The Iran war debacle Sullivan can’t run away from

Barber Wissam Srour, 41, right, searches for belongings in the rubble of his barbershop, damaged in an Israeli strike, in the southern port city of Tyre, Lebanon, Friday, June 19, 2026. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

By Rich Moniak

The White House Fight Night last weekend was a strange, impressive spectacle with lots of pageantry that drew rave reviews, but “will never happen again.” In other words, it was anything but normal. Which is all too normal with President Donald Trump in the White House.

This week, Trump broke a presidential norm established during the past half-century that’s actually good for the country. Unlike Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq 2.0, he signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) intended to end a misguided war with Iran.

But true to character, he’s trying to duck, spin and weave it into a mission accomplished story when in reality starting the war was a monumental mistake. 

And that has Sen. Dan Sullivan’s name written all over it.

Let’s start with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action signed by President Barack Obama in 2015. 

In April of that year, I discussed the framework for the JCPOA with Paul Pillar, a 28-year veteran with the CIA and former executive assistant to the deputy director of intelligence. He believed “even this imperfect deal gets us farther, is more in support of our interest, and does more to assuage our concerns than if we had no deal at all.” He later added “one of the things that diehard opponents have consistently done as part of their strategy is avoid talking about the alternative.” 

Sullivan was a diehard opponent of the JPOCA. Last month, I mentioned how he and other Senate Republicans warned Iran’s leadership that the next president could revoke it. Around the time their letter was sent, he speculated on Fox News that the Obama administration had removed Iran from the official list of states that sponsor terrorism as “some kind of quid pro quo tied to the negotiation.” 

When I challenged his objections to the framework, he responded in part by saying I needed to get my facts straight. But he couldn’t refute the point I made that Iran had not been removed from the list of states that sponsor terrorism. 

My point here isn’t that Sullivan got a fact wrong. To him, that was incidental to his primary objective of preventing Obama from securing a major foreign policy accomplishment, regardless of the consequences. 

As Pillar warned, reaching no agreement would lead Iran to keep UN inspectors out of the country and go all in on a program to develop nuclear weapons. Then “the risk of war goes up appreciably.” 

He was right on both points. First, after Trump ripped up the deal in 2018. Then when he attacked Iran in February. 

And despite the fact that Trump began the war without the consent of Congress as required by the Constitution, Sullivan stood behind him.  

“It's been a bipartisan goal of every president to make sure the Iranians don't get nukes and don't get ballistic missiles, and that's what the President and our brave troops are undertaking right now,” he said in March.

According to Trump, the MOU “achieves everything we set out to accomplish,” including “ending the current conflict” that he started, “reopening the Strait of Hormuz,” which wasn’t blocked before the war, “and preventing Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon,” with an assurance no better than the one Obama secured 11 years ago. 

He boasted that the price of “oil is dropping like it has never dropped before” without mentioning the war is what caused it to rise dramatically. 

The MOU doesn’t mention Iran’s ballistic missile program. 

And it stipulates all US sanctions will be terminated “in an agreed upon schedule as part of the final deal.” Sullivan, who has always been a staunch advocate of applying maximum pressure through economic sanctions, can’t be pleased with that. Or the $300 billion Iran reconstruction fund Trump agreed to help establish with our partners in the region. 

“For me, the bottom line is that I don’t trust Iran’s leadership,” he wrote. “My job is to keep my state and my country safe from declared enemies of the United States, like Iran. I’ll continue to lay out the facts in order to do so.”

That wasn’t entirely true when he said it 11 years ago. If he sticks to partisan politics like he did then, he’ll lie about the MOU being better than Obama’s JCPOA. 

The alternative is to end his self-imposed norm of providing cover for Trump by standing up for the truth, the Constitution and the health American democracy. 

• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.