A senior official who spent decades in government once told me something worth remembering: On the hardest problems, the policy options are bad, worse, and catastrophic. “A good day in government,” he said, “is when you get to choose the bad option, knowing full well you will be criticized for it.”

The memorandum of understanding (MoU) that the Trump administration has reached with Iran is a case study in that logic. It is the bad option — a negotiated settlement that falls well short of stated American war aims and restores something close to the prewar status quo — but the alternatives were worse, much worse.

Start with what we know about the MoU. According to reports, the memorandum ends fighting on all fronts, including Lebanon, for 60 days, slowly reopens the Strait of Hormuz to all traffic, and gradually lifts the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports. On the nuclear issue — the original justification for the war — the commitments are remarkably thin. Iran’s deputy foreign minister made no concrete nuclear commitments, and the White House claimed nothing beyond Iran’s longstanding promise not to build a weapon, a promise Tehran has been making for decades.  The harder questions — enrichment levels, the existing stockpile, and sanctions relief — are deferred to a second round of negotiations.

The bottom line: An entire war fought — 13 Americans dead, and thousands more across the region — to end up where we started. But — and this matters enormously — the MoU was still the right call.

Consider the alternatives. More bombing — no matter how intense — was not going to break Tehran. Iran withstood more than five weeks of intensive airstrikes — by the Pentagon’s own account, twice the scale of Shock and Awe in 2003 — and it never came close to collapsing or capitulating. The Islamic Republic absorbed the punishment and emerged with its political structure intact. This should surprise no one. Sustained bombing doesn’t break regimes — it hardens them. A century of airpower history warns of this: Germany, Japan, North Vietnam, Serbia, Iraq.

There were worse options. Forcing open the Strait by direct military action was easier threatened than executed. Geography gave Iran every advantage — a narrow waterway, easily mined, flanked by an Iranian coast laden with missiles, drones, and fast boats. Threats were cheap for Iran to sustain and extraordinarily costly for the United States to suppress indefinitely. And time was not on Washington’s side.  

The White House also considered ground options, such as seizing Kharg Island to choke off Iran’s oil revenue or sending special forces into Iran’s underground nuclear facilities to capture its enriched uranium stockpile. Both were terrible ideas. Troops on Kharg island would have been exposed to relentless missile and drone attacks, with little assurance that it would hasten the war’s end. The Pentagon rated the uranium mission as “High to Extreme” on acceptable risk, given the tunnels were booby-trapped, the material buried under mountains, and American forces would be invading Iranian territory with no clear exit strategy. Trump rightly rejected both options after being warned they would prompt severe Iranian retaliation, extend the war, and deepen the global economic crisis. The casualty estimates alone should have settled it.

So yes, the MoU is the best among the bad, worse, and catastrophic options facing Washington. Ending the war on these terms was the right call. The deeper mistake was the decision to start it at all.