When it comes to Iran, the fog of war is the proverbial peasouper. The American president is addicted to hyperbole. The Iranian regime is steeped in deception and its power structures are broken. The Gulf Arabs wish to be seen to act, but not too clearly. The military objectives of the Israeli prime minister are entangled with his campaign for reelection and his desire to dodge responsibility for the missteps that allowed October 7 to happen.
The post-October 7 wars are, like the war in Ukraine, fought in a new way. They are information wars. Force is mobilised by digital technology. All sides deploy digital media, especially social media, to spread a smokescreen of half-truth and outright fiction.
News media don’t mind. The incentives of their business encourage them to lack curiosity about the sources of their information and cultivate credulity about anything that reflects poorly on the United States and Israel.
Believe none of what you hear, and not much more of what you see. Yes, the Americans are negotiating with Iran. Yes, there is a divergence between Israeli and American war aims. Yes, there is a split within the Republican ranks over the war and the American-Israeli alliance. None of this is new.
American presidents have tried to negotiate past Iran’s nuclear programme since 2006. War aims between allies always diverge, especially towards the end of a war. The Republican Party, and Americans more broadly, have noticed that the Middle East is where grand strategy goes to die, followed by American servicemen and women.
The Trump administration is claiming total victory. Its negotiating terms are a demand for Iran’s surrender. No enriched uranium, no centrifuges, no ballistic missiles, and no support of proxies, especially Hezbollah in Lebanon. But if America had won, we wouldn’t be hearing recriminations.
The Israelis claim that the administration dropped a key part of the war plan, a Kurdish invasion of Iran, to placate Recep Tayyip Ergodan of Turkey. The Pentagon counters by alleging that Israeli spying on administration officials has reached a “critical level”.
If America had won, it wouldn’t be negotiating with the same regime. The Iranian rial has collapsed amid hyperinflation (77.2 per cent year-on-year, with food prices more than doubling). By mid-April, 50 days of war had prevented more than $50 billion-worth of Iranian oil from reaching markets. But the regime is still in power.
If the regime accepts America’s terms, does it sign its own death warrant – or does Trump give it and Hezbollah a lifeline by lifting sanctions and permitting the sale of Iranian oil and gas?
American critics of a deal with Iran are calling it “Obama 2.0”, a reheat of the JCPOA of 2015. The record shows that after 2015, the Iranians cheated on enforcement and inspections while they edged towards bomb-level uranium enrichment and built up the missile arsenal that they have used against Israel, the Gulf Arabs and, via their proxies, American ships and bases.
On June 8, Vice President JD Vance said that the administration sees a “long-term settlement to Iran’s nuclear deal” as in the American interest, regardless of whether it diverges from Israel’s interest. Vance did not “assume that anybody’s acting in good faith” in negotiations, but he sounded like he believes that America can force Iran to comply.
The main flaw in the Obama deal was, Vance said, that “there was not a proper inspections regime to ensure that the Iranians could never build nuclear weapon”. The aim is to “verify” not what the Iranians “write on the paper”, but whether they “actually comply with some of the requirements of the settlement.”
Iranian compliance with “some” clauses of the JCPOA but not others is why America is now at war with Iran. Verification processes, like sanctions, no longer carry the weight they did in the 1990s. Trump and Vance know this. Do they really believe what they are saying?
Trump has said that a deal is imminent more than three dozen times, but the shooting continues. This is how wars are fought in the Middle East. America has adapted how it fights. War proceeds by negotiation as well as force, and always by deception. The question is whether the Americans are deceiving themselves too.
Perception is not the same as reality, but perception does shape reality. The administration will try to spin a deal with Iran as a victory, but the world will perceive an Obama Deal 2.0 as Suez 2.0.
A bungled American intervention would confirm the Iranian regime as suzerain of the Persian Gulf, like Nasser after 1956 with the Suez Canal. The Israelis will make short-term strategic gains, but these would dissolve quickly.
As with Nasser’s Egypt, radical ambitions and unresolved conflicts would lead to Iran resuming the export of revolutionary ideology and rockets, leading to further conflict with Israel and America’s regional allies.
As Suez showed that the British and French could no longer walk their imperial talk, so America’s credibility as regional arbiter will collapse.
The Trump administration is now in the position that Churchill described after Anthony Eden launched Britain into the Suez campaign: “I would never have dared. I would certainly never have dared stop.”
Eden’s chancellor Harold Macmillan pushed for the war, then profited by Eden’s error and became prime minister. Vance did not push for this war, but he is unlikely to profit from a false peace. Trump has made Vance the face of the negotiations. If a deal fails, Vance will carry the can. His odds for the Republican nomination for 2028 will lengthen further.
Meanwhile in Foggy Bottom, Secretary of State Marco Rubio remains belligerent towards Iran. The administration is keeping its options open and keeping the fleet at sea. Rubio’s ratings are buoyant. American energy producers are ebullient: self-sufficient America will profit from energy market instability.
Wars are easier to start than to finish, especially when the initial aims are unclear. Deal or no deal, the Iran war isn’t over, even if the administration wants it to be over. All the fog in the world won’t stop the Iranians, the Israelis, the Turks and the Arabs from seeing that.
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