might be nothing more than

standard deflection of an unpopular

detail, not a the claim that the text

doesn't exist the same way politicians

constantly downplay specifics of

agreements that poll badly without

actually repudiating them. Plenty of

leaders describe genuinely real

commitments in misleading terms when a

microphone is pointed at them and the

honest answer would cost them

domestically and that's a far more

boring and common phenomenon than a

government secretly disowning its own

treaty. And the ship count numbers, even

with the southern route caveat, are real

verifiable traffic, which is genuinely

more than zero, genuinely more than the

total blockade that preceded this deal.

Progress doesn't have to be total to be

real progress and demanding a fully

unescorted, completely normalized

straight within the first week of a

ceasefire might just be an unreasonably

high bar for any post-war settlement to

clear that quickly. That argument

deserves respect and parts of it are

probably right. Coalition politics are

messy and a single dismissive sound bite

from a former vice president doesn't

automatically doom an international

agreement, but here's what that argument

doesn't explain. The contradiction over

the $300 billion fund isn't a matter of

tone or emphasis. It's a binary fact

question. Either the United States

committed to help develop that funding

in writing or it didn't. Trump's own

administration negotiated that specific

point and at his own G7 press

conference, he characterized it in terms

that simply do not match the text his

own negotiators put their names on.

That's not hedging. That's two different

governments, technically the same

government, describing the same signed

document in mutually exclusive terms

within the same week to two different

audiences who are both watching the same

news cycle in real time. I want to take

you back about about years for the

cleanest historical version of this

exact failure mode because a government

disowning its own treaty isn't a new

invention either. In 1919, President

Woodrow Wilson personally negotiated the

Treaty of Versailles in Paris putting

enormous political capital and his own

declining health into shaping its terms

including the League of Nations

framework he believed could prevent

future wars. He toured the country

afterward trying to sell the agreement

directly to the American public

collapsing from a stroke part way

through that effort convinced the

treaty's survival was worth risking his

own health over. He brought that treaty

home to the United States Senate

expecting ratification. Instead, the

Senate refused to ratify it twice in

votes that fell short of the required

two-thirds majority due to deep

disagreements within Wilson's own

political system about how binding

America's commitments under the treaty

should actually be particularly the

League of Nations clause that some

senators feared would drag the country

into future European wars automatically.

