The $88 Billion Price of Failure: How Washington Returned to the Deal It Once Rejected

By: Said Arikat

June 27, 2026

News analysis

Washington, D.C-The Trump administration’s request for $88 billion to finance its war against Iran may ultimately become the clearest acknowledgment that military force failed to accomplish what diplomacy had already achieved years earlier. As Congress debates the administration’s supplemental funding request, Americans are left asking whether the United States has paid an extraordinary price—in lives, treasure, and strategic credibility—to arrive at nearly the same destination it abandoned when President Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement.

The political origins of the conflict are now receiving renewed scrutiny following the publication of Regime Change, the new book by The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, which went on sale on Tuesday, June 23, 2026. The authors report that during a February 11 meeting in the White House Situation Room, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu persuaded President Trump to embrace military action against Iran despite deep reservations from America’s own national security establishment. According to the book, officials from the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency regarded Netanyahu’s proposed strategy as “farcical,” warning that its assumptions were unrealistic and unlikely to produce the promised political outcome. Nevertheless, Trump sided with Netanyahu’s assessment, placing the United States on a path toward a war that many critics now argue was unnecessary from the beginning.

If Haberman and Swan’s reporting is accurate, history may judge the episode as one of the most consequential examples of an American president being persuaded by a foreign leader to undertake a major military intervention despite substantial opposition from his own senior advisers.

Now the administration is asking Congress for $88 billion to pay for that decision.

Among the most vocal critics is Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who argues that the conflict was reckless, unnecessary, illegal, and strategically counterproductive. In his view, the war produced enormous costs while delivering remarkably little to advance American interests.

The human and financial toll is substantial. Thirteen American service members were killed, while thousands of Iranians lost their lives. Tens of billions of taxpayer dollars have already been spent, with another $88 billion now being requested. Meanwhile, Americans have experienced higher gasoline and grocery prices, U.S. weapons stockpiles have been depleted, and relations with key allies have been strained by Washington’s decision to go to war.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that after months of military operations, the United States possesses not a comprehensive nuclear agreement but merely a memorandum of understanding to negotiate one. Before President Trump withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the United States and its international partners already had extensive International Atomic Energy Agency inspections, robust verification mechanisms, restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities, and a functioning diplomatic framework. Should current negotiations ultimately succeed, Washington may simply recreate many of the same arrangements that already existed more than a decade ago.

Nor did the war accomplish its broader political objective. Advocates argued that sustained military pressure would weaken the Iranian regime and perhaps trigger regime change. Instead, the government in Tehran remains firmly in power. Schatz contends that the regime has emerged younger, more ideologically committed, and politically resilient, while the opposition failed to generate the transformation that intervention advocates confidently predicted.

From this perspective, the administration’s greatest mistake was not ending the war but beginning it. Diplomacy, critics argue, was always available and should have been exhausted before military force was employed.

The emerging memorandum of understanding also appears to require significantly greater American concessions than the original nuclear agreement. Iranian assets would reportedly be unfrozen, Tehran would regain broad access to global oil markets, and sanctions that had constrained Iran’s economy for decades would be substantially eased. These concessions, critics argue, exceed those contained in the original JCPOA while securing essentially the same Iranian commitment not to develop nuclear weapons.

Even more controversial are reported provisions affecting the Strait of Hormuz. Before the conflict, international shipping moved freely through one of the world’s most important maritime chokepoints. Under the current arrangement, Iran reportedly agrees not to disrupt commercial shipping for only sixty days while reserving the right afterward to impose transit fees on vessels passing through the strait. Such an arrangement would establish an unprecedented precedent in modern maritime commerce and could undermine the long-standing international principle of freedom of navigation that successive American administrations have defended.

Critics argue that Washington is making these sweeping concessions not as part of a final, enforceable nuclear settlement but simply to persuade Iran not to interfere with global shipping. If so, the United States would have sacrificed military resources, economic leverage, and diplomatic credibility only to secure a temporary reprieve from a crisis created by the war itself.

The broader implications extend far beyond Iran. Lifting oil sanctions would represent one of the most dramatic reversals of bipartisan American policy toward Tehran in decades. It also revives an uncomfortable historical pattern. Military interventions designed to reshape governments in the Middle East—from Iraq and Libya to now Iran—have repeatedly promised rapid political transformation while producing instability, enormous financial burdens, and unintended strategic consequences.

The administration’s $88 billion request therefore represents far more than another wartime appropriation. It is a test of whether Congress believes this conflict advanced American national interests or merely delayed an inevitable return to diplomacy at vastly greater human and financial cost.

Schatz has called for a more rational American foreign policy—one that recognizes Iran as an adversary while rejecting military interventions undertaken without a coherent political strategy. He has also criticized the familiar coalition of foreign policy advocates, think tanks, media commentators, advocacy organizations, and members of Congress that has repeatedly promoted regime-change wars despite decades of disappointing results.

Ending the war may indeed be the least bad option available today. But peace achieved after months of destruction cannot erase the strategic error that made such a costly peace necessary. If the United States ultimately spends tens of billions of dollars, requests another $88 billion from taxpayers, sacrifices American lives, and returns to negotiations resembling the agreement it abandoned years earlier, this conflict may be remembered not as a demonstration of American strength but as another cautionary tale about the limits of military power and the enduring value of diplomacy.