All the pundits agreed that Trump gave away the store to the Iranians with the June 17 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).

He pledged to lift sanctions on Iranian oil exports and to release frozen oil revenues. He pledged to encourage Iran’s Gulf neighbors to pony up $300 billion in a reconstruction fund. He even pledged not to interfere in Iran’s domestic affairs.

The Iranians took all of that to the bank.

And then, nothing.

In fact, the Trump MOU set a trap. And Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) fell into it. And that is why we’ve had several days of intense U.S. (and perhaps Kuwaiti and Bahraini) bombings of Iran this week.

The MOU was performance-based. You, the Iranians, will get all these goodies, but you have to do some very basic things, the first of which is to guarantee free navigation through the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days.

And the Iranians—specifically, the IRGC—just couldn’t do it.

They thought that the MOU meant the haggling had just begun. They tried to redefine what “freedom of navigation” and “no tolls” meant. They tried to force ships to use a new transit corridor fully within Iranian territorial waters, the so-called “northern route.”

And the U.S. said no.

Without fanfare, the U.S. Navy and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have been escorting ships through a U.S.-protected “southern route” for the past three weeks, with great success. Despite the latest military flare-up, the oil markets are yawning. Brent crude has been trading on the spot market in the low 70s all week, and West Texas Intermediate is below $70 a barrel.

Until the Treasury Department revoked Iran’s special license to sell oil earlier this week (because of the IRGC attacks on shipping), Iran had managed to load 67 million barrels of crude onto tankers and get most of it out through the Strait into international waters, where it is still looking for buyers.

Sanctions relief didn’t provide the immediate income boost the regime had counted on. And so the IRGC said, “Let’s use the cattle prod.”

Long-term, the Iranians are never going to give up their uranium. None of it. One of their state TV networks last week broadcast an AI image of a mushroom cloud rising from an unnamed city after a nuclear attack. Nuclear weapons remain their goal. They just thought, mistakenly, that the Trump MOU was another Obama nuclear deal that would allow them to achieve it.

Satellite photographs from late June show recent construction at one of the four major Iranian nuclear sites, Pickaxe Mountain, south of Natanz. Thanks to David Albright and his team at the Institute for Science and International Security, we now know that the Iranians have erected chicanes on the access roads in an attempt to make any evacuation of whatever is beneath the mountain by U.S. Special Forces more difficult.

This also indicates that Iran is storing part or all of its highly enriched uranium (HEU) stockpile in this previously undisclosed (and unbombed) site. Unless, of course, the chicanes are a deception.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, one of the two “negotiators” meeting with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, reportedly told the Americans this week he can’t convince the IRGC to stop attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

For his efforts, Araghchi was forced by pro-regime hard-line protesters to flee one of the multiple funeral processions for the defunct Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, after being greeted with chants of “traitor.”

Trump is clearly losing patience with Araghchi and Speaker of the Parliament of Iran Mohammad Qalibaf. While at the NATO summit in Ankara this week, he called them “scum” and “a cancer” that “had to be removed.” But—but—on Thursday, as he was returning to Washington, he said the Iranian negotiators had called him again, begging to make a deal.

Even the Chinese are losing patience with the Iranians. On Friday, their Foreign Ministry spokesperson told the Iranians to knock off the attacks on international shipping and get back to the MOU. Sounds like the Chinese prefer secure oil supplies to chaos and the Imam Mahdi.

Araghchi and Qalibaf have been able to sell the carrots of the Trump MOU, but not the sticks that require IRGC performance. As I have been saying for some time, I believe we are heading back to war—the big war, not negotiating with bombs, as we have been doing this week.

The big war means the discombobulator. It means dislocation. It means the destruction of the IRGC. It means revolution.

Ultimately, that is the only way to denuclearize Iran. This regime will never do it.