The ceasefire in the Iran war is an admission that the US and Israel have utterly failed to achieve their goals in the conflict. They had hoped their six-week air offensive would reduce Iran to military and political impotence, but instead Iran has gained control of the Strait of Hormuz and has become the dominant power in the Gulf.
For all his apocalyptic threats to exterminate Iranian civilisation, Donald Trump had either to escalate though without much chance of decisively defeating Iran or call a halt to the conflict and get the best terms he could.
As always with Trump, everything about the end of the war is messy, leaving vital questions unanswered. Will he force Israel to declare a ceasefire in Lebanon, where 1.2 million people have been driven from their homes? Trump says that the ceasefire is based on a partial acceptance of Iran’s 10-part peace proposal, but is the US prepared to reduce or drop sanctions on Iran, which amount to an economic siege? Above all else, will this ceasefire be permanent or is it merely a pause in the fighting while the US and Israel regroup?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would certainly prefer a temporary pause in the war, after which Israel would return to trying to turn Iran into another Gaza, where everything from petrochemical plants to universities would be systematically erased. Iran is suspicious that just as the present war came eight months after the ceasefire which concluded the 12-day war last June, so the present conflict will be succeeded by another even more devastating one.
This might happen, but there are cogent reasons dissuading Trump from returning to the military option. For one, there is no more reason why it should succeed better in future than it has in the past.
The war has proved wildly unpopular at home and abroad. In Rome, the Pope denounced it, citing Jesus as saying to the proponents of war: “Your hands are full of blood.” In the US, influential former Trump supporters furiously objected to the war as the sort of unnecessary foreign entanglement Trump had previously warned against. Disillusioned former Trump acolyte Marjorie Taylor Greene called on people within the administration to stand against “Trump’s madness”, saying: “This is not making America great again, this is evil”. Some 53 per cent of Americans oppose the war and 34 per cent support it, according to the latest Economist/YouGov poll.
The ceasefire agreed overnight is only shakily coming into force today, yet already the war has irreversibly transformed the political landscape of the Middle East and the world in radical and paradoxical ways. The biggest paradox is that a US-Israeli war, aimed at defeating and marginalising Iran as a major player in the politics of the Middle East, has had precisely the opposite outcome. Though militarily outmatched, losing many of its leaders and suffering heavy physical damage, Iran is a far more powerful country today than it was on 28 February when the US and Israel began their attack.
By the same token, the US and Israel are less powerful than they were six weeks ago. They have failed to win a decisive victory against a regime which they imagined would be a pushover. Iran has demonstrated that by controlling the shipping lanes through the Strait, it has established a chokehold on the world economy, which only a full-scale land invasion of the northern Iranian side of the Gulf would stand a chance of breaking. By firing missiles and drones at the Arab oil states on the south side of the Gulf, Iran exposed their extreme fragility to attack. The ceasefire terms say Iran will reopen the Strait to international shipping, but the Iranian military will co-ordinate this. In other words, Iran has gone a long way towards establishing itself as the dominant power in the Gulf.
The vulnerability of the Arab oil states – Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Oman – has been exposed. The presence of US military bases in the Gulf states turned out to be no deterrent to Iran. The Gulf monarchs are currently angry at the damage done to them by Iran, yet they have no alternative but to double down on cultivating good relations with the Iranians. The days when the princes of the Gulf imagined their vast wealth made them the arbiters of the Middle East are well and truly over.
The contrast between Trump’s over-vaunting rhetoric about how the US might take out Iran “in one night” and that “a whole civilisation will die tonight”, followed by a ceasefire deal that partially accepts Iran’s 10-point peace plan, is too stark for the rest of the world to ignore. The momentum of the Trump juggernaut that seemed so unstoppable after the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on 3 January has been broken.
The Iranian plan includes the complete cessation of war in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen; full commitment to lifting economic sanctions on Iran; the release of Iranian funds and frozen assets in the US and compensation for damage caused by the war. The Iranians are unlikely to get all of this wish list, but the fact that they can credibly demand such concessions demonstrates who came out on top.
How did Trump so misplay what must have appeared to him as a winning hand? He was not alone: a large part of the Washington foreign policy establishment had long argued that overthrowing the Tehran regime would be easier than it looked. The Israelis made effective efforts to persuade the US President that victory over a failing Iranian regime would be swift and cheap. In a detailed account of how Trump finally decided to go to war, The New York Times describes a decisive meeting at the White House on 11 February at which Netanyahu played a video which included a montage of potential new Iranian leaders, including Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah.
The Israeli leader, The New York Times says, spoke to Trump and his senior officials about a “near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile programme could be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against US interests in neighbouring countries was assessed as minimal.”
Anti-Islamic Republic protests would erupt in the streets of Iranian cities and Kurdish fighters would pour across the Iranian border from Iraq, producing a crisis in which the Iranian regime would collapse. US intelligence was dubious about some of this, but Trump appears to have been convinced.
In the event, the war would solidify rather than disintegrate the Iranian regime. Trump had to choose between escalating the war – and risking the price of oil soaring to $200 a barrel – and a humiliating de-escalation. He has avoided a forever war, but at the cost of a lost one.
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