DID EVERYONE LOSE?

Reason's Liz Wolfe asks the obvious question about the so-far-unseen "memorandum of understanding" continuing the ceasefire in Asia Minor.  "A digital preliminary memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran has been signed, leading to an opening of the Strait of Hormuz and a 60-day pause in fighting while final details get hashed out."  That's consistent with something we noted about two weeks ago.  "From that perspective, letting Iran's government export oil is splitting a gain from trade harvested by consumers of Gulf Arab oil and fertilizers. But U.S. forces must remain on station, which brings a different set of risks with it."  And so it might seem, or not.  Our President is carrying on about ships sailing freely and the Iranians are making noises about tolling, even if they call it "providing security" or something.

It's messy emergence, Ms Wolfe suggests, not continued evolution of that rules-based international order.

We still don't know what types of restrictions Iran will agree to with regard to its nuclear program, nor do we know what Israel will do with regard to Hezbollah and the fighting in southern Lebanon. We don't know how U.S.-Israeli relations will be impacted in the long run. (Tensions between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been rather high during these last few weeks.) We don't know whether Iran will, in fact, keep the Strait of Hormuz open, or whether we'll see it mess around with the strait to gain leverage over the U.S. once again.

"Months of fighting revealed that multiple countries can impose costs," wrote Foreign Policy's Will Todman, "but none can impose order."

"The tactical and operational successes that the U.S. and Israeli militaries achieved masked a deeper strategic defeat, with neither securing the political objectives cited to justify the war in the first place," argued Todman. "The Iranian regime survived and emerged more hard-line, and it discovered a new, powerful negotiating chip in closing the Strait of Hormuz." But even bigger picture: "The war did not produce a clear victor or a more stable regional order. Instead, it accelerated fragmentation, deepened insecurity, and imposed costs on every key regional and global power involved, including Iran, the Arab Gulf states, Russia, and China. The war demonstrated that no state will be able to navigate the new era of global disorder unscathed."

Also in Reason, Matthew Petti contends, "The U.S. and Iran have moved to the next stage of the peace process. Hawks on all sides are terrified that it will succeed."

That is, if what's being worked on has any chances of succeeding.

Although the full text of the truce isn't public yet, the broad outline has been confirmed by both sides. The U.S. will issue Iran a 60-day waiver to the U.S. embargo on oil exports, and Iran will suspend its toll on passing Hormuz for 60 days. By the end of the truce period, the negotiations are supposed to produce a solution to the Iranian nuclear program, the future management of Hormuz, and the U.S. economic sanctions on Iran.

In other words, Trump's offer is a lot like former President Barack Obama's offer. Iran can trade away its nuclear capabilities in exchange for integration into the world economy. Ali Ahmadi, a researcher in Turkey, compares the current truce to Obama's 2013 interim agreement that paved the way for the full 2015 deal.

There is, of course, an important difference: Obama's outreach was meant to avoid the threat of war, while Trump's diplomacy is meant to get out of a war that he started.

Yes, and the fact that a war took place means that comparisons with that previous agreement, which was never ratified as a treaty by the United States Senate, as well as claims that Hormuz was open to commerce before hostilities began, are misleading.  Pajamas Media's Scott Pinsker notes, "President Trump didn’t get the “unconditional surrender” he demanded. If that was your expectation, he overpromised and underdelivered. But what we’ve already accomplished is historic."  He provides a list of ways in which Iran's government and its infrastructure are not what they were at the beginning of the year.  There have been two, probably three, changes in who is occupying senior leadership in Iran and that might be contributing to the difficulties in putting out the final text for Friday's formalities.

On the other hand, Andrew Fox suggests that all the shock and awe shocked precisely nobody.

A war launched with maximalist assumptions has reached an interim understanding that leaves the regime in place, Hezbollah in the field, Iran’s missile architecture as the central fact of regional security, and the nuclear question in the long grass. What forced Washington’s hand was the oil clock. Emergency reserves, rerouting schemes, naval workarounds, tanker insurance, Asian demand destruction, and political patience were all running down at once. Trump rushed to a deal because the alternative was a global oil shock that would hit American gas stations just in time for the domestic political season.

The war was supposed to show that American and Israeli power could reorder the region. Instead, it showed how quickly tactical dominance can become strategic dependence. Washington could destroy targets inside Iran, but it could not force Tehran to surrender its political position. It could not open the Strait of Hormuz by military means at an acceptable cost. It could not push Saudi Arabia into war. It could not impose normalisation with Israel on the Gulf states. It could not get Europe to join the campaign. It could not convince China to pull away from Iran. It could not stop Gulf states from privately seeking understandings with Tehran to keep themselves off Iran’s target list. It could not protect allies from cheaper Iranian missiles without burning through expensive Western interceptors at a rate that made every other theatre nervous.