The result was almost absurd if you step

back and look at it plainly. The

President of the United States had

personally negotiated and signed one of

the most consequential international

agreements in modern history and his own

country's legislature simply declined to

make it binding at home. Other nations

were left trying to figure out which

version of America's commitment was the

real one, the one their own president

had signed in Paris or the one the

Senate back in Washington had just

refused to honor. The United States

never joined the League of Nations it

had helped design. France and Britain

were left holding a treaty that one of

its three primary architects had

effectively walked away from not through

any formal renegotiation but simply

through its own internal political

process refusing to follow through. Now,

look at this weekend. Trump personally

signed a 14-point memorandum with Iran,

including a specific written commitment

on reconstruction funding. And within

days, at an international summit in

front of the global press, he described

one of his own signature commitments as

something that doesn't actually exist,

while his own coalition's most hawkish

senator predicted the entire framework

would collapse into military force. The

mechanism is different. The Senate isn't

formally voting on this MOU the way it

would a treaty, but the underlying

failure is identical. A government signs

something internationally, and then

almost immediately parts of that same

government start treating the signed

document as something less than fully

real, leaving everyone else in the

world, including the other party who

agreed to it, uncertain which version of

the commitment they're actually supposed

to believe. Let me connect those two

moments directly. In 1919, the public

disagreement played out over months

through formal Senate votes that the

whole world could watch and count. In

2026, it's playing out over days through

dueling press conferences and Sunday

show interviews, but the structural

problem facing Iran right now is the

same one facing Germany and the other

Allied powers in 1919, trying to plan a

future around a commitment that the

signing government itself won't fully

stand behind in public. Iran agreed to

wind down its highly enriched uranium,

accept IAEA verification, and constrain

its regional proxy network, all in

exchange for sanctions relief and a $300

billion reconstruction

commitment that the president who signed

it is now calling fake news 3,000 miles

from the negotiating table. If you were

sitting in Tehran trying to decide

whether the rest of this deal is worth

honoring, watching that exact

contradiction play out on live

television isn't a small detail. It's

the entire question. Okay, so here's

what I want you to actually watch in the

weeks ahead, because a theory like this

is only useful if it gives you something

to check against reality. First, watch

whether the $300 billion language

survives in any future official American

statement or whether it quietly gets

renegotiated, redefined as purely

private investment, or simply stops

being mentioned by name. If the figure

disappears from White House messaging

entirely while staying in the actual MOU

text, that's the Schrödinger clause

settling permanently into its unreal

state, and Iran will have signed away

its uranium stockpile for a number

Washington to never actually intended to

honor at face value.

Watch specifically whether any Iranian

official responds publicly to Trump's

fake news comment. Because if Tehran

lets that statement pass without

challenging it, that itself tells you

something about how much faith Iran's

own negotiators ever actually placed in

that line of the agreement. Second,

watch for more Republican voices joining

Pence and Graham in publicly distancing

themselves from this deal. One

dismissive sound bite and one failure

prediction is notable. Three or four

more from senators who would normally be

expected to defend their own party's

foreign policy would tell you the

domestic coalition behind this agreement

is genuinely fracturing, not just having

an ordinary disagreement. Pay particular

attention to whether any of them start

attaching actual legislative conditions,

funding restrictions, oversight

requirements, anything with real teeth

rather than just critical statements

that cost nothing to make.

Third, watch the military escort number

specifically. If the proportion of

tanker traffic requiring US Navy escort

through the southern route keeps

shrinking month over month, that's real

evidence the strait is normalizing. If

it stays roughly constant or grows,

that's evidence the record-breaking flow

framing was describing a managed,

militarized convoy system dressed up as

an open international waterway, and that

distinction matters enormously for

global shipping insurers trying to price

risk on this route for the next several

years. Fourth, watch whether Trump,

Graham, or anyone else in this

administration ever explicitly floats

American tolling of the Strait of Hormuz

as actual policy rather than a

hypothetical consequence of failure.

Graham already said the words out loud

on national television without anyone in

the administration rushing to walk it

back. If that idea moves from a

senator's prediction into a formal

proposal, the toll booth doctrine this

series has been tracking since the early

days of this war reaches its final,

fully American form. And the irony of

America building the exact mechanism it

once condemned Iran for merely floating

will be hard for anyone paying attention

to miss. Let me bring this back

together. Eight days after Trump and

Iran signed a 14-point memorandum ending

the war, one of Trump's most hawkish

Senate allies went on national

television and predicted the deal would

fail, naming military seizure of the

Strait of Hormuz as the likely outcome

if it does. On the same weekend, Trump

personally dismissed one of the

document's own core financial

commitments as fake news, even though

the commitment is written into the text

he signed. His own vice president called

the resulting numbers record-breaking,

while his own former vice president

called the whole document a plan to make

a plan. None of that happened because

some hidden flaw was buried deep in an

annex nobody read. It happened because

the flaw is the most visible thing about

this entire agreement. A government that

can't agree with itself about which

parts of what it signed are actually

real, playing out in public across

multiple countries within the span of a

single weekend. So, when people ask

whether this deal is going to fail,

I think Lindsey Graham already answered

that question as honestly as anyone has

all week. The more useful question, the

one nobody's really sitting with yet, is

what it means that the administration

negotiating this peace can't even

maintain a consistent story about its

own terms for more than a few days at a

time while the country on the other side

of the table is taking notes on every

single contradiction deciding in real

time exactly how much of this agreement

it actually has to honor and exactly how

much of it it can simply wait out the

way Germany once waited out a treaty its

own primary architect couldn't even get

his own government to fully accept.

Think about that. I'll see you in the

next lecture.