Unconditional surrender

July 8 update: Trump declares ceasefire over, brands regime in Iran “sick” and launches strikes again in response to Tehran’s assault on tanker traffic. The image of “Schroedinger’s Strait”, describing a strategic waterway that is both open and closed, is more pertinent than ever. But also my own description of a “non deal” that fails to address with the underlying issues: the nuclear programme, support for proxies and, now, Iran’s claim to exercise sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz.

For the past three days, the US and Iran have traded military strikes which further threatened to unravel the fragile ceasefire over the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s goal is to assert control over the strategic waterway. There can be no return to the status quo ante. An impetuous President Trump, who told Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in their blockbuster book Regime Change that he’s always been a winner is the loser. The US has suffered a strategic defeat.

1. Trump has abandoned all pretence of regime change in Tehran. He’s calculating a multi-billion dollar bribe through sanctions relief and bungs from the Gulf states beats a bombing campaign. The Israelis, especially Prime minister Netanyahu, are beyond dismayed.

2. Economics trumps politics. Trump revealingly admitted he did not want to go down in history as “(Herbert) Hoover” who presided over the stock market crash that lay the ground for the Great Depression in the 1930s. The US could not stomach the prospect of a collapse in the global economy caused by an oil price shock - and the Iranians knew it.

3. The Strait of Hormuz will not return to the status quo ante. Free passage through a strategic waterway is no longer guaranteed. Though there will be no tolls for the next 60 days, the Iranians are talking up the prospect of fees and of joint sovereignty (with Oman) over the Strait in future - and this will be up for negotiation.

4. The Iranians are due to begin receiving billions of dollars in assets that have been frozen for years as well as funds from the resumption of oil supplies worth $60bn a year. Trump and his vice president JD Vance have also floated the idea of a Gulf reconstruction fund to be financed largely by Iran’s neighbours. Significantly, Trump says the US will not contribute a red cent.

5. Trump insists Iran’s nuclear programme will be halted for the next 15 to 20 years, but the details remain open to negotiation over the next weeks and months. The Iranian commitment not to develop nuclear weapons is old news. As for the existing stockpile of highly enriched uranium (“nuclear dust”) buried underground, it will be neutralized rather than transported out of the country. Trump has a hard job claiming his nuclear deal is better than Barack Obama’s.

6. Trump is betting that stuffing the Iranian regime’s mouth with gold will bring about “a normal country”. But as I noted in an earlier post, the notion that every regime sees the world through dollar signs and term sheets ignores the power of ideology, in this case a regime built on the doctrine of resistance and hostility to Israel and the US.

7. Trump initially claimed he intended through a military campaign of shock and awe to bring about the “unconditional surrender” of Iran. As Gary Kasparov and Andrew Neil have crisply observed, the US via the Trump administration have ended up offering unconditional surrender themselves.

BACK TO MY EARLIER POST…..

Fifty shades of grey does not begin to capture the complexity of the US-Iran negotiations to engineer a deal to end hostilities in the Gulf which have caused billions of dollars of damage and paralysed oil supplies to the rest of the world.

President Trump’s “peace deal” - timed to coincide with his 80th birthday celebrations - is in fact nothing more than a memorandum of understanding. There will no solemn ceremony, no Nobel prizes, certainly nothing to compare with the three-way handshake between Jimmy Carter, Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin which marked the Camp David accords in September 1978, bringing about a lasting peace between Israel and Egypt.

This time, the warring parties have agreed to an electronic signature only - a measure of an abiding distrust between Iran and the US rooted in the history of the 20th century: the US-backed coup against Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953; the “ruinous” oppression of the Shah; the nest of spies in the US embassy in Tehran; the seizure of the American hostages in 1979; US support for Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war; the Tehran regime’s sponsorship of terror proxies throughout the Middle East; and latterly, the US bombing raids which obliterated the regime’s leadership and President Mojtaba Khamenei’s closest family.

Trump insists that the Strait of Hormuz - closed for more than 100 days - will be open by Friday. The strategic waterway will moreover be “permanently toll-free”, he told the New York Times. Trump further insisted that if Iran failed to conclude a final nuclear deal, he would restart military attacks or make the US “the guardian of the Middle East”, taking a 20 per cent cut in oil revenues.

Behind the bluster, there are any number of devils lurking in the detail. The Iranians are masterful negotiators, as Karim Sadjadpour captures in his Atlantic essay on “the bazaar style” which involves continuous and tireless negotiation. (A Gulf diplomat says that one of the more contentious words in an earlier peace deal draft brokered by the Pakistanis involved the word “etc” - a term viewed as routine by the Americans but dangerously open-ended by the Iranians).

I had a taste of the bazaar style during an eight-day trip to Tehran in November 2013, just after the interim (that word again) diplomatic deal to contain Iran’s nuclear programme, the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). During the visit, accompanied by then foreign editor Roula Khalaf, I interviewed former Presidents Rafsanjani and Khatami, businessmen, hardliners and academics, but the ultimate goal of sitting down with President Hassan Rouhani proved infuriatingly elusive.

As I wrote: “Iranians hate being pinned down. Answers to questions either last 20 minutes or are confined to a single enigmatic sentence. As one Tehran businessman with close connections to the regime explained: “You westerners like black or white, or yes or no. But this is the Middle East, where everything is grey. We prefer: it depends, perhaps, maybe – or simply Inshallah (God willing).”

Time is also an elastic concept. After being given the runaround ahead of an interview with Mr Rouhani, our Tehran correspondent finally demanded a 300 per cent guarantee on an 8am encounter. The reply? “We cannot do 300 per cent, we can only offer maximum 90 per cent. Maybe we can offer 100 per cent, but only after the sanctions are lifted and we can import it.”