The provisional surrender document signed by Donald Trump appeared to represent a triumph for Iran and indeed for the world; but neither the USA nor Israel has the slightest sense of honour and they cannot be trusted to negotiate in good faith.
Iran knows this – after all, the USA twice attacked Iran actually during peace negotiations, on each occasion killing key Iranian negotiators.
To understand the American position, it is important to realise two key points:
- Greater Israel is an absolute priority
- Opening the Strait of Hormuz is not a US priority
While the US/Israeli alliance were defeated in their attempt to impose regime change on Iran, and indeed have consolidated the popular support of the Iranian government, they have succeeded in expanding Greater Israel. Israel has ethnically cleared and devastated a vast swathe of Southern Lebanon, expanding its military footprint, and notably attempting to repeat its ploy from November 2024 of pushing forward its armour under cover of ceasefire.
Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon has been a major negotiating point for the Iranian government and is a key – indeed the very first – point of the Iran/USA MOU. But in an extraordinary coup aimed at negating that deal, the USA has signed a deal with Israel and its puppet Aoun regime in Lebanon which seeks to legitimise Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon through the agreement of the “Lebanese government”.
This is an astonishing development. I did not think I could have a lower opinion of the appalling bloated traitor “General” “President” Aoun but not even I – nor I think any commentator – believed he would make such a deal with Israel. The plan is that the Americans, Israelis and Lebanese Army will act together to forcibly eliminate Hezbollah, and only after that is certified – by the Israelis – will the Israelis withdraw from Southern Lebanon.
Here are the operative paragraphs. Note that they carefully do not say in terms that Israel will actually leave Lebanon.
“3. …The Government of Israel and the Government of Lebanon commit to a reciprocal, sequenced process, with clear conditions, whereby the LAF will restore effective sovereign authority over all Lebanese territory, pending the verified disarmament of non-state armed groups and dismantlement of associated infrastructure, enabling the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to progressively redeploy out of the Lebanese territory.”
“5 . …The Government of Israel underscores that the termination of this threat, through the disarmament and dismantlement of such groups in all of Lebanon and additional security arrangements to be agreed upon between the two countries, will eliminate any future need for IDF military action or presence in Lebanon.”
This is plainly completely incompatible with the USA/Iran MOU, which states as Point 1:
“The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the current war are signing this MOU to declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon and other provisions of this paragraph.”
Of course, everybody knows that Israel will never withdraw voluntarily, any more than they withdrew from the Golan Heights. Annexation is plainly the goal and expansion of Greater Israel at least to the Litani River and probably further.
It is important to realise that this is not only Aoun seeking the annihilation of the Shia population of Southern Lebanon; he is also betraying his own community. Aoun is himself a Southern Lebanese Christian, and Israel has been destroying the homes, churches, hospitals and families of Southern Lebanese Christians with as much glee as they attack Muslims.
The agreement names two “pilot zones” where the combined Israeli and Lebanese Army forces will eliminate Hezbollah, followed by Israeli withdrawal from those zones. But these are zones which Israel is not currently occupying – they are areas where Israel was defeated in fighting by Hezbollah and which have been since subject to relentless Israeli bombardment.
So Aoun has agreed to support militarily an IDF advance further into Lebanon, against an agreement that Israel will be able to withdraw once these key Hezbollah redoubts have been destroyed. Even if Aoun were stupid enough to believe the Israelis will withdraw after the operation, this is a level of treachery it is difficult to comprehend.
Greater Israel is not a concept. It is a reality being created before our very eyes.
Israel now occupies 70% of Gaza and plainly the entire “Board of Peace” mechanism is nothing but smoke and mirrors, pure fraud. It has zero effect on the continued tightening of the Gaza concentration camp into an ever-shrinking area. Israeli settlements in the West Bank expand daily and every night the skies are red with Palestinian homes and crops burning. In East Jerusalem Palestinians are continually evicted and replaced by fresh European or American arrivals. In Syria, Israel is building permanent fortifications and its armour creeps forward field by field, with the full cooperation of “President” al-Jolani.
Iran was able to resist the combined military might of the USA and Israel. That is cause for celebration. But do not allow it to blind your eyes to the continued hard reality of the expansion of Greater Israel.
There is no gain for the US in the US/Iran Memorandum of Understanding which the US did not already possess before starting the war. It is therefore very possible, and in many senses valid, to read it as the formalisation of US defeat: a surrender document. Which is why you should be sceptical about US commitment to the terms.
