Trump Surrenders to Iran on Terms Humiliating for U.S.

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President Trump is closing out his career as a brilliant businessman with yet another bankruptcy, this one at colossal scale, and he’s taking the United States down with him. In the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Iran, our master deal maker is revealed even to his MAGA base as totally inept.

Dawn on Strait of Hormuz .

The document calls for certain immediate actions, but then allows 60 days for the two sides to arrive at final terms in accord with the MOU. That deadline is “mutually extendable”. Given that negotiations for the Obama 2015 agreement took two years, we may well see Iran stalling interminably again. Meanwhile, here’s what’s in the MOU:

Uranium Enrichment: An end to Iran’s upgrading of uranium on their path to creating nuclear weapons was the overarching intention of the war. The memorandum calls for the following:

”The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran have agreed to resolve the disposition of stockpiled enriched material pursuant to a mechanism that will be mutually agreed upon…with the minimum methodology to be down blended on site under the supervision of the IAEA.”

This will happen according to a schedule yet to be worked out. The IAEA is the International Atomic Energy Agency which has always served the role of inspector of Iranian compliance.

Trump touted as a major accomplishment getting Iran to pledge not to produce a nuclear weapon. The MOU says:

”The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons.”

Note reaffirm, because the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) struck by the Obama administration and cancelled mindlessly by Trump in 2018 had already exacted that promise. It said:

“Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons”

The Trump negotiators, Vice-President JD Vance along with real estate guys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff , failed to get “acquire” into the pledge, which is not what “procure” means.

That’s all the U.S. got, and to get only that, in place of the “unconditional surrender” that Trump initially demanded, it is the U.S. that has surrendered, and with few conditions in its favor. Trump and his negotiators have showered upon Iran a cornucopia of concessions painful to read:

The Hormuz Strait: “Immediately” upon signing of the MOU, the U.S. is to withdraw its blockade over 30 days while Iran engages its…

“best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge, for 60 days only”

Iran will consult with Oman, on the opposite shore, along with other Persian Gulf littoral states, “to define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz”, which clearly means the imposition of tolls (“fees”, Iran has called them) for these euphemistic “services”.

In a curious phrase that sounds like Iran has in mind slow-walking the Strait’s clearance, the traffic allowed to others will only be in proportion to the amount of restored Iranian commercial traffic.

Sanctions: The U.S. is agreeing to “terminate all types of sanctions” somehow even those it does not control, such as by the United Nations Security Council and the IAEA. There seems nothing our negotiators won’t agree to, so desperate is Trump to get out of this war. This is to be done in accord with an “agreed upon schedule as part of the final deal” 60 days hence, but then comes this utter capitulation:

Oil: Right away, in return for nothing, even before sanctions are to be lifted as part of the final deal,

“US Department of Treasury will issue waivers for the export of Iranian crude oil, petroleum products and derivatives, and all associated services, including banking transactions, insurances, transportation”

Wasn’t Trump going to take Iran’s oil?

Frozen Funds: In another giveaway in return for nothing as yet agreed to, the U.S. is to release Iran’s frozen and restricted funds. How much might that be? Iran says a hundred billion measured in dollars. The funds are to be made available “for payment to any ultimate beneficiary designated” by Iran’s Central Bank. Will we see their bank ordering the U.S. to make out checks to Hezbollah, or the Houthis, or Hamas? Once again, as with the JCPOA, the memorandum makes no attempt to restrict Iran’s funding of terrorist groups.

Reparations: The stunning provision that has even Republicans meekly voicing “concern”, after a decade of silent acquiescence to all things Trump, is that the U.S. is agreeing to pay reparations. With “regional partners”, we are to come up with $300 billion for a “mutually agreed plan” for reconstruction and economic development of the enemy country.

Our supposed “regional partners” are not party to this deal so their funding of reparations is not only voluntary but absurd to contemplate, after being attacked by Iran, and yet Trump believes each country should be in his debt for taking on Iran.