The global image of American power has been significantly diminished. The United States remains capable of extraordinary destruction. The war has made something else equally clear: destruction is not the same thing as control. The limits of American hard power have been brutally exposed.

All of which might contribute to Our President's willingness to give diplomacy a chance rather than go through, twice now, with shock and awe.  Didn't he recall the B-52s back in April and scrub a third day of strikes last week at the urging of Pakistani mediators or in response to calls from somebody in authority (who?) in Iran?

Mr Fox is correct.  "The Islamic Republic is corrupt, brutal, loathed by millions, and economically incompetent. It is also deeply practised in repression. It has survived war, sanctions, assassination, protest waves, elite factionalism, and decades of external pressure. Its security organs exist and were designed for moments like this. The Basij and Revolutionary Guards merely need to be feared, armed, and organisationally intact enough to make rebellion costly."  But such tyrannies are brittle.

Moreover, Mr Petti suggests that the latest pause for negotiating will be like the ones before.

It's not clear what happens if the 60-day negotiating period expires without a final peace treaty, although nothing is stopping the two sides from extending their truce. If the past three months are any indication, both sides will keep trying to test each other's limits as part of the negotiating process. The point of this week's memorandum is to keep those tests below the level of war.

The most explosive point of disagreement seems to be Lebanon, where the Israeli army is fighting the pro-Iran militia Hezbollah. Iran has been insisting that a ceasefire should also include Lebanon, and is threatening to bomb Israel in response to any Israeli moves on Beirut, the Lebanese capital. On Sunday, after Hezbollah flew drones into northern Israel, the Israeli army bombed Beirut, killing three people.

Iran got ready "to launch a large number of missiles at the Israelis" but called off the attack under U.S. pressure, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance told Fox News on Sunday night. An Iranian source told Amwaj.media that Trump had offered to accelerate the timeline for lifting the blockade if Iran did not attack. Trump also publicly demanded "no more attacks by Israel anywhere in Lebanon" and privately asked Israel to withdraw from Lebanon, according to Israel's Channel 12.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz declared on Monday that the army will stay in Lebanon "without any time limit" and clear out the Lebanese population from the areas it holds. "Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu made these points clear to U.S. President Trump and to other senior American officials, and I also made this clear yesterday to U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth," he said, adding that "if Iran attacks Israel because of events in Lebanon, we will strike it with full force."

Domestic American hawks have also been trying to stop the peace process.

I'm not sure what to make of Our President publicly dressing down the Israelis.  There might be an element of good cop, bad cop in play.  Furthermore, his offer to lift the blockade if Iran doesn't flip missiles at Israel (which might simply get more Iranian leaders taken out in retaliation) suggests there is still leverage the United States can use.  Those hawks?  Matt Vespa with Pajamas Media represents their sentiments.

The late Ayatollah Khomeini knew the 1979 hostage crisis was damaging Jimmy Carter. After Carter lost the 1980 election, he released the hostages from the American Embassy.

Yet, unlike Carter, if things do collapse again, word is that Trump will glass the country again.

I'm sorry, I'm bracing for the worst.

It might be that Our President has not yet glassed the country as he'd still like the people of Iran to have a chance to build a normal country once the fanatics go to their dirt naps.  And even if the pessimists in the United States are right, the mullahs might be able to keep their nuclear dust, for all the good it will do.  "With war likely over, Iranian rulers must face demands of angry, embittered population."  What sounds like a favorable spin for the mullahs quickly sours.

Iran's theocratic rulers have seen off a U.S. military campaign but their real problems may be about to begin: managing the competing demands of hardliners buoyed by surviving the onslaught and those of an impoverished, angry people.

Iran's powerful hardliners are energized by a three-month confrontation they feel Iran has won. They want the leadership to take a tough stance in coming talks with the U.S. and prioritise ‌rearming, confident they can halt any internal dissent with force.

Ordinary Iranians, however, are desperate for any peace dividend or financial relief to be used in raising living standards and offering better prospects after a destructive war that has followed years of ‌painful sanctions.

Both camps have high expectations, conflicting demands and little patience. Looming in the background is the spectre of renewed mass protests like the unrest authorities quashed in January by killing thousands of demonstrators.

Brace for the worst, indeed.