Trump Chose Scylla

The tragedy of Trump’s odyssey played out in the Strait of Hormuz

In the end, Odysseus did what Circe told him to do. Steer toward Scylla, she had warned, and accept the loss of sailors. The alternative—the whirlpool of Charybdis—would swallow the ship entire. So he made his choice, gripped the tiller, and sailed his crew into the monster’s reach. Six men were plucked from the deck. The rest survived.

Last month, writing for The Big Picture, I used a Homeric epic to describe how Trump had sailed us all into the Strait of Hormuz and found himself caught between two gruesome fates: a humiliating peace deal that left Iran stronger than before the first bomb fell, or a wider war that risked pulling the entire region into a conflagration no one would survive intact. Like Odysseus, Trump would eventually have to choose. And like Odysseus, choosing the lesser catastrophe would not spare him from loss.

On June 14, Trump made his choice and announced a deal. The Strait would reopen, he proclaimed. The war, ostensibly, would end. Trump posted on Truth Social that ships around the world should “start your engines,” and declared the deal complete, with all the confidence of a man who has just avoided drowning the world in a giant whirlpool of war.

But the fearsome Scylla had already reached down from the rocks. The beast would exact its price: six losses that Trump and his party must now bear.

What the six-headed monster devoured

Odysseus lost six of his crew to Scylla as their vessel sailed past the rock where it perched. For Trump and the GOP, six political blows have left them reeling just months before the midterms. Trump and his party have given up power, security, wealth, sovereignty, credibility and legacy.

Power. At the start of the war, the U.S. appeared all-powerful. It commanded the skies and seas. It sank the Iranian navy and decimated its air defenses. Flush with that power, it made categorical demands of Iran, including the dismantling of Iran’s ballistic missile system and the turnover of its nuclear stockpile.

But at the announced end of hostilities, it is Iran that has emerged victorious, with none of the U.S.’s major demands met other than the Strait of Hormuz reopening to traffic. Iran’s missile program was not merely sidelined from negotiations; Trump affirmatively conceded Iran’s right to have it. At his G7 press conference, he argued Iran could not be barred from having ballistic missiles altogether. “Am I going to let Saudi Arabia have missiles, but they can’t have them?” he said. “It doesn’t work that way… and missiles aren’t the problem.”

And under the MOU, Iran’s nuclear material stays put, deferred until later. The MOU’s nuclear pledge uses the word “reaffirms,” meaning Iran is simply restating what it said in the 2015 agreement secured by President Obama that Trump tore up in 2018. The pledge stands unaccompanied by any verification mechanism or enforcement process, so the West has less leverage than it had under the Obama deal. When a reporter asked Trump what would compel Iran to cooperate, he said fear of renewed U.S. bombing would guarantee compliance. “If it doesn’t get done in 60 days, it’s all right. We go back to bombing,” Trump declared. But that’s a threat Iran had already absorbed for three months without yielding on either point.

Security. Trump declared Iran would stop funding terrorism, which it does primarily through its proxies throughout the region. But Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis are explicitly excluded from the negotiations. Iran’s network of armed groups emerges from the war intact. America’s allies in the region are no safer than they were before the first bomb fell.

At the start of the war and through its prosecution, there were two bright line security goals for the U.S.: Iran would surrender its highly enriched uranium, and its ballistic missile program would be dismantled. Trump repeatedly stressed the fundamental nature of these goals. Marco Rubio warned in February that Iran’s reluctance to discuss its ballistic missiles was a “big, big problem,” that they were “solely designed to attack America and attack Americans,” and that these were things that “have to be addressed.” Pete Hegseth, in the administration’s first briefing after strikes began, declared the operation’s mission was to “destroy the missile threat” and ensure the regime has “no nukes.” Neither bright-line goal made it into the final deal, and the whole world is less secure as a result.

Wealth. Trump spent his first term dismantling the Obama nuclear deal precisely because it extended economic relief to Tehran. But the MOU offers a host of economic bounties to Iran, including sanctions waivers and unfrozen assets. Most notably, it also commits the U.S. to developing “a definitive, mutually agreed plan” for at least $300 billion in reconstruction funding to repair the damage from U.S. and Israeli strikes. For context: the entire Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Western Europe after World War II, cost roughly $150 billion in today’s dollars. The reconstruction commitment in the MOU is roughly twice that.

This wealth is being delivered to a regime that Trump spent years calling the world’s foremost state sponsor of terror. Iran enters the world financial system not as a chastened adversary but as a country that held a chokepoint to ransom and collected.

Sovereignty. Trump promised to restore free navigation through the Strait of Hormuz. But the MOU does no such thing. It commits Iran only to use “its best efforts” (not a guarantee) to ensure the safe passage of commercial vessels. Moreover, that commitment runs for only 60 days, “with no charge.” After that period, only Iran and Oman will “define the future administration and maritime services in the Strait of Hormuz.” The U.S. is excluded entirely from the decision.

Iran went into this war merely monitoring the Strait. It comes out as essentially its administrator, with the legal architecture to charge tolls and significant leverage to threaten closure again whenever it chooses.

Credibility. The U.S. launched this war with little to no consultation with its allies. Then, when the operation stalled, it demanded they join it. The response was unambiguous. Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius stated flatly that this was “not our war” and that Germany “did not start.” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer drew a clear line against being pulled into a broader conflict. Trump called the refusal cowardice. A Pentagon memo drawn up by Elbridge Colby reportedly outlined retaliatory measures against what it called “difficult allies.” It failed to impress them.