Status Quo: A final item: Pending the final deal, both countries agree to maintain the status quo, specifically the status quo of Iran’s nuclear program. Iran could go right on upgrading uranium above 60% well beyond the “mutually extendable” 60 day deadline.

obsessed with obama

Jealous of his popularity, Trump has been avid that his deal will be better than President Barack Obama’s, which he calls “disastrous” and “one-sided”. Just before the MOU’s release, he tweeted:

“The Obuma Deal was a road to a Nuclear weapon for Iran, cash and all, one of the worst and dumbest (hence Dumocrats!) Deals ever made by the U.S. Our Deal is a WALL against Iran ever having a Nuclear weapon, the complete opposite of Obuma.”

(The juvenile misspellings are his.) In his ignorance and mania to destroy all things Obama, Trump was unaware that Iran had been conforming to the JCPOA, as attested by IAEA, for the three years before he heedlessly cancelled U.S. participation in the six-country agreement. Iran was not on “a road to a Nuclear Weapon”, with its uranium stock reduced from over 7,000 kilograms to 300; bled down to only 3.67% on the enrichment scale; and left with only first generation centrifuges. Left to continue, this could have been the status for15 years.Trump is frenzied to cover this up.

Sitting alongside Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi at the G7 conclave in France, Trump launched into an anti-Obama tirade:

”I mean, the JCPOA, done by Obama, he gave them a billion seven in cash, gave ‘em hundreds of millions of dollars, hundreds of, gave ‘em billions and billions of dollars, but he gave them one-point-seven billion dollars in cash, green cash from banks, into a Boeing 757 and flew it into Iran…They tried to bribe their way out of it, and you know what the Iranians did? They laughed at Obama, and they said he’s a stupid son of a bitch”

There were no hundreds of billions of dollars paid to Iran. The $1.7 billion Iran got in the JCPOA agreement settled a decades-old dispute, returning $400 million Iran paid the U.S. for arms that were never delivered when in 1979 the Shah was overthrown, plus $1.3 billion in interest accumulated over 36 years. Paper money on a palette had to be flown to Iran because sanctions had them blocked from the international banking system. And no U.S. dollars, incidentally; entirely Euros and Swiss francs.

Trump, of course, has no interest in explaining that truth. And he is absurdly making a false claim against Obama when his deal is about to pay Iran about 175 times what Obama legitimately returned to Iran.

empathy for the devil

The president has now chosen empathy for Iran as a way of downplaying the agreement. Like many, he had previously attacked Obama’s deal for not restricting missile development, but now neither does Trump’s deal. On Wednesday, he said missiles don’t matter. At a G7 press conference he said,

”Missiles aren’t the problem. Missiles, they hurt a little location, but they don’t blow up the planet…What am I gonna do? We’re going to let Saudi Arabia have missiles, but [Iran] can’t have them?”

Missiles and drones are, of course, a big problem. Iran is now deploying them to attack
Forget Iran. All that matters to him is the stock market.

not just Israel but most of the Gulf States, blowing up Kuwait’s airport and crippling a good measure of Qatar’s liquid natural gas refining capacity that will take five years to bring back on line.

Late last month, the president said on social media that Iran’s uranium…

“will be unearthed by the United States… in close coordination and conjunction with the Islamic Republic of Iran, plus the International Atomic Energy Agency, and DESTROYED.”

He is now saying,

“It is a little hard, though, when you say that somebody wants it, other people have it, other, adjoining states have it, and you’re not letting them have it for purposes of electricity and things like that. It’s always a little tough. You have to use a little common sense.”

No need to worry about the uranium, buried under the rubble of the bombing run of last July. ”Nobody is going to get that for a long time, unless we want to get it”, the president told reporters at a G7news conference:

”You could make the case, why are you even bothering, because it’s not really valuable.”

Has he read the document?

He was two days from signing the understanding with its astonishing pledge to “plan” how to resurrect Iran with 300 billion U.S. dollars when he decreed, perhaps unable to face the humiliation of his massive blunder:

“We are not investing any money in Iran, by the way. The rumor got out there yesterday, it was ridiculous. We have the right to go in some day and do, if I want to do something or if somebody wants to do something. But we are not investing any money. We have no obligation to invest any money in Iran.”