The Strait of Hormuz was fully open before the US started the war. Allowing the flow of oil to resume has become a short-term US priority due to high domestic retail prices and pending elections, but the MOU envisages more Iranian control – and potentially fees – in the Strait than existed before the war.
There is no indication of restrictions on the Iranian nuclear programme that were not already available in the peaceful negotiations. Crucially there are no limitations on Iran’s vital ballistic missile production. The proposed relaxation of sanctions and release of frozen assets is a triumph for Iran and long overdue, and the $300 billion in dollars in reparations, from unspecified sources, is stunning.
So stunning of course that anyone with their head screwed on will realise there is no long term American intention to keep faith with the deal.
Trump is not stupid. There are many ways of characterising his kind of cunning, but it is not stupidity. He was not, as the prevailing narrative seeks to state, the only person in the World who did not realise the Strait of Hormuz would be closed by the war. The USA is quite happy to see the Strait of Hormuz closed, or permanently made more difficult and expensive to transit.
The key to understanding Trump’s position is his famous love of tariffs. Trump is a mercantilist. For many years the world worked on the general basis of accepting the economics of Adam Smith – that freedom of trade promoted universal, reciprocal wealth creation. That was the founding basis of the World Trade organisation, and is the internal philosophy of big trading blocs like the EU.
Trump rejects this and returns to the philosophy that other nations are all competitors, not potential partners, and that success lies not only in increasing your own production, but in damaging your rivals’ production – which ultimately will increase domestic production further. Trump rejects the basic premise of free trade.
The long prevailing belief in the beneficial effects of free trade historically was, as logic demands, accompanied by the demand for freedom of navigation.
Sweeping away tariffs goes hand in hand with sweeping away the controls on shipping which carry the goods. Before the rise of liberal economics, almost all states had practised mercantilism, with controls on shipping being a major source of state revenue. The magnificence of Kronborg Castle in Helsingør, in which Hamlet is set, was constructed entirely from revenues from tolls on ships exiting the Baltic by passing the strait it overlooks, for example.
Freedom of navigation was initially enforced ultimately by the British, and later the American, Navy. States attempting to enforce customary passage fees, for example in the Malaccan Strait, were classified as “pirates” and freedom of navigation became a routine justification for imperialist aggression and/or colonial occupation. Freedom of navigation eventually became customary international law, ultimately codified in the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea.
The simple truth is this: in openly abandoning the principle of free trade, the Trump regime has also abandoned the logically linked principle of freedom of navigation. This is evident not just in their indifference to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. It is evident in the naval blockades of Cuba and Venezuela and above all in the worldwide blockade of Russian hydrocarbon deliveries, including the effective end of free passage through the Strait of Dover, and a de facto naval blockade of the Arctic passages.
Following the shale boom, the United States is a net hydrocarbon exporter. The USA balance of trade benefits from high hydrocarbon prices. Trump is doing everything he can to increase US hydrocarbon production by slashing environmental and other controls. This is a core Trump policy.
The USA does not import hydrocarbons through the Strait of Hormuz. That fact is key to Trump’s thinking.
In this mercantilist view, closure of the Strait has two benefits for the USA.
- It disadvantages rival hydrocarbon suppliers
- It disadvantages rival industrial competitors in Europe and Asia who do get hydrocarbons through Hormuz.
This is exactly the same logic behind the destruction of Nord Stream 2. The same mercantilist system also explains the effective seizure through naval blockade and control of Venezuela’s oil production, and the blockade of Russian hydrocarbons through sanctions and the “shadow fleet” propaganda disguising another naval blockade.
The UK’s recent actions in the Dover strait indicate that the West, not just the United States has surrendered the principle of freedom of navigation in straits.
Trump believes, as he has repeatedly stated in public, that domestic fuel prices in the USA are a blip and will equalise as the USA increases its domestic fuel production and Venezuelan fuel production. However this was not happening in time for the mid-term elections which is why reopening the Strait of Hormuz became a temporary priority that occasioned the ceasefire and MOU with Iran.
None of this implies good faith negotiation or a real prospect for a lasting peace.
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So has Iran sold Hezbollah out?
Also gotta wonder who’s stumping up the reparations money? Gulf despots?
Answer: No.
No-one ever imagined that reparations money was ever more than fictional, much the same as in Gaza.
There’s a huge war coming – not just between those who support some sort of freedom – and those who wish to take full control of humanity, but between good and evil, sadly for me much of the West is now in my opinion classed in the latter category – this coming war will be decisive in what future direction humanity takes.
