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Oil tankers are beginning to make their way nervously out of the Strait of Hormuz for the first time in 10 weeks under the terms of the US-Iran deal to end the war. At the same time, the US has ended its blockade of Iranian ports and suspended sanctions on Iranian oil.
President Donald Trump faces strong criticism from Israel and anti-Iran hawks in the US for agreeing a peace accord, or memorandum of understanding (MOU), which leaves Iran stronger than it was before the war. But the President appears intent on avoiding his own “forever war” like those he had previously criticised in Iraq and Afghanistan. Given the unpopularity of the war in America – and the fact that critics of the deal offer no alternative policy other than more war – he may get away with an utter failure to achieve his original objectives of regime change after a decisive military victory.
Will the deal last? Friction is already impeding negotiation of the next phase of the pact, with US Vice President JD Vance dropping plans to travel to Switzerland for further talks. Suspicion of the US, which has twice attacked Iran while peace negotiations were under way, has apparently led Iran to wait to see whether or not the US is going to implement the interim agreement.
Israel is the biggest obstacle to a negotiated peace, its leaders denouncing the deal as a betrayal and a calamity for all. The first paragraph of the MOU mandates “the immediate and permanent end to the war on all fronts, including Lebanon”. But Israel is desperate not to end its incursion into Lebanon where it is fighting a resurgent Hezbollah, the Shia paramilitary movement allied to Iran. On Friday there was fierce fighting in the south of the country where Israel says that a four-man Israeli tank crew, including a battalion commander, were killed and a further five Israeli soldiers wounded in attacks on Friday by Hezbollah, while Israeli air strikes killed 18 and injured 33 people according to the Lebanese government. Later Israel and Hezbollah announced a ceasefire.
It looks unlikely that the MOU will unravel at this late stage, though Israel will try to preserve its freedom of operations in Lebanon. These are now being constricted on the insistence of Trump, who, along with Vance, has been publicly denouncing Israeli behaviour in furious terms never used by American leaders in the past.
Trump recounted his expletive-laden exchanges with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he accuses of reckless violence in a bid to provoke Iran into stalling or scrapping the peace deal. Vance said of Israel in an interview with The New York Times that “you can’t just kill your way out of solving every national security problem that you have”. Trump demanded that Israel stop blowing up entire apartment blocks, with civilians inside, just because they saw a single Hezbollah fighter there.
The crucial question now is how far Trump and Vance will match their rhetorical anger at Israeli actions in Lebanon with an actual withdrawal of military backing. Vance emphasised that America was Israel’s only powerful ally in the world, and it supplies and pays for two-thirds of Israel’s defensive weaponry. Actually, the US-Israel military alliance has gone a lot deeper than that since 2021, when the Israeli armed forces were integrated into US Central Command (Centcom) in Florida. Since then, the American and Israeli military have trained in peace and operated in war more closely than any US ally since Britain in the Second World War, according to experts in Washington.
Is that military alliance now dissolving less than four months after Trump and Netanyahu confidently went to war together on 28 February? Their joint objective was to destroy Iran as a political and military player in the Middle East. With Syria and Iraq weakened by devastating wars, Iran was the last nation state in the region capable of resisting US-Israeli hegemony.
But there is an iron rule in Middle East politics: the US and Israel always overplay their hands. Israel was in a more than usually hubristic mood earlier this year because it had struck crippling blows against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Trump was feeling equally over-confident because he had just kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and was gaining effective control of Venezuela.
The US-Israeli air campaign certainly was vastly destructive, with Iran being hit by 23,800 air strikes. But, as in Vietnam, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq, military superiority stubbornly refused to translate into political gains. Iran took control of the Strait of Hormuz and fired missiles and drones at the hugely wealthy Arab oil states on the south side of the Gulf. They now know that what happened once can happen again. Their energy infrastructure is vulnerable and the US and Israel cannot defend them.
The balance of power in the Gulf – the most valuable and strategic territory on Earth – has changed, and in Iran’s favour. The Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) states – Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates and Oman – are discovering to their horror that they have no choice but to conciliate an empowered Tehran. The UAE, which had previously been co-operating closely with Israel, has agreed to release between $10bn and $20bn in frozen Iranian assets in the UAE in return for Iran halting attacks, according to a Reuters report. They say some $3bn had already been made available to Tehran.
In 1990, Saddam Hussein wanted to assert Iraq’s power over the Gulf and invaded Kuwait. It turned out to be a disastrous idea and the following year his army was defeated by a US-led coalition, though he was left in power in Baghdad. Almost by accident 36 years later, Iran is close to achieving Saddam’s ambition and becoming the dominant power of the Gulf.
Paradoxically, the assassination of 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, alongside much of the Iranian leadership, on the first day of the war not only failed to destabilise the regime but rejuvenated it. Khamenei had followed the Islamic Republic’s founder Ayatollah Khomeini’s guiding principle of avoiding war with Israel and the US. But that war had grown ever closer since 2020, when Trump ordered the assassination in Iraq of Maj-Gen Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ foreign operations.
