US-Iran peace deal: Epic Fury’s epic failure?

The memorandum of understanding that the US and Iran reached on 14 June, brokered by Pakistan and due to be signed in Geneva this Friday, was greeted by President Donald Trump as an "absolute deal". 

Read closely, it is something far more modest. The text reopens the Strait of Hormuz, lifts the American naval blockade on Iran's southern ports, and commits both sides to 60 days of negotiations on sanctions and Tehran's nuclear programme. 

Everything that mattered when the bombing began remains unsettled. As the BBC's International Editor Jeremy Bowen put it, the agreement "ends a war that was based on America and Israel's misreading of the strength of their enemy in Tehran. It is not a peace deal". 

And therefore, the peace deal raises an obvious question: What did Trump want to gain from this whimsical war, and how exactly did the US suffer a strategic loss in Iran? 

A war that could not deliver its aim

The campaign that became Operation Epic Fury began on 28 February with a decapitation strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader of nearly 37 years, along with dozens of senior commanders. 

The central rationale behind the operation was that the Islamic Republic was a personalist system that would fracture once its leadership was removed. It did not. A collective leadership assumed control within hours, the Revolutionary Guard held the state together, and Tehran began retaliating almost immediately. The premise was flawed at the outset. 

Mehdi Hasan, editor-in-chief of Zeteo, argued back then, "They've already killed the head of state, the supreme leader, on day one — completely illegal under international law — and they've got no strategy to end this. They've got no end goal in sight."

That gap between firepower and purpose is the war's defining feature. As John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago has noted while analysing the outcome of the war, that the historical record on regime change from the air is unambiguous, "It's hard to get regime change using air power alone. You've got to send boots, and that's not going to happen." 

Without ground forces, the US found itself in the war of attrition the Pentagon had spent decades avoiding, Mearsheimer argues, one that Trump was maneuvered into by the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The economic weapon Washington could not neutralise

Iran's most effective response was not military but economic. By mining and contesting the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas passes, Tehran imposed a cost the US Navy could not lift by force. 

American strikes degraded Iran's missile, drone and air-defence networks, yet US intelligence estimates that Iran retained around 70% of its pre-war missile stockpile and a similar share of its mobile launchers. 

Those weapons reached US bases and Gulf energy infrastructure: six American service members were killed when a drone struck a US operations centre at Kuwait's Shuaiba port, and Iranian fire hit Qatar's Ras Laffan gas complex, refineries in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, a Bahraini desalination plant and data centres in the UAE. 

Most importantly, Trump failed to mobilise its allies to come together and create a joint task force to open the Strait. That demonstrated how far Trump's 'America First' policy has degraded its hold over its traditional allies. 

A deal that reads as a climbdown

The terms now on the table reflect that reality. Iran's counterproposal centred on sanctions relief, the release of roughly $24 billion in frozen assets, and compensation for war damage it puts at $270 billion; it made no mention of the ballistic-missile programme Washington and Israel had demanded be curbed. 

As the BBC's International Editor Jeremy Bowen put it, the agreement "ends a war that was based on America and Israel's misreading of the strength of their enemy in Tehran. It is not a peace deal".

Trump has insisted the strait will reopen "permanently toll-free," yet the version of the memorandum published by Iranian media states that passage will be subject to "Iranian arrangements". 

The 60-day window now opening to negotiate enrichment limits is, in substance, an attempt to recover ground the US abandoned when it tore up the 2015 nuclear accord. 

An alliance under visible strain

The war's second casualty is the relationship between Washington and Jerusalem. Israel was not a party to the agreement and has rejected its restraints. Defence Minister Israel Katz has ruled out withdrawing from southern Lebanon, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir declared that "Trump's agreement does not bind us." 

Israeli strikes on the Beirut suburbs on 14 June, which killed three people, drew a public rebuke from Trump for jeopardising the deal. Danny Citrinowicz of Israel's Institute for National Security Studies argues the episode exposes a structural change: "Any Israeli military move perceived in Washington as an attempt to sabotage the agreement is expected to encounter a harsh response," and the old route of bypassing the White House through Congress "barely exists at this time."

Beneath the diplomacy lies a deeper shift in American opinion. A Pew Research Center poll found that 60% of US adults now hold an unfavourable view of Israel, with majorities under 50 in both parties rating it negatively — a trend that places the 2028 renewal of the $3.8-billion annual military aid package in political jeopardy. 

"Our country is not the same as Israel," Mehdi Hasan observes. "Israel's interests are not America's interests." None of this means Israel emerged empty-handed; Parsi acknowledges the campaign degraded Iranian capabilities Netanyahu had sought to weaken for years. 

And the bill for the resulting instability, energy shocks, alienated Gulf partners, diminished credibility has fallen on Washington, not Jerusalem. And Washington is painfully aware of it. 

Loss without a settlement

The cost has been heavy and the return negligible. Lebanon's health ministry has recorded more than 3,400 dead. Iran's economy ran at close to 70% inflation through the war. Al Jazeera contributor Umair Waqas estimates first-year global output losses of $1.3 trillion, rising towards $3.5 trillion should the ceasefire collapse, with fertiliser and grain disruptions threatening the Global South most acutely. 

And the regime Washington set out to topple is still standing—by several accounts more cohesive than before, and now committed to a doctrine of swift retaliation that names US data centres and undersea cables as future targets.

What, then, did the United States achieve? It removed Iran's leadership and part of its arsenal, and secured a pause. On 8 April 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and CENTCOM Commander Admiral Brad Cooper publicly testified that Operation Epic Fury had degraded 90% of Iran's defense industrial base, leaving them with only 10% capacity. 

While the operation successfully diminished Iran's immediate military capabilities, it did not achieve regime change, did not curb the missile programme, did not keep the strait open by force, and did not bind its own ally to the peace it brokered. 

Changing the rules of the game, as one analyst of the war observed, is one thing; winning it is quite another. On the evidence of the deal it has just signed, Washington managed neither.