Those same allies then heard the U.S. president describe a deal no one had yet seen as “very strong”—adding, without apparent embarrassment, “Nobody knows what it is, but it’s very strong.” When Trump did discuss the nuclear provisions with The New York Times, the paper’s David Sanger noted that the president “seemed to be describing Iranian concessions that the country has not yet made.” The final MOU was so far from “very strong” that the White House read it aloud rather than circulate its terms publicly.

The Center for a New American Security observed that trust in the U.S. and its commitment to Article 5 defense of its allies had already been undermined. The Council on Foreign Relations followed up, noting that the Iran war had left European governments deeply divided on questions of military intervention, and that this was a fracture the U.S., not Iran, created. The U.S. had started a war it could not finish on its own terms, inflicted three months of economic damage on everyone, and settled for less than it demanded in nearly every case. As former Secretary of State Antony Blinken put it, “The only ‘achievement’ of the ceasefire is the likely re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz — which was open before the war started.”

Legacy. Trump came to power promising to undo the Obama Iran deal as an act of historic strength. The deal now signed offers Tehran more than Obama’s ever did: more money, more relief and more leverage. The Revolutionary Guard’s grip on power remains unbroken, and an extremist supreme leader is still in place. The Islamic Republic that Trump spent a decade calling an existential threat to civilization survived the full weight of American military power and negotiated from a position of strength.

Trump had also urged regime change in Iran. On the first day of the war, he told the Iranian people directly: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.” But at the G7 summit in Evian four months later, the same president said: “I never cared about regime change. It was never a part.” Of Iran’s new leadership, the same people he condemned for killing tens of thousands of its own protesters earlier this year, Trump also offered this: “We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. They were nice to deal with. Strong people, smart people. They’re not radicalized.” Any dissidents in Iran who once hoped Trump would be their savior are now likely cursing his name.

The crew erupts

In the Odyssey, the crew’s dissent began quietly, then erupted all at once and led eventually to a full mutiny, leaving Odysseus floating on the wreckage of his vessel, clinging to a branch above the swirling waters of Charybdis.

For Trump, criticism from his own party began as soon as word of the MOU terms leaked, and it has been building ever since:

• Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, warned that the deal “would be a disaster” and that “everything accomplished by Operation Epic Fury would be for naught.”

• Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, shared Wicker’s post without comment, a pointed silence from one of the Senate’s most hawkish voices on Iran.

• Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called the framework “straight out of the Wendy Sherman-Robert Malley-Ben Rhodes playbook,” a direct comparison to the Obama-era diplomacy Trump spent his first term dismantling.

• Former U.N. Ambassador under Trump Nikki Haley piled on: “This regime chants death to America, murders our troops, and attempts to assassinate Americans on U.S. soil. Now, we plan to unlock billions of dollars and lift sanctions, with the promise of even more money.”

• Former senior Trump advisor Steve Bannon, whose views rarely align with Haley’s, broke with the president on sanctions relief. “Keep the sanctions,” he said on his War Room podcast. “If we lose that, it will take forever to get back.”

• Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana called it “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades,” noting that Iran had “learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works and will undoubtedly leverage it in the future.”

• The National Review editorial board warned of “a risk that Trump will return the United States to the failed Obama-era Iran deal, which Trump tore up in his first term.”

• And conservative radio host Erick Erickson, after Vance suggested Iran’s leaders had expressed regret about their 47 years of hostility toward the United States, responded with three letters: “FFS.”

Trump’s counter-narrative

Trump has offered his own counter-narrative, and it has shifted with each telling. That is not helping in the least.

On March 9, with gas prices already climbing and the Strait effectively closed, Trump told reporters the disruption was largely someone else’s problem. “It doesn’t really affect us,” he said. “We have so much oil. We have tremendous oil and gas, much more than we need.” Three weeks later, in a primetime address to the nation on April 1, he went further. “We’re now totally independent of the Middle East,” he declared. “We don’t have to be there. We don’t need their oil. We don’t need anything they have.” Then at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains on June 17, the same president warned that without the deal, markets would have collapsed “at levels that nobody ever saw before, maybe except for 1929 or whatever.” He then added, in a moment of unguarded honesty: “We run out of reserves in about four weeks.”

In short, the president who told Americans in March that the Strait’s closure barely touched them was telling G7 leaders in June that another month of war would have drained the world’s oil reserves and crashed markets to Depression-era levels.

At the G7, he also dismissed Iran’s roughly 440 kilograms of 60-percent-enriched uranium—the stockpile he spent months insisting Iran must surrender—as “nuclear dust” buried too deep to reach. “You could make the case, why even bother?” he said. “It’s not really valuable stuff.” He added that the goal of securing it was not altogether “necessary,” and described it as more of a “public relations” issue than a strategic imperative. This from the president who cited that same stockpile, repeatedly, as justification for launching the war.

Some in the GOP now realize the party must own the terrible deal Trump signed. And that requires some serious spin.

Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, a Trump loyalist, appeared on CNN to defend the idea of Iran retaining its missile program, one of Trump’s stated justifications for launching the war in the first place. Marshall told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that he preferred Iran not to have missiles, but that “the key issue” was that “they have to be able to defend themselves.” Historian Joseph Stieb observed: “It’s like the last 40 years of the Republican Party’s foreign policy didn’t happen.”

Trump signed the MOU himself at a dinner with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Palace of Versailles. It was the same venue where, after World War I, the Allied powers compelled Germany to sign what became one of history’s most famous surrender documents. The world grasped the symbolism immediately.

In the myth, Odysseus cleared the strait. But he did not escape what came next. His crew, having watched him sacrifice six of their own, stopped believing his promises. When he forbade them from slaughtering the sacred cattle, they did it anyway—driven by hunger, exhaustion, and the collapse of faith in a captain who had led them somewhere no one wanted to go. Zeus destroyed the ship. Every last one of them drowned.