Trump Needs Iran’s Deal — America’s Missiles Are Running Out
Trump and Hegseth fought at Camp David over the drained stockpile the same morning Tehran declared the Hormuz pact nearly done.
Iranian officials declared the Strait of Hormuz deal all but done Thursday morning — “agreed in principle,” per Bloomberg at 5:12 AM ET, “close to being finalised” by 10:19 on the Guardian’s live blog — and the timing is the story: the same morning, the Washington Post put Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in a room at Camp David, fighting over how few missiles America has left. Tehran says the deal is nearly done. Trump concedes only “a lot of progress.” No Omani official has said a word.
Trump has promised this deal for months, lately by the day: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent saw “a chance we may have a deal today or tomorrow” on Tuesday — the same day Narativ called the talks “a phantom of Trump’s imagination”: the papers moved only through mediators, and Washington never held the pen. The phantom now has a body. Tehran is the only government describing it.
The Post’s Camp David reporting explains why Trump needs it to be real. He and Hegseth clashed over how far the war has drawn down America’s missile stockpile — Foreign Policy puts PAC-3 Patriot interceptors down from roughly 2,300 to 800 — and when the fight leaked, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the story “100% fake news,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell echoed her, and Trump posted that the “leakers” of these “treasonous statements” are “being hunted down,” promising jail. Leavitt denied a fight nobody could see. Trump hunted the people who saw it.
Narativ asked the question on July 20, after Iranian missiles breached one American base four times in a week: “Do the batteries defending those bases have the missiles to keep defending them?”
Sixteen days later, Camp David answered it.
No.