That’s matched by the breathtaking naïveté of JD Vance saying — after we had decapitated Iran’s leadership, killed thousands of their people, and destroyed their military assets:

”The coolest thing about the progress we’ve made over the last few weeks is that you see people within the Iranian system — senior leadership, even IRGC officials – saying you know what? We may have some animosity, we may have some mistrust, but we recognize that the way that we have done business with the United States for 47 years is a mistake. Let’s try something else.”

The outcome

That Trump fell for Netanyahu’s three-card monte at the White House, committing Secretary of Lethality Hegseth’s U.S. military to attack Iran because it “sounds good to me”, is viewed as America’s biggest foreign policy disaster since Iraq. Iran is now considerably stronger than before the war began. It has learned that the blows of the mighty United States can be withstood, its missile and drone stockpiles having largely survived, with nothing to stop its rule of the Hormuz Strait, closing or opening it at will. Allied with Russia and China and about to be economically rescued by Trump’s “deal”, Iran will become a much bigger problem.

The United States has learned once again — soon probably to forget once again — that a nation of size cannot be bombed into submission.

Is Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta (Facebook et al.) in Decline?

< social media|200||Some in the media seem to think so.>

Maybe it’s retribution for how much advertising income Facebook drained from the media over the last two decades, but otherwise why has there been a flurry of news articles lately suggesting that Meta Platforms (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) is past its prime. “There’s a moment when internet companies get the stink of death on them”, begins an opinion piece in The New York Times. “For Meta that time is now”.

It’s a tough argument. Facebook still has three billion users, which is even more than the populations of China and India combined. Last year Meta brought in $201 billion in ad revenue. That is 20% of the entire advertising market, scooped up by this one company. But the media noticed that for the first time the member count dipped slightly in April.

Nevertheless, Gen Z arrivers — born in this century’s first decade — may have Facebook accounts but they frequent them less than older generations, preferring Instagram and TikTok and SnapChat for connection with friends. They see Facebook as a platform for older people.

Triggering suspicions of decline was management in April telling employees that 8,000 in their midst – fully 10% of the company’s near 79,000 workforce — would be shown the door. All were made to wait in anger and angst until May 20 to learn if they were booked for the guillotine. In the meantime, to their furor, the company had employees’ keystrokes, mouse movements, and click locations recorded in order to train A.I. to do their jobs when they were gone. On the big day, everyone was told to work from home. Evidently, the C-suite didn’t want any tearful partings.

Is Meta in trouble financially? Hardly. The company had just posted record revenue — after all these years a 33% increase over the first quarter of 2025. Its annual revenue per employee is a stunning $2.5 million, which makes the layoffs seem cruel. Severance was generous, though, with 16 weeks of pay plus two additional weeks for every year an employee had been with the company.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta Platforms’ CEO

But for CEO Mark Zuckerberg, their removal would free up money for his all-out quest for Meta to arrive at A.I. “superintelligence”, the level at which A.I. renders humans obsolete. Zuckerberg said another 7,000 personnel would be re-assigned to A.I. development.

the dark underside

Zuckerberg saw Facebook as a way for people around the world to connect with each other. It has undeniably done so, but it has also attracted some of humanities worst elements, creating a conduit for sex trafficking, bullying and shaming by school kids that has led to suicides, scams that have fleeced people of life savings, disinformation by countries such as Russia out to interfere with our elections, and so on. To give you an idea of the scope, when the Consumer Federation of America filed a complaint about Meta misleading users about preventing scams, the tech giant replied that in 2025 it had deleted 159 million scam ads in 2025, and taken down nearly 11 million scam accounts.

In 2018 investigative media exposed the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It had acquired data about up to 87 million Facebook subscribers which it exploited by gathering personal information from them and the links to their friends.

For whatever good it does, Facebook has a parallel record of malfeasance. Internet providers have for 30 years been given immunity from legal responsibility for content placed on their sites by others. Originally meant to encourage free speech and protect online platforms from being sued into extinction, that freedom is now being challenged.

