Israel

President Trump might have thought that negotiating an interim diplomatic understanding with Iran was going to be the hard part. But selling the 14-point Memorandum of Understanding to the public is proving to be just as laborious.  Trump deserves blame not because he negotiated a poor peace deal but rather because he decided to go to war in the first place Less than 24 hours after the document was released, virtually nobody is particularly satisfied with it. Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill, normally deferential or wholly supportive of Trump’s agenda across-the-board, are already expressing nervousness at the terms and demanding a full briefing from the administration about how the White House plans on executing them.

President Trump is giving peace a chance in the Persian Gulf, and for Iran’s leadership this is literally a matter of life or death. If Iran had continued to fight, one of two things would have happened. Either the war would have resumed its original tempo, leading to the extinction of another generation of Iranian leaders and the loss of yet more of the nation’s military capabilities, only for Tehran to strike a deal much like this one after realizing the futility of its efforts; or the war would have escalated, as the US employed greater force, potentially including ground troops, to force open the Strait of Hormuz. The latter scenario would have been costly to America, and the world, but it would have been fatal to Tehran.

Well, well, well. For all the head-scratching that it initially occasioned, President Trump’s hasty abandonment of "Project Freedom" – his grandly titled plan to open the Strait of Hormuz – turns out not to be so mysterious after all. Trump’s reversal, NBC News revealed late yesterday, came at the behest of America’s Gulf allies, foremost among them Riyadh which told Washington that it would suspend the US military’s right to use its airspace. Now Trump, who has described his current exchanges with Iran as "very good," is breathing optimism about a one-page peace memorandum that he claims will be completed by the end of the week. Iran, by contrast, merely says that Trump’s proposal is “under review.

The abrupt announcement of a two-week ceasefire in the war between the US, Israel and Iran resolves none of the issues which caused the conflict. Beyond an agreement to cease attacks, the arrangements that will hold during the two-week period appear themselves unclear. Each side in the last hours seemed to commit to different versions of the ceasefire in key areas. Iran remains an aggressive and dangerous power, with the ambition of expelling the US from the region, dominating the Gulf states and destroying Israel From Israel’s point of view, the bottom line is clear. The Iranian regime has been significantly weakened in its capacities in a number of key areas. At the same time, the regime has not been destroyed or even severely damaged in its continued ability to rule Iran.

Much has been made of the adjective ‘asymmetric’ when discussing warfare in recent years. The word enjoys a renewed currency now that Israel and America are engaged in combat with enemies who, unable to match them with comparable armed forces, instead disperse, hide and strike at the soft underbelly of their foe. David and his sling, I suppose, when David met Goliath thousands of years ago, was a forerunner of this strategy. But I want to discuss another kind of asymmetry, and another Old Testament hero, Samson. Alone, captive and blinded, Samson reached for a secret weapon unavailable to his captors: the weapon of self-sacrifice. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and their forces do not fear death.