Middle East

No one imagined that Hamas would voluntarily hand over its weapons and turn to politics and peace in the Gaza Strip. Even when President Trump announced his Board of Peace and 20-point plan toward a settlement to end the war with Israel, the sticking point, every analyst insisted, would be the disarmament of an organization designated a terrorist group by the United States, Britain, the European Union, Australia and many other nations. It’s unlikely that Hamas will cooperate unless Israeli troops withdraw as per the agreement Now, after months of negotiations – involving Trump’s two Middle East envoys, Egypt, Qatar and Turkey – and without any fanfare, the seemingly impossible has been achieved.

Iranians have adopted a new sport in the past few years: knocking the turban from a passing cleric’s head. There are points for technique and for how high and how far you can get their headgear to go. These are small acts of revenge against a hated religious elite who came to power on a wave of arrests and torture and who, as recently as January, ordered thousands of peaceful protesters to be shot in the streets. It’s also a symptom of something larger. Political Islam is in retreat across the Middle East and the wider Muslim world. “The strange death of political Islam” is an idea that’s in the air at the moment. Rule by clerics, and by others who claim to speak in the name of God, is going out of fashion in the Islamic world.

As a UFC aficionado, President Donald Trump might know what a twister is. It works by cranking the victim’s head one way while controlling his hips in the other. Apparently, the pressure that this places on the spine is agonizing, leading to a rapid tap out or life-altering injuries to the back and neck. In the Middle East, the President finds himself in a geopolitical twister. On the one hand, Iran’s Memorandum of Understanding terms are too unpalatable for President Trump to swallow – crystalizing as they would an unambiguous defeat, with all the strategic and political consequences that that would entail. On the other, the US Air Force has been unable to suppress or interdict Iran’s missiles and drones.

The war in Iran rumbles on, in parallel to talks that are aimed at stopping it. Both sides would rather the war were over; this limbo is causing mayhem in Iran’s economy and politics, while MAGA too has been bent out of shape. Yet a reality might be starting to take hold in which fighting simply drifts aimlessly, much like the peace talks. And much like the ships that are stuck in the Strait of Hormuz, too. As both sides try to game the stalemate, unintended consequences are emerging The US is calculating that a naval blockade, in the absence of a memorandum of understanding, can economically constrict Tehran, narrowing its room for maneuver and eventually forcing Tehran back to the table.

Metaphorically speaking, champagne bottles were uncorked in the Jerusalem office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after Donald Trump declared at the NATO summit in Ankara that the ceasefire with Iran was over. Trump’s remarks – in which he branded Iran’s leaders "scum," "a cancer" and "liars" – were sweet music to Netanyahu and his government.  The 60-day ceasefire, brokered by Pakistan and Qatar on June 17 to end the war between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran on the other – a war that began on February 28 – was effectively imposed on Netanyahu. The Israeli Prime Minister, Mossad, the Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli Air Force all wanted the fighting to continue.

Clarissa Eden famously declared that "in the past few weeks I have really felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through my drawing-room." Does Melania Trump feel the same about the Strait of Hormuz? Or perhaps Donald will be reminded of the strait every time he hits one over the water at Bedminster. He ought to be. The Iran war will define his presidency. It is his legacy – just not in the way he imagined. In 1956, a British prime minister discovered that we were no longer a great power. It was an end to illusions. We liked to think we had the best navy in the world, but that was irrelevant to whether we could keep a canal in Egypt.

Trump’s Middle East tour in May last year felt like the end of an era. Here was the former al-Qaeda commander, Ahmed al-Sharaa, now leader of Syria, shaking hands with a vulgar American Commander-in-Chief, who resembles the caricature of a US president we might find in an al-Qaeda cartoon. Yet the War on Terror’s two leading men, the President and the Jihadi, having ended the last act at each other’s throats, have returned to the stage arm-in-arm to take a bow. Al-Sharaa has trimmed his beard, put on a suit, replaced Bashar al-Assad as president and begun welcoming western investors to help him rebuild his country after a decade and a half of civil war. Trump has dropped the showy religiosity and moral posturing of his predecessors.