In March, a jury in Los Angeles held Meta and Google’s You Tube liable for a now-20-year old woman’s mental health distress as a child owing to their deliberately addictive techniques such as “infinite scroll” and recommendations by algorithm. Also in March, a jury in New Mexico in a case brought by the state attorney general found Meta liable for $375 million for its failure to shield young people from online hazards. The Wall Street Journal, ever standing up for business, dismissed the first case as the companies having no responsibility for someone’s “personal troubles” and called the citizenry suing big business as “a shakedown”. But a war is brewing. Zuckerberg’s Meta, and its practices of maximizing engagement by young people, is facing thousands of cases waiting for their moment in court.

sputnik moment

Mr. Zuckerberg and others were unprepared for OpenAI’s ChatGPT bursting upon the scene in late 2022, as was the whole of Silicon Valley. Meta’s first attempt at its own large language model performed poorly. The company re-started and has been playing urgent catch-up since, while rivals OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s offerings have soared. Last year Zuckerberg hired Alexandr Wang, then 28 and billed as the world youngest self-made billionaire at age 24, to lead the Superintelligence Labs for a salary in the millions, but Wang has several times postponed release of the labs latest work.

Mr. Zuckerberg intends to spend $135 billion on A.I. infrastructure this year alone. Even if market research outfit
Massed servers at a data center.

eMarketer is correct that revenue could reach $243 billion this year — a huge jump from $201 billion last year – which when reduced by operating costs ($83 billion last years), means Meta must borrow, with $59 billion in long-term debt on Meta’s balance sheet already. The Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” column said “The spending growth looks increasingly unsustainable”.

This has investors worried. They have already seen Zuckerberg’s erratic management style. When headcount peaked at 87,000 in 2022, he cut 11,000 slots. Then in 2023, declaring it the “year of efficiency”, he cut 10,000 more to 67,000 at year end. But headcount was back up to 79,000 before the 8,000 layoff. He seems to hire and fire in massive waves without analysis of what useful these legions of bodies will be doing nor regard in layoffs to what they’ve been doing.

going for broke

Investors looking at Mr. Zuckerberg’s $135 billion A.I. spending plan surely have in mind his fantasy immersion in what he called the “metaverse”.

Mark Zuckerberg’s oft-stated goal for Facebook was connection — to bring people together. But he wanted to take that from a flat screen that scrolls posts from friends and family to a three-dimensional world of interaction where those same people, in avatar form, can come together to talk and do things jointly. Convinced he had seen the future, in 2022 he assigned thousands in the company to create this alternate world. By draining the company of billions of dollars and causing its market value to plunge by 70% over that year, he had investors spooked.

Zuckerberg believed that we will live in the metaverse, an immersive realm accessed by wearing virtual reality headsets where we create cartoon-like avatars to represent ourselves. There, we will have our avatars while away the hours in any of a number of “worlds” for entertainment, socializing, adventure, business, where we meet with co-workers, family, or have chance encounters with people from around the globe who have strapped in at the same time and have sent their avatars roaming, too.

There was never much interest. Headsets cost up to $1,500. Those who gave a try to Zuckerberg’s world tended not to return. But the spending went on. He was defiant, saying people would…

“look back decades from now and talk about the importance of the work that was done here”.

In March of this year he announced that people would no longer be able to access the the immersive world through headsets, which defeated his 3D world. There was nothing left but remnants on cell phones.

In all, Zuckerberg had blown through a jaw-dropping eighty billion dollars.

In any other company, he would have been fired long before $80 billion had been expended. But Mark saw to it long ago how he could not be uprooted from his creation. It’s a public company, but Zuckerberg controls Meta through a dual-class share structure:

Class A shares (one vote each) are available to the public but Class B shares are held by Zuckerberg and a small group of insiders and they have 10 votes each.

This structure gives Zuckerberg approximately 57–60% of Meta’s total voting power even while owning only around 13% of the total shares outstanding. In practical terms, no shareholder vote can override him.

From starting up in a Harvard dorm room on a bit of software that let students compare two photos of incoming freshmen and decide who was better looking (hence the peculiar name “Facebook”), and onward to $279 Billion in wealth.

For the Trump Family, Corruption Seems Second Nature