The Harvard Idiot wishes to confirm that the United States has surrendered to Iran, and that the President should receive the Nobel Peace Prize for it.
Not for the surrender. For the unanimity.
He has produced the rarest substance known to the modern world. Agreement. I am an idiot. I went to Harvard. I have never agreed with anyone, and now I agree with everyone.
And the whole room has agreed. Here I must do something I have never done in a column, which is cite sources approvingly. The New York Times titled its editorial Trump Lost This War. The Wall Street Journal, which wanted the war, called the deal a strategic retreat. Mike Pence said it smacks of appeasement. David Ignatius, in the Washington Post, called it an exit ramp, not a victory parade, which is the most Harvard sentence written about the affair, and we will return to the man who wrote it.
Then the other side filed its brief. Iran’s chief negotiator went on television and said Tehran had obtained by talking, several times over, what it could not take by force. Hezbollah called it a great victory. The Supreme Leader called it American desperation.
The loser is nodding along with the winner. The defeated do not, as a rule, file a concurring opinion. Americans have not agreed on anything since 2009. We do not agree on the weather, on whether a hot dog is a sandwich, or on what to call the Gulf. This man signed two pages, and a country that cannot agree on the time of day agreed on this by Thursday. There is no Nobel category for it. There should be. For creating unanimity.
The deal was written by Mr. Jared Kushner, Harvard College, concentration in Government. It runs two pages. He produced it with a gentleman from Hofstra. The original deal, the one the President spent ten years calling the worst in history, was written by Mr. Barack Obama, Harvard Law; it ran a hundred and fifty-nine pages and required six governments and a room of physicists.
Note the direction of travel. Obama, the Harvard lawyer, was thorough, and was called a traitor. Kushner, the Harvard Government major, was confident, and was given Versailles. This is the central finding of my career, now confirmed at the level of foreign policy. Harvard does not make you competent. It makes you able to lose at any length you choose. Mr. Obama lost in a hundred and fifty-nine pages. Mr. Kushner has discovered you can lose in two. This is called progress.
And here I call my star witness. The deal has fourteen points. Within seventy-two hours, the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson was in print to note that Woodrow Wilson also had fourteen, and to counsel us against calling it a surrender just yet. The Strait was closing again as he wrote. This is what Harvard provides. Not the win. The man who, while the rout is still settling, counts the clauses, finds a flattering precedent, and explains in beautiful prose that it is too soon to despair. I have been that man. I will be him again. It is the only thing I am good at.
The war itself, I should add, was run by a third Harvard man, Mr. Pete Hegseth of the Kennedy School, who hated the institution so thoroughly that he mailed his diploma back marked return to sender, and who is therefore the only figure in this story to have correctly assessed his own education.
The President did not go to Harvard. He went to Penn, about which I have nothing to say, silence being the most damning verdict in my repertoire. And yet the President’s conduct is, to my discomfort, the most honest in the file. He called the deal great. He cited no one. He produced no annex. He declared victory in a country he had just agreed to rebuild for three hundred billion dollars, and he believes it, and the belief is the tell. A Harvard man would never say great. A Harvard man would say exit ramp, as Mr. Ignatius did.
The gentleman from Hofstra is of the same superior species, and a real estate developer besides. He looked at a country the United States had spent the spring bombing and saw three hundred billion dollars of new construction, which is the sanest reaction anyone in the government has had to the war. No theory, no footnote, nothing to dress it in. I respect this more than I can say, and cannot, myself, manage it.
There remains the Vice President, who occupies a category of his own, having gone to Yale, which is the apparatus of Harvard without the achievement of Harvard, the citations without the acceptance letter. He has been sent to inform the nation that the rollout was not chaotic, a sentence he delivered while his own trip to the talks was canceled, reinstated, and canceled again. He intends to run for president in 2028 on a treaty he did not want, did not write, and cannot describe. A Harvard man would have called the chaos deliberate sequencing. A Hofstra man would have called it nothing. Only Yale calls it not chaotic, which is to deny the thing while standing in it. I ask the Committee to disregard him. A Yale man alone against the unanimous opinion of the species is not a dissent. It is a personality.
I have consulted my own Iranians, of whom I have several, all resident in Beverly Hills, none of whom has ever chanted death to America, partly from manners and partly because they left. They are, to a person, Jews, with one exception, who was my landlord, a Muslim and a gentleman, and who returned my deposit in full, the only deal between an American and an Iranian this decade that closed as written. These people agree on nothing. They have feuds I am not cleared to discuss. They cannot agree on how to make rice. They agree on this.
The Harvard Idiot extends to the President his sincere congratulations, his confidence in his continued growth, and his solidarity. For one week the entire range of opinion, foreign and domestic, from the Times to the Journal to the mullahs to the Persians of Beverly Hills, reached a single verdict, and he is the man who produced it. He did not bring peace to Tehran. He brought it to the group chat. No one has ever brought peace to the group chat.
The Harvard Idiot lives in Copenhagen, chosen for its distance from American opinion. He need not have bothered. There is only one opinion now, and it crossed the ocean to find him.