What was the war for? The inevitable question raised by the US-Iran deal

Iranian civilians have been living under the threat of attacks for months
AFP via Getty Images, via BBC
The memorandum of understanding signed by the presidents of the United States, Donald Trump, and Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, made clear the political, military and economic consequences of the ill-calculated decision to attack Iran on February 28.
The human cost is already clear. Thousands of people died, many of them civilians, in Iran and Lebanon.
The US, and by extension Israel, suffered a strategic defeat. The regime in Tehran faced its worst nightmare: a joint military operation to incapacitate or destroy it conducted by the US, the strongest power in the world, and Israel, the superpower of the Middle East. The regime not only survived. He emerged stronger.
His strategy of blocking the Strait of Hormuz - and with it a fifth of the world's oil and gas supplies, as well as other vital components of the global economy - forced Trump to agree to a series of concessions that infuriated and alarmed Iran's harshest critics in the US and the Israeli government.
The memorandum of understanding - or MOU, for its acronym in English - calls for an end to the war in Lebanon, but Israel says that cannot happen. The Israelis want to have freedom of action in Lebanon, and this issue could provoke an even greater rupture between Israel and the US, in addition to favoring the most radical sectors of Iran that oppose any agreement with the Americans.
In exchange for the reopening of the strait, the text of the MOU states that the US will lift its blockade of Iranian ports, ease sanctions allowing Iran to earn billions of dollars from oil exports and begin the process of returning billions in cash to Iran, through the unfreezing of assets held in the abroad.
This is all before the US and Iran even enter the difficult process of negotiating a nuclear agreement. It is the price paid by the US to return to the situation of February 27, the day before the Americans and Israelis launched the war. That day, the Strait of Hormuz was open to navigation and American and Iranian negotiators were discussing a nuclear deal.
The signing of the MOU means that negotiations will resume and ships will be able to transit the Strait of Hormuz.
US and Iran sign agreement to end the war
Foreign policy error
Joe Biden's Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, published on X: "the only 'result' of the ceasefire is the likely reopening of the strait of Hormuz - which was already open before the war started. And apparently we will pay Iran for it."
The question of what exactly the war was for is inevitable and will not go away. It is Trump's biggest foreign policy mistake so far.
It could also mean the end of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's long political career. He faces elections in October and a reckoning with Israeli voters for his role in the security failures - the worst in Israel's history - that allowed the country's military and intelligence system to fail to detect Hamas' plan to invade Israel from Gaza on October 7, 2023. Netanyahu's hard-line military policies and contempt for diplomacy were designed, at least in part, to restore his reputation as Israel's "Lord Security." Israel.
Tehran has always been aware of the potential power of closing the Strait of Hormuz. The same was true of the US military, its diplomats and its intelligence services.
But Iran's former supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, an elderly and cautious man, chose not to risk using the strait as a weapon.
After Israel killed him and his closest advisors in the first bombing operations of the war, his successors correctly believed they were in an existential struggle and did not hesitate to close the strait.
They discovered the power of controlling a point of strangulation of the global economy. It is a much more usable weapon, and much cheaper, than the network of allies and intermediaries they have invested decades and billions in building in the Middle East.
US President Donald Trump points the finger at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as they shake hands during a press conference following a meeting at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, US, on December 29, 2025
REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
With the exception of Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria, which fell in late 2024, Iran's so-called "axis of resistance" still survives, albeit barely. But it has been so weakened by Israel that it no longer makes sense to discuss whether it still has the capacity for "resistance".
Iran has also invested resources in a nuclear program that it continues to deny has as its objective the construction of a weapon, but which undoubtedly gave Tehran an option and a threat. However, it provoked a war that, despite the regime's survival, caused enormous damage to Iran.
Closing the strait, in contrast, was easy and had a swift and devastating impact, spreading the effects to the oil-producing Arab states and much of the rest of the world.
The power of the US and Israeli air forces secured a series of tactical victories. But they were not enough to avoid a strategic defeat. This is because the US-Israeli regime change strategy was based on a series of simplistic and misguided assumptions.
Iran was not like Venezuela, a corrupt Latin American dictatorship, which collapsed when its leader was kidnapped and put on trial in the US.
The Iranian regime is undoubtedly corrupt and highly repressive - its agents killed thousands of protesters on the streets of Iran in January - but it is also based on an ideology, religious convictions and a conception of national security, martyrdom and survival that emerged from Saddam Hussein's devastating war against Iraq in the 1980s.
When the US started the war, Trump said the regime in Tehran would fall. He told the Iranian people to prepare for a once-in-a-generation opportunity to take back their country. Shortly thereafter, he demanded the regime's unconditional surrender.
Netanyahu, who had tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to convince Trump's predecessors in the White House to go to war against Iran, used biblical language to sum up the magnitude of what he believed was about to happen: "This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have wanted to do for 40 years: completely destroy the regime of terror."
Neither managed to accomplish their goals.
The memorandum of understanding is not a final agreement. It is a commitment to negotiate the biggest issue between the parties - Iran's nuclear program. But it already includes important incentives for Iran. If negotiations move forward, the US has stated that it will lift sanctions.
Everything depends on the success of 60 days of negotiations on a nuclear agreement - a period that can be extended and probably will be, as the issues are complex. Neither side trusts the other. A lot can go wrong. More radical sectors in Washington, Tehran and Israel do not want the deal to work.
If it adopts maximalist stances in negotiations, Iran risks exaggerating its position and compromising economic gains that could alleviate its weakened economy.
But this deal is much better than a war that killed thousands and threatened a global economic recession.
If a nuclear deal is reached, satisfying both the US and Iran, and if both fulfill their promises, the Middle East could be transformed. That's a big "if" at the end of what will be a long and difficult negotiation.

Source: G1