A “mandatory” new demand. A round of “self-defense” bombings hours after talks were declared progressing. A president outsourcing approval to Jerusalem while American families pay $327 more at the pump. This is not statecraft. It is improvisation with consequences.
Three months into a war he started, and three days after declaring that a “peace” agreement with Iran had been “largely negotiated,” President Donald Trump did two things over the weekend that should disqualify any serious claim to peacemaking. First, he posted to Truth Social that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan must “mandatorily” sign onto the Abraham Accords as a precondition of any agreement with Tehran. Second, he ordered U.S. Central Command to carry out fresh “self-defense” strikes in southern Iran — hitting missile sites and Iranian vessels in the Strait of Hormuz — even as his own negotiators were across the table from Iranian counterparts.
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the two largest of the named states, rejected the demand within twenty-four hours. Pakistan’s defense minister Khawaja Asif said his country would not enter any framework that “conflicts with its fundamental ideologies.” A Saudi source told Al Arabiya the kingdom’s stance on Palestinian statehood is unmoved. The Israeli prime minister, who would presumably be the chief beneficiary of any such expansion, was reportedly not on the call.
This is the diplomatic posture of an administration that has, by its own framing, branded its president “the world’s ultimate negotiator.” It is a posture that fuses three different objectives — containing Iran, ending the war he started, and expanding Israeli normalization — into a single ultimatum that none of the relevant parties have agreed to, and several have publicly refused. Worse, it stacks that ultimatum on top of an ongoing bombing campaign that is, by definition, the opposite of negotiation.
Americans, meanwhile, are paying the bill. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy reports that as of May 26, the average U.S. household has spent $327.58 more on motor fuel because of the war — a figure projected to reach $870 by summer’s end. Aggregate excess fuel spending has surpassed $43 billion. That number is not a forecast. It is an invoice.
1. The “Mandatory” Demand That Wasn’t Negotiated
The Abraham Accords, brokered during Trump’s first term, normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. They were, as Newsweek notes, widely considered Trump’s signature foreign policy achievement. Their original logic was bilateral — discrete deals between consenting governments, brokered patiently and announced ceremonially.
What Trump posted on May 25 is not that. According to the Times of Israel, the president framed his request as “mandatory” — a word that does not appear in any prior Accords document. He named six Muslim-majority nations, including Egypt and Jordan, which already have peace treaties with Israel dating to 1979 and 1994. There is no diplomatic reason for those two countries to “sign” anything. The demand reveals either a misunderstanding of regional treaty architecture or an indifference to it.
Burcu Ozcelik, a Middle East security fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, told Newsweek that the linkage allows Trump to “shift the blame toward the Gulf states if peace talks fall apart” — pre-positioning a scapegoat for failure. That is the candid reading from a regional analyst. It is also a confession that this is not, by design, a negotiation aimed at success.
The Saudis have stated their position with consistency across three administrations: there will be no normalization without a credible pathway to Palestinian statehood. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told Trump as much in the Oval Office last November. The current Israeli governing coalition rejects Palestinian statehood as a matter of declared policy. These two facts are not difficult to reconcile in the sense that they cannot be reconciled — not on the timeline of an Iran deal, and not by presidential decree.
“It should be mandatory that all of these Countries, at a minimum, simultaneously, sign onto the Abraham Accords.”
— Donald J. Trump, Truth Social, May 25, 2026
2. Bombing Toward a Peace Deal
Hours after Trump publicly suggested negotiations were “proceeding nicely,” Bloomberg reported that U.S. and Israeli jets struck Iranian vessels south of Larak Island in the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian state-aligned outlets reported casualties among Revolutionary Guard personnel. U.S. Central Command framed the action as defensive — a response to Iranian forces emplacing mines. CENTCOM spokesman Tim Hawkins said the U.S. was using “restraint during the ongoing ceasefire.” That sentence, taken seriously, describes a ceasefire under which the United States is still bombing.
The phrase “self-defense strikes” performs a familiar function. It places the moral burden on the adversary while preserving the option to escalate. It is the same framing the administration used in February when it joined Israel’s “pre-emptive” attack on Iran, the same framing used in early April when Trump threatened to wipe out “a whole civilization”, and the same framing being used now while Iranian negotiators sit in Muscat trying to draft a deal.