Iran responded feebly, firing a few missiles at American bases which had been forewarned to avoid military casualties. Iran tried to avoid confrontation for the next five years, seeking to project moderation but in reality conveying timidity and weakness. What Iran called “strategic patience” allowed Israel to inflict almost fatal losses on Hezbollah in 2024, while Iran’s main ally in the Arab world, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, was overthrown the same year.
Iran had all the symptoms of a sinking power until Trump and Netanyahu inadvertently gave it the kiss of life by removing a failed and decrepit leadership and promoting an abler and tougher one.
Israel today sees its military and political victories over the last few years fast dribbling away. These successes could have been achieved only in close alliance with America, but it is that alliance that is now in doubt.
Further thoughts
In Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera The Pirates of Penzance, the hero Frederic says that he has stayed on with the pirates, to whom he is apprenticed, because he is “a slave to duty”.
Sir Keir Starmer claims that he is motivated similarly in staying on as Prime Minister. “This is not about personal vanity,” he insists, as his Cabinet dissolves around him. “It is about a very deep sense of duty.”
There are other points in common between the career paths of Frederic and Starmer. The former was meant to be apprenticed as “a pilot”, but his nurse-maid, being hard of hearing, had mistakenly signed him up as “a pirate”.
In Starmer’s case, the role of nurse-maid was played by Labour Together director Morgan McSweeney, later to become Starmer’s chief of staff, in his bid to take over the Labour Party and shift it from left to right. McSweeney chose to back Starmer to be Labour leader in order to win the factional battle within the party and a general election, only for Starmer to turn out to be as ill-suited to Downing Street as Frederic was to a pirate ship.
In the wake of Andy Burnham’s decisive win in the Makerfield by-election, Starmer’s attempt to keep his job looks increasingly absurd and hopeless. Yet the man himself remains something of a mystery, as do the reasons why he became a widely-detested national scapegoat for Britain’s ills.
He has proved cack-handed as a politician, administrator and a statesman. Promising change to an unhappy and angry electorate in the general election in 2024, he has shied away from any such radical transformation once in office. He excused his conservatism by saying that “whoever is prime minister is going to face the same prevailing winds as I am facing”. In other words, ill winds blowing from the bond markets, Ukraine and the Middle East paralysed the Government.
But these excuses do not quite explain away Starmer’s serial failures and self-inflicted crises. He came across as an over-promoted civil servant whose policies have seldom strayed far from conventional Establishment wisdom. He lacks the basic political skill of choosing the right subordinates – selecting Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US being but one notorious example of this.
As a leader, Starmer’s greatest sin was to open the door wide to Reform, the British version of Trumpism with its alluring fake remedies and thinly-disguised racist scapegoating. He comes across as inauthentic because he genuinely lacks authentic opinions and policies, and always reacts to events rather than trying to shape them.
Perhaps, he is a supreme example of “failing upwards” – a person who gets better and better jobs, despite poor or pedestrian performance, because their face fits, they are in the right place at the right time and they have seething ambition.
Beneath the radar
The British provincial press is a shadow of its former self, largely destroyed by internet platforms siphoning off the great bulk of the advertising revenues that once financed thousands of excellent publications.
The good news is that this vacuum of information, following the eclipse of local papers as news sources, is being at least partially filled by well-informed online regional newsletters financed by subscriptions. Many are run by able journalists with deep knowledge of their locality. Such publications have become essential reading for anybody who wants to know what is happening where they live.
An outstanding example of this is the award-winning Local Authority newsletter, based in Chatham in Kent, which focuses on the Medway towns, providing good quality reportage and analysis of local issues. It recently carried a fascinating interview with Robbie Lammas, a Conservative councillor in Medway who defected to Reform last October, but who has since decided that his defection was a mistake and wants to return to the Conservative fold.
In an interview with Local Authority, Lammas is informative, without sounding embittered about what he sees as Reform’s hidden weaknesses. The newsletter notes that a Reform critic of Lammas after his redefection said that “among the signs that Lammas was never truly Reform… was that Lammas remained too attached to mainstream media and consumed too much BBC content rather than alternative media and podcasts. Lammas said the comment reflected a wider problem he encountered inside parts of Reform, where a political culture is shaped less by ordinary party debate than by online conspiracism and alternative media ecosystems.”
“I realised very quickly that they absolutely hate Conservatives,” Lammas says. “Some of them hate Conservatives more than they hate Labour.”
He says that Reform was upset that he did not denounce his old party – as many Conservative defectors have done. “Reform are united by grievance alone,” he says, adding that the party is good at identifying problems – but has little interest in solving them.
Cockburn’s picks
I found this paper from the LSE about Brexit and racism perceptive and original, explaining how the Brexit referendum unleashed forms of racism once deemed unacceptable in British society. This coincided with the rise of politicians from ethnic minorities coming to the forefront of British politics. The author Maria Sobolewska untangles this little-understood consequence of Brexit.
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