If you have ever offered a back-handed compliment to your children knowing that they will not catch it while the adults in the room all snort, then you understand what Emmanuel Macron did to Donald Trump at the Palace of Versailles this week.

Following the Paris G7 meeting, the French president invited the American dictator to a dinner at the Palace, home of French King Louis XVI, famously guillotined for treason in 1793 along with his wife Marie-Antoinette, concluding the French Revolution. The Revolution itself was largely precipitated by the domestic financial troubles caused by helping the United States win their own war of Independence against the United Kingdom.

When Trump had dinner at the Palace, it was in the Hall of Mirrors. It is an ornate, dazzling location for which Trump has long held an obsession. The dinner was billed as an event to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the French-backed independence of the United States.

The Hall of Mirrors at the Palace is best known as the site of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, in which Germany was forced to sign a humiliating peace treaty for which the terms were dictated to them, not negotiated, bringing a formal end to the First World War. The treaty required Germany to pay the western allies the equivalent of roughly US$600 billion in today’s money in war reparations.

It is appropriate, then, that Macron invited Trump to use this location to sign his memorandum of understanding with Iran to end the war he started with them. As with the German surrender of 1919, the United States do not seem to have had a lot of say in what they were agreeing to.

The first clause of the agreement includes peace for Lebanon, which is specifically named three times, and effectively means Israel holds a complete veto over the success of this armistice, able to force the United States back into a war it has already lost by continuing its own operations.

The United States, prior to starting this war principally to distract from the still-unreleased complete Epstein files, had 19 military bases in the middle east. Most of them were arrayed in a way that surrounded Iran, projecting theoretical power against an adversary the British and Americans created for themselves over western corporate control of the nation’s oil reserves, when they worked to overthrow a democratically elected government, leading directly to the Islamic Revolution.

It is significant, then, that the memorandum of understanding includes the declaration that the United States “undertakes to remove its forces from the proximity of the Islamic Republic of Iran within 30 days” of a final peace agreement.

Up until Trump invaded Iran, the Strait of Hormuz operated as an international waterway with unimpeded access for the world’s commercial shipping industry. The commonly accepted figure is that around 20 % of the world’s crude oil transited that Strait prior to the war.

The agreement restores unimpeded access to this commercially important waterway “for 60 days only” solving a problem created by the war that did not exist prior to the war, and giving effective permanent control of the previously international waterway to Iran. This fleetingly temporary undoing of American damage is the United States’ only accomplishment in this deal.

Not unlike the German surrender at Versailles, the agreement also provides significant war reparations:

The United States of America undertakes, with regional partners, to develop a definitive mutually agreed plan with at least USD 300 Billion, for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It is hard to read this agreement as anything other than a complete capitulation by the United States to an enemy the United States created for itself, attacked unnecessarily, and was defeated by in near record time.

That the American President signed the articles of surrender to Iran in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles is evidence that there is no aspect of history that any member of the American administration has ever read.

That the French president was able to so masterfully troll Donald Trump in this way to demonstrate it, moreover, will mark the moment at which the once mighty American empire truly became the open laughing stock of the world.

That they give Israel a veto over their own surrender within its terms has also ensured that peace never actually comes. The surrender agreement, as much as one exists, is already dead. The US will need to be defeated as many times as they have claimed victory for this war of choice to actually end. The empire has no close.