Either negotiations were progressing nicely, in which case bombing the other party’s vessels was an act of sabotage; or they were not, in which case the president was lying about the state of the talks. There is no third reading consistent with competent statecraft.
3. Jerusalem in the Driver’s Seat
Axios obtained the draft memorandum of understanding now circulating between the U.S. and Iranian negotiating teams. The document contemplates a 60-day pause, conditional sanctions relief, and a final agreement contingent on verification. It also stipulates that Israeli operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon would end as part of the deal. Netanyahu has objected to that clause directly to Trump on a phone call, an Israeli official told Axios. The Israeli prime minister has also publicly criticized the broader contours of the emerging deal.
The pattern across this war has been consistent: Israel objects, the United States modifies. The “preemptive” February strikes were Israeli-initiated and U.S.-joined. The June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer that destroyed Iran’s enrichment infrastructure was carried out at Israeli urging. The repeated threats to extend the war — to bridges, to power plants, to civilian infrastructure that experts said would constitute war crimes — accompanied periods of high Israeli pressure on Washington. And now, with a deal apparently within reach, Trump has appended to that deal a precondition designed to please Jerusalem, attached it to an ongoing bombing campaign, and excluded Netanyahu from the call announcing it — as if pre-emptively soliciting his veto.
This is not American leadership in the Middle East. It is American servicing of one regional client’s preferences, dressed in the language of “mandatory” presidential authority.
4. What This Costs the Average American
The geopolitical incoherence is not abstract. It carries a price tag — paid weekly at the pump, monthly at the grocery store, and in the still-uncounted lives of the U.S. service members the Pentagon has so far confirmed killed in the conflict.
Average additional fuel cost paid by a U.S. household since the war began on February 28. Projected to reach $870 by summer’s end.
As of May 26, 2026 — Up roughly 38 percent since the conflict began, the highest level since the early months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Total excess paid by Americans to the oil industry since prices began to rise. The cost of an undeclared war, billed to consumers.
Year-over-year consumer price growth in March — the largest jump since May 2024, driven substantially by fuel and shipping costs.
White House spokesman Kush Desai told CBS News that the economic disruptions are “temporary.” Vice President JD Vance has called it a “rough road.” Trump himself, when asked, called gas prices “a small price to pay.” For the family in Chicago or Toledo or Reno paying ninety cents more for diesel to drive to work, the adjectives — temporary, rough, small — describe somebody else’s experience entirely.
5. A Timeline of Incoherence
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6. A Coalition Already Splintering
The political damage is no longer confined to the opposition. Former Trump ally Marjorie Taylor Greene, who left Congress earlier this year after a public break with the president, warned that the war will cost Republicans the midterms. She called the administration’s pivot a “complete bait and switch” against the MAGA promise of no foreign wars. Tucker Carlson met with Trump multiple times to try to dissuade him from the operation. Megyn Kelly, on her own show, suggested American service members “died for Iran or for Israel” — not for the United States.
Inside Congress, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky — until recently a Republican — led a bipartisan war powers effort with Democrat Ro Khanna, arguing the strikes were unconstitutional. Trump campaigned successfully to defeat Massie in his primary. The message to remaining Republican skeptics was unmistakable: dissent has a price.
“Our president is deeply unwell, and the Cabinet must invoke the 25th Amendment.”
— Rep. Sam Liccardo (D-CA), April 7, 2026
This is not a normal political configuration. When the president’s own former allies are warning that his foreign policy is unhinged, when his coalition is publicly fragmenting over a war he refuses to define an end-state for, and when his only response to dissent is the political destruction of dissenters, the question is no longer whether the system is strained. The question is whether the system has a functioning circuit breaker.
The 25th Amendment and a President Negotiating While Bombing
Section 4 of the 25th Amendment provides a mechanism the Constitution’s framers built precisely for moments when a president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” It requires the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet (or a body designated by Congress) to make that declaration. The vice president would then assume the duties of acting president. If the president contests the declaration, Congress decides by two-thirds vote of both chambers.
