Trump's 'Apocalypse Now' is a busted flush. Iran has proved it and China knows it
US President Donald Trump has just given the world a masterclass in the art of dealmaking. You threaten armageddon one minute, and cave in to your enemy’s main demands the next. This should go down in the textbooks of diplomacy.
Iranians have good reason to come out into the streets and wave their flag today. Iran is entering two weeks of negotiations, having notched up an impressive list of strategic wins.
This is irrespective of how the 10 points in the ceasefire plan are described. Trump called them a “workable basis” for talks. Iran and Pakistan described them as guarantees for a ceasefire for two weeks only.
Under these terms, Iran will keep enriching uranium. If it has agreed to surrender its stock of highly enriched uranium, this is no great concession; it is what Iran offered in negotiations mediated by Omani Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi before the US and Israel attacked.
Iran will continue to control the Strait of Hormuz, allowing a limited number of ships through during the period of the ceasefire. And it will continue to collect transit fees, along with Oman.
Trump retweeted the statement of Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, in which he said that for two weeks, safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz would be possible “via coordination with Iran’s Armed Forces”. This means that reopening the strait comes with Washington’s recognition of Iran’s authority over it.
But that is not all. The price of peace with Iran is a binding pledge not to attack it again, the removal of all sanctions - both primary and secondary - and compensation for war damage.
Of the 10 points, Iran’s demand for the withdrawal of all US combat forces from the region is the most speculative. A withdrawal of US forces from Iraq has been demanded by successive prime ministers in Baghdad for the best part of a decade, and it still has yet to happen.
Netanyahu loses
Whatever happens in Islamabad over the next two weeks, the fact that Trump pulled the rug out from under an intense campaign of US and Israeli air strikes is a major blow to the authority of the man who led him into this war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
If his genocidal campaign in Gaza spelt the end of Israel’s moral authority over Europe, the war on Iran could have the same effect on Israel’s monopoly over Washington’s policymaking in the Middle East. No longer will issues be seen in DC exclusively through Israel’s lens.
Every one of the predictions that Netanyahu pitched to Trump for over an hour in the situation room of the White House - a room rarely used for meetings with foreign leaders - on 11 February proved to be false.
Trump's campaign became one expletive-laden, racist, colonial rant, topped by his version of Apocalypse Now - his threat to end 3,000 years of Iranian civilisation
That Iran’s ballistic missile programme could be destroyed in a few weeks: Iran continued to fire ballistic missiles into the sixth week.
That the regime would be so weakened it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz: no ship has passed without Iranian permission and/or payment.
That the danger of Iran landing blows against US interests in neighbouring countries was minimal: Iran landed blows on US aircraft, radar systems and troops continuously in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar.
That street protests inside Iran would begin again, and with impetus provided by Mossad and an intense bombing campaign, conditions could be fostered for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime: there has not been one defection either at home or abroad from the regime, and popular rage against the bombing has consolidated, not diminished, support for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The New York Times reported that Netanyahu delivered his presentation in a confident monotone, as if he knew in advance that Trump had made up his mind.
But the Israeli prime minister, who had campaigned for decades for a US strike on Iran and who saw Iran’s hand in every act of Palestinian resistance, cannot be so confident today that Trump has his back.
Fates intertwined
There is no dispute that Netanyahu was the man who led Trump into this war. If the war goes wrong, he is the man upon whose shoulders the entire Washington establishment - Republican and Democrat - will place the blame.
Then there is Trump, whose erratic social media posts have stoked calls by members of Congress for his impeachment. His Republican base remains silent, as they, too, can see the direction in which this president is leading them ahead of the midterm elections in November.
The joint venture in Iran means that Trump has tied his fate politically to that of Netanyahu, and yet the polls for both men in the US are nosediving.
The latest evidence is a Pew Research poll conducted at the end of March. It found that 60 percent of US adults have an unfavourable view of Israel, up from 53 percent last year. A total of 59 percent have little or no confidence in Netanyahu to do the right thing, up from 52 percent last year, and the majority of adults under 50 in both parties rate Israel and Netanyahu negatively.
If the experience of the last two sets of negotiations with the Iranians is anything to go by, there is a good chance that Trump will say Iran is not upholding its side of the deal and restart the campaign.
Certainly Netanyahu will strain every sinew to engineer such a situation. He does not even need false-flag drone strikes against Iran’s Gulf neighbours. He can simply keep on bombing Lebanon, as he did on Wednesday.
But what if Trump does restart the war? What is there to do to Iran that he has not already tried? What new cards does Trump have to play?
Iran has plenty. It can close Hormuz again, and start working on doing to the Suez Canal and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait at the mouth of Red Sea what it has done to the Gulf.
The Houthis in northern Yemen have the air-to-sea missiles to attack shipping in the Red Sea. They had just joined Iran’s campaign. The global price of oil and basic commodities would shoot up in the event of a resumption of an air war that has already failed to bring Iran to heel once.
Trump further weakened
Unlike the first or second Gulf wars, Trump does not have the backing of Europe. He could threaten European states by pulling out of Nato, but Trump is not strong enough now to continue a war that makes no sense either to his allies or to his own party.
The third Gulf war has distilled all the mistakes of the first two. They were made by former President George HW Bush in Iraq, and his son, George W Bush, in Afghanistan and Iraq, followed by the blunders of the Obama administration in Libya and Syria, and the Biden administration in Gaza.
Trump’s campaign became one expletive-laden, racist, colonial rant, topped by his version of Apocalypse Now - his threat to end 3,000 years of Iranian civilisation.
In the world order that is forming in the ashes of American exceptionalism, Trump’s inchoate ramblings are seen as weakness. The US under Trump has lost all sense of the utility of force - and that is a big thing for the world’s strongest army to lose.
Trump’s lack of cards, and his weakness on the world stage, has already been marked by China and Russia. They did not just abstain from a Bahraini resolution calling for the Strait of Hormuz to be reopened; they vetoed it.
Fu Cong, China’s ambassador to the United Nations, described the resolution as “unbalanced” and stated that it “only accuses Iran”.
“We don’t think the resolution is balanced. It doesn’t even touch upon the root cause of the situation,” he said. “I want to emphasise, in particular, the timing is very bad. We all heard what the US president has said [about targeting a whole civilisation].”
Fragile ceasefire
So what happens next? Two factors will determine the fate of the ceasefire: what happens in Hormuz, and whether transit can be formalised in an arrangement that Iran and Oman can live with. What happens in Lebanon will also be crucial.
A major item in Iran’s 10 demands was that the ceasefire should apply across the region, particularly in Lebanon. Yet hours after the chief mediator, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, said the ceasefire should include Lebanon, he was contradicted by Netanyahu, who vowed the campaign in southern Lebanon would continue.
Hormuz and Lebanon will decide whether there is another round to this war on Iran - but Trump and Netanyahu know exactly what to expect if they plunge back in
Will this hold? Will Iran allow Israel to continue to pulverise Lebanon as if nothing has happened?
A Hezbollah official said the group would not accept the continuation of Israeli strikes in Lebanon as it had done before the attack on Iran, but it is “giving a chance” to the countries that reached the agreement to obligate Israel to follow it.
Already, the ceasefire was struggling on Wednesday, as Israel carried out a blitzkrieg in Lebanon that hit 100 targets in 10 minutes, killing dozens and injuring hundreds. In addition, a major Saudi oil pipeline running east to west was hit by Iran.
Hormuz and Lebanon will decide whether there is another round to this war on Iran - but Trump and Netanyahu know exactly what to expect if they plunge back in.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
This article was sourced from Middle East Eye.
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