Trump Heads to China to Celebrate Losing in Iran

You find odd things on the internet.

Especially on YouTube, especially when you spend a fourth of your life looking for clips. For instance, you might discover John Denton, Secretary General of the International Chamber of Commerce, went on Forbes this week and said the Strait of Hormuz closure is “like a cancer that’s already there, but isn’t visible” yet.

Farmers across South Asia and East Africa are making planting decisions right now without fertilizer. They’re either skipping it because the price is too high, or planting without it and accepting the yield loss, he said.

The World Food Program had 318 million people already in food crisis before the strait closed. 45 million more are projected to lose food security by year’s end.

“The other day is already here,” he said. “You just can’t see it.”

The cancer is in the bloodstream. That’s what we’ll be harvesting this fall.

And look! Suddenly, you’re more informed than the president of the United States would ever want to be.

Unlike Trump—who cannot know things that cause him pain—you know what Trump did. The scale of it. Start with what we know for certain: Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate concluded with high confidence that Iran had halted nuclear weapons work in 2003 — an assessment that, as Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, has pointed out repeatedly, never changed.

But don’t trust me. Trust Tulsi Gabbard. Ok, I’d never.

But Donald Trump does, or did — enough to put her in charge of all U.S. intelligence. Gabbard testified under oath that Iran’s nuclear weapons program had been “obliterated” by earlier strikes. The White House website used to say the same, before Trump decided Iran would be his next Venezuela. What he destroyed, at a cost measured in thousands of civilian lives and the largest oil supply disruption in history, was not a nuclear threat. It was the JCPOA — Barack Obama’s Iran deal — and its ability to constrain Iran from restarting its program. International inspectors confirmed it was working. Trump shredded it in his first term, then launched a war to take advantage of the catastrophe he created.

The war kicked off on February 28, 2026, without congressional authorization, without an imminent threat, without a plan for how it ends. When the 60-day War Powers clock ran out on May 1, his response was to write Congress declaring hostilities “terminated” — a lie so bad only congressional Republicans pretend to believe it.

Duss called it: the justification for this war is “complete bullshit.” To end it, to keep a vigilant eye on Iran’s established nuclear capabilities, Trump will have to sign something that resembles the deal he destroyed — from a far weaker position, with billions more in concessions to Tehran. We know this because Iran’s formal proposal is already on the table: reopen the strait, lift the blockade, defer the nuclear question. The JCPOA, rebranded, from a position of American humiliation.

Trump has declared victory constantly. At the White House state dinner for King Charles on April 28, he told the room he had “militarily defeated that particular opponent,” while his negotiators were failing to close a ceasefire and Iran was keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed. He attended a UFC match while diplomacy collapsed. On May 2, with the strait still closed, he told Newsmax: “We have already won.” By May 12, the ceasefire was on “massive life support” — his words — while his Secretary of State declared the war “concluded” and his negotiators were still waiting for a response. The two men are not conducting the same negotiation. They may not be conducting the same war.

Marcy Wheeler has identified the trap that makes a genuine Iran resolution structurally impossible for Trump. The JCPOA was Obama’s thing. Any deal Trump signs that resembles it—and any functional deal will—is a confession: that the first Black president was better at this.

Netanyahu has been feeding Trump the fantasy of total Iranian capitulation along with the same “weeks!!!” nuclear panic he’s been selling to far more discerning audiences for decades. Any deal Trump signs, Bibi can torch. He has done it before, with this exact deal, with this exact president. So what happens next is either Trump stands up to Netanyahu—ha—or this spiral runs again, from a weaker position, with a hungrier world.

Jared Kushner’s $2 billion Saudi fund would probably benefit most from a functioning Strait of Hormuz — something the Saudis should have thought about before they helped push us into this disaster. Brent crude hit $126 a barrel at its peak, up over 55% since the war began. The bond market is screaming. Goldman Sachs has pushed expected Fed rate cuts to December 2026 at the earliest, possibly 2027, which means every American carrying a mortgage, a car payment, or a credit card balance is still paying for the decision one bigot made so he could feel better than Barack Obama.

Trump flies to China this week having done more for Beijing than any American president ever, and not on purpose. He handed China an uncontested decade-long lead in renewables by abandoning the clean energy transition. He handed it the trade war when China grabbed, in Marcy Wheeler’s phrase, America’s “rare earth nuts” — restricting exports of the metals that run fighter jets, EVs, and semiconductors — and Trump folded in weeks. The man who came in promising to make China pay leaves for the summit having paid China in concessions, in strategic retreat, and in the undisputed manufacturing future he decided wasn’t worth keeping.

And now Xi gets a state visit as his reward for keeping the regime that Trump and Netanyahu tried to destroy on life support throughout the war. China bought more than 80 percent of Iran’s sanctioned oil while the bombs were falling, funding the missiles that shot down an American F-15. Chinese ships left port carrying rocket fuel precursors for Iran in early March. U.S. intelligence assessed China was preparing to ship air defense systems to Iran through third countries even after the ceasefire began. Beijing played both sides: brokering the pause, arming the enemy.

And the prize for that performance is a summit with a president desperate enough for a win that he’ll give Xi the photo, the handshake, and the trade truce all at once.

The picture from Beijing will be of Trump smiling, the smile he gets when he believes he has won something. What the camera won’t show is what he’s handing over: the clean energy century, the semiconductor supply chain, the rare earths, the diplomatic credibility, the fiction that American power costs something to defy. He is celebrating, in real time, the greatest strategic gifts any American president has ever delivered to a rival, gifts that may prove, in the verdict of the next fifty years, to be the moment the United States surrendered the century.

I still believe, pray, Trump will eventually declare total victory, use Putin as political cover, and sign a rebranded JCPOA he will insist has nothing to do with the original. Ideally, he’ll do it before weeks, months, and years of carnage that won’t change his legacy: By attacking Iran, he turned it into a world power.

Regardless, the cancer Denton described is set to be harvested into 45 million people suffering some degree of starvation. The United States went to war, illegally, with no plan and no objectives anyone could articulate, because one man could not tolerate that a Black president had outperformed him in every room they ever shared. That is the scale of what was done to this country, and to the world, and to those 45 million people.

For nothing.

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