When a nation's word is treated as worthless

According to CNBC, two United States service members have been killed in Jordan, one remains missing, and Iran has formally abandoned an interim peace agreement — issuing a threat of "unforgettable lessons" in its wake. When asked about Iran's repudiation of the agreement, President Trump reportedly said, "I couldn't care less." I confess that phrase arrests me more than the military exchange itself.

I spent years of my life — first in Paris negotiating the treaty that ended our Revolution, then in London negotiating the agreement that bears my name — on the premise that the words of an agreement carry weight precisely because the parties care about them. A treaty is not a preference. It is a public commitment, and the public faith of a nation is its most durable asset in the world. The moment a head of government signals indifference to whether an agreement holds, he does not merely wound that single agreement; he depreciates every obligation his nation holds or may seek to contract.

I am not in a position to evaluate the specific terms of this interim arrangement — I could not have known them, and CNBC's account does not detail them. What I can say, as a matter of diplomatic principle rather than recollection, is this: even a flawed agreement, imperfectly observed, is preferable to no framework at all, because a framework creates the procedural ground on which grievances may be raised without resort to arms. When Iran steps away from that framework and the United States responds with a shrug, both parties have chosen escalation by default rather than by deliberate design — and that is the most dangerous kind.

The deaths of two soldiers and the disappearance of a third demand more than a posture of indifference. They demand that the government ask what obligation — treaty, convention, or law of armed conflict — governs the conduct of each party and how that obligation may be enforced or restored. That is the question a statesman should be unable to shrug away. Grief without legal remedy is mere sentiment; legal remedy without acknowledged obligation is mere procedure. The two must be joined.

I do not say that Iran's conduct is defensible; the CNBC account makes no such argument, and neither do I. I say only that a republic which treats its own international commitments as expendable — that calls off concern for a peace agreement with the casualness one dismisses an inconvenience — will find, in time, that other nations read that casualness as an instruction. They will learn that this government's signature is provisional, its word conditional, its public faith a negotiating posture rather than a binding undertaking. The resulting world is one in which force, not agreement, resolves every question. We tried that world before we had a Constitution, and it was not favorable to the republic's interests.

What should be done? The administration ought to state clearly, publicly, and without equivocation what legal and diplomatic framework it intends to substitute for the one now abandoned — and on what terms it will hold Iran accountable under the laws governing armed conflict. Silence and indifference are not a foreign policy. They are its absence.