What the Iran Deal Could and Coudn't Teahh Purin About Ending the War in Ukrain?
What it takes to stop a war, even when stopping looks like losing
What the Iran Deal Could — and Couldn’t — Teach Putin About Ending a War
The war in Iran did not end the way anyone advertised it would. Not with surrender — Iran’s, anyway — and not with a clean American victory. It ended with a memorandum of understanding: a 60-day cessation of hostilities, a reopened Strait of Hormuz, sanctions relief, and a promised $300 billion reconstruction fund for the very regime the United States and Israel had spent months bombing. Almost no one is calling it a triumph. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which had backed the war, described the agreement as a retreat and warned it could turn into an economic bailout for Tehran. The New York Times editorial board was blunter still, framing it as a defeat. Conservative commentator Erick Erickson said flatly that Trump had surrendered to Iran. Senator Ted Cruz warned that handing billions of dollars to “theocratic lunatics who want to murder us” was reckless. Even Mike Pence — who credits Trump for striking Iran directly — has said the deal’s terms “smack of appeasement.”
So this isn’t a story about a good deal. It’s a story about a war that stopped anyway, because continuing it had become more expensive than anyone wanted to admit. And that raises an uncomfortable question: if cost and exhaustion were enough to bring Washington and Tehran to the table, could the same logic ever bring Putin to one over Ukraine?
I don’t ask this lightly. I’m from Afghanistan, a country that has barely known peace in 45 years, and I’ve seen up close what war does to the people who live inside it long after the headlines move on. I don’t romanticize war, and I don’t romanticize the men who start it. But I think Trump deserves some credit for being willing to stop, even imperfectly, rather than keep escalating to save face. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has pointed out, this is a lesson humanity seems doomed to relearn every generation — even Achilles, in the Iliad, called the Trojan War insane while still fighting it. Kristof’s own verdict on the Iran war is that the mistake wasn’t ending it; the mistake was starting it in the first place, after the U.S. abandoned the diplomatic track it already had with Tehran.
The costs, in the end, were staggering. Harvard public-finance expert Linda Bilmes estimates the Iran war’s total bill — munitions, base repairs, veterans’ lifetime disability care, the interest on money borrowed to pay for all of it — will reach $1 trillion. Thirteen American service members died. Thousands of Iranians and Lebanese did too. None of that money will go to Medicaid, child care, or college tuition. It went, instead, to a war whose stated goal — preventing a nuclear-armed Iran — was achieved only partially, and at a price even its supporters now question.
Russia’s costs in Ukraine are larger by an order of magnitude. Mediazona and the BBC’s Russian service have confirmed the identities of more than 225,000 Russian soldiers killed since the 2022 invasion — and their own statistical modeling, built on Russia’s probate registry, suggests the true toll may exceed 350,000. RAND researchers estimated that by late 2022 alone, Russia’s military spending had already topped $40 billion, with GDP losses in the tens of billions and long-term economic damage that will outlast the war itself. Four years in, by some measures, this war has already run longer than World War I.
But here’s where the comparison breaks down, and I don’t want to paper over it: Iran did not invade anyone. The war against it was framed, rightly or wrongly, as preventive — a response to a perceived nuclear threat and to proxy attacks like Hamas’s October 2023 assault on Israel. It lasted months, not years, and it always had a built-in off-ramp: a negotiated ceasefire window, a structure for talks. Ukraine, by contrast, did not attack Russia. It asked only to remain independent and to align with Europe. There is no equivalent 60-day clock running on this war, and no sign Putin feels the kind of domestic pressure — rising gas prices, falling approval numbers, a Congress demanding answers — that pushed Trump toward the table. Trump faced voters. Putin, for now, does not have to in any meaningful sense.
So the lesson isn’t “do what Trump did.” The terms of the Iran deal aren’t a template anyone should want to copy, and the war that produced them shouldn’t have been fought to begin with — a point even the deal’s defenders mostly concede. The lesson, if there is one, is narrower and harder to act on: wars end not when one side achieves everything it set out to win, but when the cost of continuing finally outweighs the cost of admitting limits. That recognition doesn’t require a clean victory, or even a deal anyone is proud of. It just requires someone with the power to stop deciding that stopping is less costly than going on.
Whether Putin ever reaches that point — and whether anything short of military and economic exhaustion on a Russian scale could bring him there — is the real question. The war in Iran doesn’t answer it. But it’s a reminder that even leaders who insist they’re winning eventually run out of road, and that admitting it, however messily, beats not admitting it at all.
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