The right-wing hawks who applauded Donald Trump for launching the war with Iran earlier this year are adopting a new argument to avoid criticizing the president as he fumbles toward enacting a weaker, piecemeal version of the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal he once decried. According to their theory, the current negotiations are a sham: Trump is merely laying off the Iranian regime temporarily to forestall Republican defeat in the midterms and will resume hostilities after the November elections.

Iran’s obvious and expected counterstroke of closing the Strait of Hormuz in response to U.S. and Israeli military strikes succeeded in hamstringing the global energy and fertilizer trade, sending prices soaring. Now Iran’s regime is intact and in control of its nuclear materials and ballistic missile stockpile, and the U.S., having failed to achieve the administration’s stated war goals, is negotiating surrender terms that will leave it in a weaker geostrategic position than before the war began.

“You go back to January, shipping was moving, Iran's nuclear program had been bombed six months before and was largely destroyed,” former NATO Ambassador Kurt Volker said on Fox News last week. “We launched this war, the global economy took a big hit. Oil prices skyrocketed. Now we're winding this down but we have Iran now emboldened to exercise some kind of control over the Strait of Hormuz.”

While MAGA’s hacks are eager to praise any deal as an historic victory for Trump and downplay the implications of the memorandum of understanding he signed with Iran, the movement’s hawks recognize that these negotiations are, as The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro put it, “a disaster.”

Over the last week, the hawk faction has scrambled for a response that doesn’t risk their own MAGA audiences by directly attacking Trump. Many have turned their vitriol on Vice President JD Vance for his role in the negotiations, absolving the president of responsibility for the document that he signed and publicly describes as “a very strong deal.”

But another argument recently adopted by right-wing hawks posits that the MOU is effectively meaningless because Trump is negotiating in bad faith. In this telling, the president only agreed to the MOU in order to bring down the cost of gas and thus boost the GOP’s standing in the midterm elections — and after they pass, he will order the U.S. military to resume its attack on Iran.

This argument has some benefits for the hawks:

1. It doesn’t require them to admit they made a mistake in supporting the war with Iran.
2. It doesn’t require them to criticize Trump.
3. It lets them wave away whatever emerges from the U.S.-Iran negotiations.
4. It buys them time to once again talk the president into military action through his TV.

Fox host Mark Levin, the shrill-voiced megahawk, and network contributor Hugh Hewitt, a higher-brow Sean Hannity, got this argument going on Thursday, as The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last noted.

“Time for a change in strategy,” Levin, who previously described himself as “very skeptical about any deal,” posted on social media. “We should consider slow walking the enemy, building up our munitions, our oil reserves, get the price of gasoline down, get through the midterms, then knock them out. Instead of rushing to a deal, building up their oil industry, transferring billions to them, etc.”

Hewitt responded affirmatively to Levin’s post and added that he believed this was actually the president’s strategy.

“Assume that many inside the Administration, including President Trump, settled on this course weeks ago,” he wrote. “Keeping the Senate and (against all odds) the House in GOP hands isn’t just a political goal for Republicans, it’s critical to the national security,” he continued, adding, “President Trump factoring in the realities of domestic politics and their consequences is a right and proper calculation.”

Hewitt’s theory contradicts Trump’s own prior statements — for which the pundit had praised the president — insisting that he would not take domestic politics into account in negotiating with the Iranians.

“They thought they were gonna outwait me. You know, ‘We'll outwait him. He's got the midterms,’” Trump said during a May 27 Cabinet meeting . “I don't care about the midterms.”

Responding to those remarks on Fox later that day, Hewitt said: “What I appreciate is the president said he's not caring about the midterms. What that means, and I think everyone understands, is he's putting the national security ahead of gas prices.”

Hewitt brought his revised views on Trump factoring domestic politics into Iran negotiations to Fox during last Friday’s edition of Special Report.

Hewitt described the MOU as “halftime, probably the longest halftime in the history of modern war since the phony war after Germany overran Poland in the fall of 1939. There was seven months when there was no war, and then Germany invaded France.”

(Note that in Hewitt’s historical analogy, Trump is Adolf Hitler.)

“We're going to go back on the battle damage assessment and figure out how to finish the job, unless Iran actually capitulates,” he predicted. “The MOU's language is bad. I think everyone is reading into it what they want but the reality is talk to me in five months, after the election, and I think we'll be back in the battle with Iran.”

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade, who has described the deal as “not acceptable” and repeatedly blamed it on Vance, added his voice on Tuesday morning.

“The closer it gets to the midterms, I think the less likely the president [is] to act,” he explained. “But after the midterms, the gloves come off.”

The upshot, however, is that the hawks’ escalation plans are unlikely to succeed and have huge potential downsides — while Iranian officials now know they can easily close the Strait of Hormuz, shut down a huge chunk of the global energy trade, and punish American consumers.

Their idea to attack Iran was foolhardy, the president’s belief he could pull off a strategic victory was ill-conceived, and now we are all dealing with the consequences.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters