Subject: Re: The downside of "peace"
That is what the Israel firsters are proposing: the "peace" is nothing but an attempt to con the Proles into voting GOP one more time, then restart the war after the election. The fact that the MOU is virtually a surrender to Iran does make that a plausible scenario: make an offer so attractive that he can get a quick agreement, to make the price of gas a non-issue. Then repudiate the "deal" the day after the election.

That's really unlikely scenario. While certainly high prices of oil, gas, fertilizer, helium and other industrial inputs are more of a problem for Trump heading into the midterm elections, they don't become not a problem once the midterms are over.

High prices on all those things are bad for the Administration. They cause the President to be unpopular, they damage a whole lot of other industries that use them for industrial inputs so they cause broader damage to the U.S. economy, etc. Interest rates stay high, the global economy goes into recession, it becomes a massive issue in the GOP Presidential primaries (which effectively will start in the late spring of 2027). The President would have massive downside to restarting the war after the election. Especially since four months is not nearly enough time for the world to recover reserves and inventories.

And it gets even more unlikely, bordering on fantasy, when you start asking the real questions about what repudiating the deal (and therefore restarting the blockade and possibly the bombing): with what resources, and to what end? Congress is already pissed and unhappy about the war, and it's already cost about $120 billion. Trump doesn't have the money in hand to prosecute another open conflict, and Congress is In No Mood to give him any more. And that's if the GOP were to pull off a miracle and hold the House!

Meanwhile, if Trump did restart the war, he'd be putting his huevos right back into the same vise he extracted them from now at great cost. There's nothing he can get by repudiating the deal after election day, because the U.S. still doesn't have the resources to withstand more than a few months of the Strait being closed.

This is pretty much just the fantasy of Iran hawks and Israel supporters so that they can imagine that Trump is playing 17D chess - that the MOU isn't the agreement, that the war is just put on pause and Trump the savior will actually vanquish the Iranian threat. But that's just lunacy. Trump has capitulated, because he didn't have any choice but to capitulate. He can't undo the capitulation, because if he does he will back in the same spot and have to capitulate again a few months later. The unpopularity of the Iran war and high gas prices have cratered all the stuff he wants to do - ballroom funding, the SAVE act, the $1,776 billion slush fund, getting interest rates down. He's not the brightest bulb in the candelabra, but he's going to stick his wangdoodle back into the same hydraulic press that just flattened it again.