Middle East

If you control the world’s largest economy, as the US does, and if your enemy depends on exports to the West, as Iran does, it should hardly be a surprise when the big economy decides to use its commercial and financial leverage.   That is exactly what the US is doing – and this week it announced it would ratchet up the pressure substantially. Some sanctions were already in place, most notably restrictions on Iran’s oil exports, enforced by the US Navy. What’s new is that those sanctions will be supplemented by a full range of additional sanctions on commercial and bank transactions routed through third countries.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has made many concessions in its long decline. Until now, it stood firm on one rule: women must remain covered. The veil, it has insisted since the 1979 Revolution, was a divine instruction. But apparently divine instructions can lapse. This summer, a young woman appeared at a pro-government rally in a pink top and acid-washed jeans, her hair loose on her shoulders. She addressed the camera while standing among a crowd of women veiled from head to toe. Rather remarkably, the footage went on state television. Five years ago, that footage would have been evidence for a prosecution. Now, it is propaganda. The veil used to divide the pious from the impious.

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.