The amendment has never been invoked in American history. MSNBC’s legal analysis notes that politically diverse voices have raised it during this Iran war — including Democratic lawmakers like Sen. Chris Murphy, Sen. Ed Markey, Rep. Ro Khanna, Rep. Diana DeGette, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, and Rep. Sam Liccardo, with more than 70 members of Congress on record by mid-April.
The case being made is not partisan. It is functional. A president who announces a peace deal is “largely negotiated” and then bombs the negotiating partner’s vessels two days later is not exhibiting the steady judgment the office requires. A president who attaches a unilateral, non-negotiated demand to a multilateral framework — naming six countries that have not agreed to it, two of which (Egypt, Jordan) already recognize Israel — is not exhibiting basic command of the file. A president who has, by his own framing, made the Iran war an existential question for civilization itself, then offshored final approval to a foreign prime minister, has surrendered the executive function the Constitution vests in him alone.
The Practical Barriers
The barriers to invocation are real and we should name them honestly. Vice President JD Vance has shown no public daylight with Trump. The Cabinet was hand-selected for loyalty. Congressional Republicans, having watched Massie’s primary loss, have powerful incentive not to break. Section 4 also requires sustained majorities through what could be weeks of contested process.
Why The Barriers Don’t Negate The Case
The procedural difficulty of invoking the 25th Amendment does not refute the constitutional case for it. If anything, the obstacles are evidence of how badly the system has degraded — not evidence that the system does not need the remedy. The amendment exists because the framers anticipated moments when a president would be functionally unable to lead and surrounded by people unwilling to say so. A president whose erratic posture has cost Americans $43 billion at the pump, killed U.S. service members in a war Congress never authorized, and now threatens to collapse his own negotiated peace through a precondition no party has accepted — that is exactly the moment the amendment was written for.
Editorial Conclusion
A peace deal cannot be built on improvisation, ultimatums, and bombs. What the world saw this week was not a negotiator at work. It was a presidency unable to hold a single thought across forty-eight hours — extending war while announcing peace, demanding the consent of nations that have publicly refused it, deferring final say to a foreign capital. The constitutional question is no longer hypothetical. The 25th Amendment was written for a president who could no longer discharge the office. The country is watching one in real time.
Sources & References
- NBC News — Trump says it should be “mandatory” for more countries to join the Abraham Accords as part of Iran deal
- TIME — What to Know About the Abraham Accords as Trump Seeks Iran Deal
- Times of Israel — Trump says ‘mandatory’ for Muslim nations involved in Iran deal to join Abraham Accords
- Newsweek — What Are the Abraham Accords? Trump Pushes More Nations to Sign Amid US-Iran Talks
- Bastille Post — Saudi Arabia, Pakistan reject Trump’s Abraham Accords demand
- CNBC — U.S. conducts ‘self-defense strikes’ in Iran as Trump pushes for peace deal
- Bloomberg — US Strikes Targets in Iran as Trump Hails Progress on Peace Deal
- Axios — Exclusive: What’s inside the Iran deal Trump is close to signing
- Axios — Trump asked Muslim leaders to sign peace deal with Israel after Iran war ends
- MSNBC / Maddow Blog — Amid fresh U.S. strikes in Iran, Trump goes on the defensive following Republican pushback
- CNBC — Trump faces calls for removal over threats to wipe out ‘whole civilization’ in Iran
- TIME — What to Know About the 25th Amendment as Lawmakers Call for Trump’s Removal
- The Hill — Democrats say Trump’s Iran threat cause for 25th Amendment removal or impeachment
- MSNBC Legal Blog — How the 25th Amendment would work against Trump amid his Iran belligerence
- CNN — An eclectic, bipartisan group suddenly calls for removing Trump using the 25th Amendment
- ITEP — Iran War Fuel Costs — Continually Updated Tabulation
- CBS News — In 8 weeks, the Iran war has dented the U.S. economy. The damage could linger.
- TIME — How High Could Gas Prices Go? What to Know About the Iran War’s Ongoing Impact
- TIME — Marjorie Taylor Greene Warns Trump’s War in Iran Will Cost Republicans the Midterms
- Rep. Liccardo (House.gov) — Comment on Cease-Fire with Iran, 25th Amendment
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