Rupert Murdoch’s flagship paper ripped apart President Donald Trump’s peace deal with Iran after U.S. and Iranian forces engaged in renewed fighting on Sunday.
Just ten days after Trump, 80, signed the memorandum of understanding with Iran during his dinner visit to the Palace of Versailles in France—including an agreement to halt hostilities—the two countries once again exchanged trading strikes.
Meanwhile, Tehran asserted Sunday that the deal gives the regime exclusive authority to manage traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, even as the complete, toll-free opening of the vital waterway had been one of Trump’s central selling points of the deal.
“All of this violates the deal and calls into question why Mr. Trump signed it,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board declared Sunday afternoon.
The paper delivered a scathing line after highlighting Trump’s Saturday Truth Social post announcing U.S. airstrikes in retaliation for an Iranian strike on a tanker carrying Qatari oil in which he fumed, “It is very possible that they will never learn!”
“Or is it U.S. decision makers who never learn?” the Journal, which has more than 4 million subscribers, wrote.
“Vice President JD Vance has been touting Iran’s ‘transformed’ Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders ready to ‘turn over a new leaf’ with the U.S. He even reached ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ with them outside the memorandum, Mr. Vance assured critics,” it continued. “Well, these are no gentlemen. It’s the same terrorist regime, and this is the Battle of Hormuz that Mr. Trump thought he had ducked.”
It then tore into the litany of concessions Trump made to Iran in his deal, particularly his decision to lift sanctions on Iranian oil for the first time in decades and his promise to release billions in frozen Iranian assets, arguing that Trump had signed away leverage for negotiations over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
“The U.S. needs the leverage for nuclear negotiations, and it was never wise to give Iran a blank check,” the paper wrote. “All the more so now that the regime isn’t respecting the deal, which mandates a cease-fire as well as Iran’s ‘best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels.’”
The Journal told Trump that his tit-for-tat strikes, which he has called “love taps,” “won’t impress” Tehran, adding that the regime sees the president’s “reluctance to enforce the cease-fire terms.”
The paper capped off its takedown by giving Trump a scolding for wavering on forcing open the Strait—closed by Iran only after the president launched his war in February—and warned that the country now leaves him with only two choices: “surrender Hormuz to Iranian terror or fight for it, like he always should have once he started the war, and reopen the Strait by force.”
After the editorial board published its piece, the U.S. and Iran agreed to stop fighting and resume peace talks, a Trump administration official told CNN, leaving the Journal’s call to reopen the Strait by force unheeded.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
