President Donald Trump and his national security team meet in the Situation Room of the White House, Saturday, June 21, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
Retired War College professor and staff writer for The Atlantic Tom Nichols on Tuesday warned that President Donald Trump appears to start bombing when he needs to "change the news cycle."
Speaking to MS NOW on Tuesday, Brennan alleged, "There are so many elements of this that I think make [the Iran deal] a real fraught agreement."
He added that there is a large segment of the GOP that is nervous about this deal and that the U.S. might be in a worse position than before the war began.
Nichols said, "So if this brings this conflict to an end and people start talking, that's all the better. But this is an American strategic defeat. There is no question about that. The Iranians achieved their strategic goals, which was the survival of their regime, proving that they could control the Strait of Hormuz, intimidating all of their neighbors by striking them, more or less, at will, as punishment for cooperating with the United States."
CNN reported on Tuesday that U.S. intelligence found Iran can shut down the Strait of Hormuz at will from now on.
Meanwhile, the U.S. has achieved none of its goals, he said. Trump also tried to walk back his goal of "regime change."
"Trump today said, well, we weren't interested in regime change. Of course, he was," Nichols said. "That's why he launched this war. He thought this was going to be a quick, easy knockdown of the Iranian regime. So we haven't achieved regime change. The Strait is in a more perilous position than before the war."
Meanwhile, he said that the U.S. has lost control over the nuclear situation. While he had his own concerns with the JCPOA from the Obama administration, he noted that it was actually working before Trump ripped it up.
"And now Trump is saying, well, you know, the nuclear dust can sit there. Maybe it's not that important, which is his way of saying we can't get it. And I give up," Nichols said of Trump.
Another thing Nichols criticized is that the U.S. hasn't allowed Israel to see the deal and hasn't told them whether it has anything in it to do with military action in Lebanon. It's one of Iran's demands and it has been a red line for Israel. The anti-Israeli terrorist group, Hamas, operates out of Lebanon. Iran has been funding Hamas for decades.
He later recalled Vice President JD Vance saying on X that no funds would be released to Iran in exchange for signing an agreement to halt the war.
"First, the Iranians are not receiving any cash, and no funds are being released for simply signing a deal or attending a meeting," Vance wrote.
"When people say that billions of dollars of assets will be released, that's not true," Vance later said to CBS. "What is true is that Iran will have a much better and much more prosperous future if they meet the obligations they make in this agreement."
Nichols chuckled, calling Vance's attempts to walk back his initial statements as "a very careful circumlocution."
In reality, the U.S. isn't giving any money, Nichols said.
"We're just going to make it possible for them to get billions and billions of dollars from everybody else. I'm sorry, what happened to a month or two ago that this was the worst regime in the world? It was run by monsters. These were tyrants who had to be overthrown, that the Iranian people could be freed?" he asked.
Nichols said now it appears that the administration is saying, "Well, you know, these new guys, they're very rational, they're reasonable, they're nice fellows. They're nice to deal with."
"You know, I've never been in a room with Iranian negotiators, but I've never known anybody who said, you know, these are nice guys. These are easy guys to deal with," Nichols added. "This is all just a way of of Vance rationalizing Trump's burning desire to get out of this war in which we have been defeated, a war that we started, that we screwed up and that now we need to get out of."