Brother, You can’t have capitalism and humanity. We are still being feed that the all route of EVIL is socialism.
Medhurst has been expanding on this for a while now, the US controlling energy which resonates with what you say 👍
https://substack.com/@richardmedhurst/note/p-196141950?r=86dtc4
Freedom of navigation is also a big issue for China, and that’s what a lot of this is really about.
Re Lebanon.
The Israel/US/Lebanon agreement is possible, because the Aoun regime has no power at all, certainly not to disarm Hizbullah. And the Israelis have figured this out.
To recall the background, which Craig knows well. It’s all the fault of the French in 1920. Lebanon as autonomous territory under the Ottomans was a very small country, Beirut and the Maronite mountain behind it. The French taking on the post-war mandate wanted to create a large Christian state, and added in a large territory to south, north and the Biqa’ valley in the east. Even in 1920, there was only a small Christian majority. Since then the higher birth rate of the Shi’a has done the rest. The French installed a bizarre constitution, in order to ensure permanent Christian domination, one which allocates the presidency to the Christians, prime ministership to the Sunnis, etc. So whatever the result of the elections, the same govt continues.
The civil war was all about the Christians not losing their control, but they did anyway because they are now minority, and the Shi’a majority. I read somewhere that in the last parliamentary elections, it was actually Hizbullah who won the greatest number of seats. They should have become the government, in any normal country, but they were kept out by the bizarre constitution and French and American pressure, so instead of providing some ministers, they withdrew entirely.
The Christians and Sunnis just don’t have the strength to contest Hizbullah power, in practice. The government is incapable of disarming Hizbullah, as they are just a feeble cipher, maintained by the West, and the real government should be Hizb, while the army is deliberately kept weak by the US so that it can’t fight Israel.
But in my view that doesn’t mean Israel is winning the war. They haven’t been able to advance the front very far, nothing like previous rushes to Beirut. The Christians, however much they hate Hizbullah – and they do intensely – also can’t do much to undermine Hizb’s position, and carry out any agreement with Israel.
This is to note the western home-market psywar practice of saying that the resisters or potential resisters of Zionazi aggression should be disarmed, or deprived of the ability to develop weapons, in the interests of goodness and light.
This line is applied to Palestine, Iran, and southern Lebanon. If the Zionazi military attack some other country, doubtless it will be applied there too.
Judging by the Electronic Intifada’s Resistance Reports, the “Greater Israel” project does not seem to be making progress in Lebanon. For all we know, we might start seeing such reports from Gaza again in the not-too-distant future, or even start seeing them from Syria.
Turning to the Gulf, I think that Trump will be very concerned with Iran blocking the Strait of Hormuz, because of the effect on petrol prices in the US and with it his election prospects. With demand for petrol peaking in summer in the USA, he might attempt an invasion of Kharg Island or Qeshm Island and smaller ones in the Strait of Hormuz. That might precipitate a Teutoburg moment, not against America’s aircraft carriers, but against her forces after they leave those vessels and use smaller craft for the purpose of invasion.
I think that Trump is increasingly desperate, and therefore if, as I foresee, the Republicans will be crushed in November, we might expect an attempt at overthrowing American democracy itself, e.g. by the declaration of a state of emergency suspending the Constitution and introducing dictatorship, as in Sinclair Lewis’ prescient novel It can’t happen here (ISBN 9780241310663), brilliantly adapted by BBC Radio.
If that happens we might see an “underground railroad” network developing, for people liable to be rounded up.
Since the Democrats are the other cheek of the property party arse, I doubt that they will bother. I wonder where the 2nd Amendment types will be if the Republicans try it on?
Efforts will be made to prevent Republican defeat in swingable states by “any means necessary”. I don’t know anyone in the USA who believes otherwise.
True that the Democrats won’t win the two-thirds of the Senate required for an impeachment conviction but this is a minor matter.
The fascist nutters want an explosion of violence so as to usher in a more brutal and hierarchical “mediaeval” society, and many of them are quite open about this.
Note: so Silicon Valley wasn’t such a hippie thing after all.
We can only hope that the Aoun capitulation gets the bird from the army, the Lebanese public and turns out to be a Pyrrhic victory.
Nassim Taleb writes interestingly on the Lebanon or the “Levant” as he calls it.
Lebanon as a model, with the assumption of continued stability (with French mafia at home in popular holiday resort Beirut) torn to shreds in the 1970s, just as it’s about to be in the 2020s in many countries?