Munk Dialogue with Andrew Coyne: Trump loses his bargaining power and has Mark Carney's “elbows up” promise delivered?

Some of the hawks in the United States want the US to keep pushing on on this-

Mm-hmm

... as if, if they just, you know, blew harder, the house would fall over. Well, it, uh, it's pretty clear that's not the case in this situation. There's a reason why other presidents were shy about attempting a military solution to the Iranian problem, and it wasn't 'cause they were weak or stupid or cowardly, it's 'cause it's a really difficult situation. [upbeat music]

Welcome to the Munk Dialogues. Rudyard Griffiths here, chair of the Munk Debates, joined by our regular contributor, Andrew Coyne, journalist at the Globe & Mail. Andrew, great to be in conversation with you today.

Good to be with you.

Let's kick around the last, uh, 72 hours or so of, um, MOU related, uh, back and forth between the president of United States, the government of Iran, JD Vance, uh, in Switzerland to open up, uh, the first, I guess, of a series of bilaterals, um, Andrew, on the terms of this MOU. What, if anything, did you see coming out of the weekend? It seems like a, a complex dance here of, uh, of positioning, especially on the part of the Iranians, who seem to be enjoying this moment of kind of maximum leverage over the Trump administration.

Well, exactly. I mean, y- first of all, the, the deal is not really a deal, as I think you alluded to. I don't just mean terminologically it's a memo of understanding, but, but the... So much of it was put off to future negotiations. Um, so much of what was in, and just to recap, was a complete, um, um, capitulation by the United States, there's no other word for it. On issue after issue that they had claimed, uh, were their casus bellies, the reason why they were going to war, whether it was regime change, whether it was, uh, liberating the Iranian people, whether it was, uh, you know, getting rid of, uh, Iran's ballistic missiles, getting control of its nuclear program, none of these things actually are in the agreement. And in fact, even on the, the, the thing they announced mid-war as being their new war aim, which was reopening the Strait of Hormuz that had closed because of the war, uh, it's not clear they've even achieved that. Um, uh, whatever it may be on paper, effectively Iran, uh, still controls the Strait of Hormuz. And they still control and they still are likely to prevail in th- these negotiations for the ser- very simple reason that Donald Trump has all but an- announced he has no bargaining position. I mean, he basically said, "I had to do this because otherwise the world economy would go down in the tank." Well, if you're the Iranians and you hear that-

[chuckles]

... you've, you've, you've, you've just been told, um, "I have no bargaining position. I have no leverage." And we've seen this with Trump again and again and again, not just because of the situation he blundered into here, which was entirely of his own making because they didn't think through the strategy, they didn't have a strategy, they misunder- I was gonna say misunderestimated, the George Bush line, they mis es- underestimated [chuckles] their enemy, uh, in a thousand different ways. Um, b- but, but he's also just eminently rollable. We've seen this when