Minab, 175 Dead and a Tomahawk - One Video and 116 Meters<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nEven within his own ranks, opposition emerged. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana called the agreement the most serious foreign policy mistake in decades and said Reagan must be turning in his grave. Before the war, the strait had been open, Iran had been crushed under sanctions, and thirteen American soldiers were alive. Now, thirteen Americans were dead, families had paid billions at the gas pump, sanctions were being lifted, and the bombing had stopped. Cassidy had lost his primary after Trump supported his opponent. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas spoke of bad advice being given to the president, saying that giving billions to theocratic fanatics who wanted to kill you was not a good idea and that not one cent should reach the Ayatollah through free passage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Trump opened the press conference with a forty minute monologue that ranged from Iran and Ukraine to drugs hidden in hubcaps. He praised the secured border and said Mexico had lost control of its own country and that President Claudia Sheinbaum was frightened. The frozen Iranian assets, he said, did not belong to America but to Iran and would probably have to be returned because if they were kept, nobody would trust the dollar anymore. If the agreement failed, he joked, he would blame Vance. If it succeeded, he would take the credit himself. And every time peace had been discussed, the stock market had risen like a rocket, while the one president he never wanted to become was the unfortunate Herbert Hoover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/video><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\nTrump: \u201cIf the Iran agreement works, I\u2019ll take credit for the success. If it doesn\u2019t work, I\u2019ll blame JD.\u201d A statement Trump has made in similar form before.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\nTrump spoke with unusual sharpness about Israel. He said he felt sympathy for Lebanon and advised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to act more gently, saying there was no need to tear down a building every time someone from Hezbollah entered it. Lebanon had once been one of the great cultures of the Middle East and had been ruined over recent decades, and a visit from there to Washington was expected in the coming weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/video><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n\u201cBuildings are being brought down on people or destroyed right next to them. How would you want to live there? It is so unfair, especially in Beirut. You know, you drive through Beirut - I looked at the pictures, I looked at the footage two days ago, yesterday, where they struck. That was a major attack. In my view, it was unnecessary.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\nMacron defended the accusation that he had rolled out the red carpet for Trump. Using a soccer metaphor, he said that whether at home or away, he wanted to score goals and offer a guest a warm welcome. He said he had always trusted Trump, even during disputes over tariffs after Trump threatened a one hundred percent surcharge on French wine unless a European digital tax was dropped. Macron called an American directive preventing foreigners from accessing the newest models from Anthropic and forcing the company to take them offline strictly nationalist. Giorgia Meloni praised Western unity and pressure on Moscow, saying the goal was direct talks between Zelenskyy and Putin, from whom no serious signal had yet emerged. The summit, attended by Zelenskyy, had convinced Trump that Russia was currently not negotiating seriously, Macron said, calling it the moment of \u00c9vian. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oxfam called the summit one of omissions, saying climate and equality, along with human rights, had been pushed aside to secure Trump\u2019s participation and that silence had become the strategy, although leaders at least called for a joint response to the Ebola outbreak in Congo. What Oxfam calls omission is something we witness day and night. What is happening in America we see around the clock. The violations of human rights are severe, thousands of innocent people are being held in detention, and we are trying to return every single one of them to freedom, subjected to an ICE that resembles a militia and driven by an extreme right wing populism from which Europe, including Germany, is not protected. We also experienced Iran directly on the ground for weeks and saw bombs fall without reason or restraint on targets that did not follow even the most basic military logic. That the regime in Tehran is barbaric remains undisputed, but an entire population was punished. If this is meant to be the standard for human rights in 2026, then much has gone wrong in recent years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Human rights need support more urgently than ever, and stopping right wing populism requires even more than support, it requires resilience and determination. One could handle all this in the style of a wire service, but that is not our way. That future generations are being left standing in the rain, as is happening right now, must be said clearly, and that politicians like Trump cannot continue down this path is more a duty than diplomacy. Diplomacy is a fine and important thing, but it depends on reliability, and with Trump one is simply left behind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If both presidents ultimately signed, it would be a major step for two countries whose relations collapsed in 1980 over the hostage crisis at the American embassy in Tehran. Pezeshkian entered office promising better relations with the West, but since Iran killed thousands of protesting citizens in January and hardliners consolidated control over the religious state, he has been standing at the edge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Only fifteen weeks ago Trump declared that there would be no agreement except unconditional surrender, and when the text was now read paragraph by paragraph, it sounded like many things, but not surrender. Iran emerged from confrontation with the strongest military in the world not only intact but with proof that economic chaos remains its sharpest weapon, the strait closed, facilities and Gulf bases set on fire, and according to Trump\u2019s own words, it worked. Antony Blinken, one of the architects of the 2015 agreement, mocked that the only achievement was reopening a waterway that had already been open before the war and that Iran was now being rewarded with oil concessions. But the broader lesson is the bitter one. For two decades Iran stood at the threshold of the bomb without crossing it and was bombed twice for it, while North Korea, which once completed the path to the bomb and today possesses more than sixty warheads, no longer hears threats from Trump. Anyone drawing the wrong conclusion from that may already have drawn it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That was how the day ended in Versailles, where a peace was signed that either side may abandon at any time and that is held together only by the threat of the next bomb. The man who admired the gold of the doors placed his name in the place where Europe once wrote conditions from which the next war emerged, and for the children who died in an Iranian school he found only the words that terrible things happen in war. A peace whose first guarantee is the threat of bombing already carries the next war inside it. Versailles knows how that ends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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