Proverbs Gave Me a Better Way to See Trump's Iran Deal

Sometimes the book of Proverbs can seem a little simplistic, its cause-and-effect declarations sounding nice but not very realistic. Proverbs 10:28 teaches us that “the prospect of the righteous is joy, but the hopes of the wicked come to nothing.” 

As Jake tells Brett at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Because from where I’m sitting in the United States of America in 2026, the hopes of the wicked are coming along pretty well. Almost every day, President Donald Trump unveils some new plan to rip up environmental protections, immiserate refugees and their allies, or further loot the nation to enrich himself and his friends, all while dodging accountability for his crimes. Proverbs seems less applicable than the laments of Job: “Why do the wicked live, reach old age, and grow mighty in power?"” (Job 21:7). If this is what it looks like for the hopes of the wicked to come to nothing, then I’d hate to see what it looks like when they succeed. 

But then I look at Trump’s catastrophic war with Iran, and I’m not so sure. Maybe the writer of Proverbs was onto something, and that something has implications that go a lot deeper than just our foreign policy debacles.

As I write this, the U.S. appears to be closer to a peace deal with Iran than we’ve been in quite some time. Given how many times Lucy has pulled this football away from Charlie Brown, you could be forgiven for some skepticism here, but take a look at the details of this agreement: It is—as Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) points out in this illuminating thread—essentially a “surrender to Iran.” Maybe at some point, Iran will balk at some of the particulars, but why would they? Iranian leadership is getting everything it wants. As Murphy puts it: “These are Iran’s terms. They made one single concession—opening the Strait. And it’s not even a concession because the Strait was open before the war!”

Assuming that’s accurate, the United States has lost the war, during its big birthday party no less. 

Nevertheless, as Murphy notes, “An end to this disastrous war is a good thing—no matter the humiliating terms. Because every day it continues, our nation gets weaker, costs keep going up, Iran gets stronger, and Trump gets further from accomplishing his goals. More war would just make things worse.”

READ MORE: Kings Start Wars. Christians Stop Them

It is worth remembering how often Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth vowed to crush his perceived enemies in some of the most embarrassing language imaginable. “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation,” Hegseth prayed in March. “Give them … overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” Trump himself vowed plenty of violence as well, including but not limited to his now-infamous April 7 promise that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Dust in the wind, as it turns out, since all of Hegseth and Trump’s bloodthirsty threats seemed to have about as much impact on ending the war as posting fart noises on TikTok would have. So, the U.S. continued its fruitless attempt to bomb the nation into submission, which resulted in lots of horrible carnage and death—including the killing of a reported 168 students at a girls school—but failed to weaken Iranian leadership’s resolve. In the end, as many predicted at the outset of this useless and illegal war, the only response available to the U.S. was to cave.

So here lies a vast and humiliating monument to Trump’s preferred way of doing things. Trump and his allies thought that loudly and proudly playing the heel on the world stage would lead to more power, more influence, more victories. They believed that the U.S. had gotten too concerned with ethics, virtue, and empathy, and that we needed to get comfortable with being the bad guy: no rules, no friends, no mercy. They believed this would lead to bigger wins. They were wrong.

This is hardly the first time the U.S. has had to learn this lesson. As writer Noah Berlatsky points out in his Substack, the U.S. military has a formidable record when it comes intervening in wars of oppression (World War II, the Korean War, the Gulf War). When you look at wars in which the U.S. was the imperialist aggressor (Vietnam, Iraq, and now, Iran), things are much more sobering. Trump’s “embarrassing and humiliating defeat suggests that insulting allies, murdering civilians, launching illegal wars, and fascist sadism in general makes the US, and the world, weaker and less safe for everyone,” Berlatsky writes.

In other words, evil is both morally wrong and strategically stupid. This war was not just a failure of our national moral character. It’s simply bad policy. Funny how those two things seem to go together.

This is worth remembering in our own lives as well: Moral failure is neither wise nor smart. The temptation to do something bad often comes with a sense that you’re actually making the savvy, justified choice. How many personal disasters have started with a line of thinking that runs “Yes, I’m doing a bad thing, but I have a good reason” or “I know this is usually wrong, but this particular situation is different.” We convince ourselves that big mistakes are actually sly calculations and, like David summoning Bathsheba, deliberately chart the course of our own ruin.

Which brings us full circle back to Proverbs and some of its cutesy frameworks. “The hopes of the wicked come to nothing.” Yes, that can look a little naive sometimes, but maybe the writer of Proverbs is taking a long view here. As they write only two verses later: “the righteous will never be uprooted, but the wicked will not remain in the land” (Proverbs 10:30). This suggests a certain fullness of time—history bending towards justice, as it were. The hopes of the wicked will, eventually, come to nothing. If history is any judge, that’s a lesson our nation will likely never learn. But you can.

Evil is both morally wrong and strategically stupid.