“Okay, MAGA friends, I’m going to offer you a challenge,” Adam Kinzinger asks in a video on Facebook, where the former U.S. Congressman from Illinois has 374K followers. “Name one concession that Iran has given. One concession that didn’t exist before the $40 billion war started.”
[NOTE: Kinzinger’s “didn’t exist” conditional refers to Iran’s pledge in the most recent Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the U.S. to open the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days, a pledge which merely returns the Strait to its pre-war open status.]
With his question, Kinzinger — a non-MAGA Republican who has been a vocal critic of Donald Trump — joins numerous critics on both sides of the aisle arguing that, even allowing for the administration’s shifting objectives, the U.S. appears to have achieved very little for its expensive and deadly attacks against Iran.
Obama-era National Security Advisor Susan Rice has called the result a “horrific surrender” by the U.S., achieved just months after Trump declared that “unconditional surrender” by Iran was the only acceptable result.
Numerous Republican lawmakers have been equally outraged: Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) called the results “out of step” with the administration’s goals, which had variously included regime change, an end to Iran’s nuclear program, and a less volatile region for U.S.-aligned Gulf Arab states like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain.
[NOTE: Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana derided the administration more pointedly than Wicker, calling the Iran war the “worst foreign policy blunder in decades” and portraying GOP standard-bearer Ronald Reagan as “rolling over in his grave.”]
Reagan is rolling over in his grave. Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not curbed, and they have learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works and will undoubtedly leverage it in the future. Now, Iran gets to build brand-new infrastructure under this deal.
— U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (@SenBillCassidy) June 17, 2026
Before the war, the…
Critics contend that the MOU did not explicitly achieve any of the goals listed above, while among Iran’s gains has been the removal of “all sanctions” against the country, allowing it to accept American dollars and otherwise opening global markets for its oil.
This relief is in addition to the release to Iran of billions of dollars in frozen funds, even as the country remains under the control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the son of its previous leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed by the U.S. and Israel at the start of the war.
The relief measures extended to Iran — which factor heavily into Kinzinger’s query — come despite the fact that, as the Council on Foreign Relations reports: “The U.S. government considers Iran to be the foremost state sponsor of terrorism, spending more than one billion dollars on terrorist financing annually. There are between 140,000 and 185,000 IRGC-Quds Force partner forces across Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen.”