After years of negotiations, two wars, a succession of ruthlessly quashed uprisings in Iran and countless billions of dollars’ worth of ordnance smashing into rubble across the region, we have the bones of an agreement. Not a deal, it should be said. Instead an understanding that manages to speak volumes and yet say very little in the way of concrete details. Vice President JD Vance's trip to Switzerland may have been postponed -- after Israel and Hezbollah exchanged fire over Lebanon last night -- but the Memorandum of Understanding between America and Israel has been signed, and both sides seem confident that the peace process has not yet been derailed. Who won, you might ask? Surely, Iran.

When it comes to foreign policy, Donald Trump is neither hawk nor dove. He’s a dealmaker who plays differing sides off each other. In so doing, he ends up disappointing warmongers and peaceniks in equal measure. Rather than blaming Trump for a bad deal, his pro-Israel supporters will tie its shortcomings to Vance On 28 February, when he launched Operation Epic Fury, Trump’s more dovish supporters felt betrayed. The president who had campaigned against regime-change wars began a new conflict by channeling George W. Bush. "To the great, proud people of Iran I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand," he said.

Donald Trump’s 80th birthday is this weekend, and what better present for a struggling octogenarian Commander-in-Chief than a peace deal with Iran, signed if not quite yet sealed and delivered. There is, I’m told, some late scrambling over "semantics" in the so-called "memorandum of understanding" between America and Iran, and lingering issues over the language concerning the "nuclear dust" – i.e., Iran’s enriched uranium. But the rest is all but agreed. J.D. Vance could fly to Europe to sign a deal tomorrow – or if not it will be Trump as he attends the G7 in Evian near the Swiss Alps on Monday. Trump really wanted to stage a peace photo-op with Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei but had to be told that would not be possible.

Donald Trump is trying to wriggle out of his self imposed Strait-jacket. After a renewed round of bombing Iran and bluster about seizing Kharg Island, he has now announced that is all over, including a planned attack tonight: “Based on the fact that discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran have been brought to the highest level of Iranian leadership and approved, I have, as President of the United States of America, cancelled the scheduled strikes and bombings against Iran this evening.” Is it back to the future again? Or are hostilities really about to cease? Any cessation will incense the war hawks in Washington who helped propel Trump into this misbegotten conflict in the first place.

Today marks a hundred days since America and Israel began launching strikes on Iran on February 28. The very next day, Donald Trump told the Atlantic that Iran’s leaders "want to talk," saying they should have made a deal sooner and that "they played too cute." Three days after Trump said this, Iran announced that the Strait of Hormuz was closed. Since then, we have been told dozens of times that we are on the brink of a lasting deal between Iran and America, often in the President’s statements on Truth Social. At the end of last month, Axios reported that US and Iranian negotiators had reached an agreement on a 60-day memorandum which would reopen the Strait, which simply needed Trump’s sign off.

America’s war on Iran was supposed to give Iranians their freedom. But even in February, at the start of the conflict, the prospects for regime change seemed doubtful. Now hardline IRGC generals appear to be calling the shots. They’ve used the war as a pretext to go after opponents and increase the Islamic Republic’s repression to horrific new levels. More than 6,000 people, including protesters, journalists, lawyers, human rights defenders, dissidents and members of ethnic and religious minorities have been detained under the guise of national security. Many are executed after being dragged through kangaroo courts.

Depending on which day it is, the ongoing peace talks between the United States and Iran are either a few days away from being finalized or close to hitting another roadblock. The status of the negotiations fluctuates about as much as Donald Trump’s mood swings. For those on the outside looking in, the whole storyline can be discombobulating. It doesn’t help that US and Iran are still taking pop-shots at each other. Early on Thursday morning, Tehran attacked a US base in response to a fresh round of US strikes on an Iranian base in Bandar Abbas.  Fortunately, the shooting is not killing the diplomacy – at least not yet. There does appear to be a general framework on the table.