The Trump Trap

All the pundits agreed that Trump gave away the store to the Iranians with the June 17 Memorandum of Understanding.

He pledged to lift sanctions on Iranian oil exports and to release frozen oil revenues. He pledged to encourage Iran’s Gulf neighbors to pony up $300 billion in a reconstruction fund. He even pledged not to interfere in Iran’s domestic affairs.

The Iranians took all of that to the bank.

And then, nothing.

In fact, the Trump MoU set a trap. And the IRGC fell into it. And that is why we’ve had several days of intense U.S. (and perhaps Kuwaiti and Bahraini) bombings of Iran this week.

The MoU was performance based. You, the Iranians, will get all these goodies, but you have to do some very basic things, the first of which is to guarantee free navigation through the Strait of Hormuz for sixty days. And the Iranians — specifically, the IRGC — just couldn’t do it.

They thought that with the MoU the haggling had just begun. They tried to redefine what “freedom of navigation” and “no tolls” meant. They tried to force ships to use a new transit corridor fully within Iranian territorial waters, the so-called “northern route.”

And the U.S. said, no.

Without fanfare, the US Navy and the UAE have been escorting ships through a U.S.-protected “southern route” for the past three weeks, with great success. Despite the latest military flare-up, the oil markets are yawning. Brent crude has been trading on the spot market in the low 70s all week, and West Texas Intermediate is below $70/barrel.

Until the Treasury Department revoked Iran’s special license to sell oil earlier this week (because of the IRGC attacks on shipping), Iran had managed to load 67 million barrels of crude onto tankers and get most of it out through the Strait into international waters, where it is still looking for buyers.

Sanctions relief didn’t provide the immediate adrenaline boost the regime had counted on. And so the IRGC said, let’s use the cattle prod.

Long term, the Iranians are never going to give up their uranium. None of it. One of their state TV networks last week broadcast an AI image of a mushroom cloud rising from an unnamed city after a nuclear attack. Nuclear weapons remain their goal. They just thought, mistakenly, that the Trump MoU was another Obama nuclear deal that would allow them to achieve it.

Satellite photographs from late June show recent construction at one of the four major Iranian nuclear sites, Pickaxe Mountain, south of Natanz. Thanks to David Albright and his team at the Institute for Science and International Security, we now know that the Iranians have erected chicanes on the access roads in an attempt to make any evacuation of whatever is beneath the mountain by US Special Forces more difficult.

This also indicates that Iran is storing part or all of its HEU stockpile in this previously undisclosed (and unbombed) site. Unless, of course, the chicanes are a deception.

Foreign Minister Aragchi, one of the two “negotiators” meeting with Witkoff and Kusher, reportedly told the Americans this week he can’t convince the IRGC to stop attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

For his efforts, Aragchi was forced by pro-regime hard-line protestors to flee one of the multiple funeral processions for the defunct Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, after being greeted with chants of “traitor.”

Trump is clearly losing patience with Aragchi and Qalibaf. While at the NATO summit in Ankara this week he called them “scum” and “a cancer” that “had to be removed.” But— but — on Thursday as he was returning to Washington he said the Iranian negotiators had called him again, begging to make a deal.

Even the  Chinese are losing patience with the Iranians. On Friday, their Foreign Ministry spokesperson told the Iranians to knock off the attacks on international shipping and get back to the MoU. Sounds like the Chinese prefer secure oil supplies to chaos and the Imam Mahdi.

Aragchi and Qalibaf have been able to sell the carrots of the Trump MoU, but not the sticks that require IRGC performance.  As I have been saying for some time, I believe we are heading back to war — the big war, not negotiating with bombs, as we have been doing this week.

The big war means the discombobulator. It means dislocation. It means destruction of the IRGC. It means revolution.

I discuss all this, as well as the latest in the war in Ukraine and this week’s NATO summit in Ankara, on Prophecy Today Weekend. As always, you can listen live at 1 PM on Saturday on 104.9 FM or 550 AM in the Jacksonville, Florida, area, or internationally by using the Jacksonville Way Radio app.

Yours in freedom.

©2026  Kenneth R. Timmerman. All rights reserved.

Website: kentimmerman.com

Ken Timmerman’s 14th book of non-fiction, THE IRAN HOUSE: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue, can be ordered by clicking here or by viewing my author’s page, here. 

Raising Olives in Provence, can be ordered by clicking here.