The agreement with Iran is no victory for Donald Trump

BarcelonaAs the hours pass and more details emerge about the memorandum agreed between Iran and the United States, it seems clearer that it represents a victory for Persian diplomacy over American diplomacy. The agreement, which will be signed on Friday, has been received with joy by the markets as it foresees the immediate reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to tanker traffic, but the fine print leaves Donald Trump in a very bad light. One only needs to look at the reaction of the Israeli media, which consider it practically a surrender to the ayatollah regime.

According to what has become known, the agreement includes the cessation of Israel's operations in Lebanon, the lifting of the naval blockade, a plan for Iran to access 300 billion dollars to rebuild the war damage, the suspension of sanctions on oil exports, the release of 24 billion dollars of Iranian funds that were frozen abroad, and the withdrawal of American forces deployed around the Persian Gulf. In return, Tehran reaffirms its commitment not to manufacture nuclear weapons and a 60-day period is opened to agree on the details of what is expected to be an agreement very similar to the one signed by Barack Obama in 2015.

To reach this point, was it necessary to turn the entire Middle East upside down and provoke an oil crisis and a generalized increase in prices across the planet? The problem for Trump is that now, in addition to convincing his public opinion that it was all worth it, he will have to find a way to force his supposed ally, Benjamin Netanyahu, to withdraw from Lebanon. Netanyahu has already hastened to say that he does not agree with the plan and that he does not intend to withdraw from the neighboring country's south as long as he does not have guarantees that Hezbollah has been dismantled. And, in fact, it is also not clear that the Shiite guerrilla will blindly obey Tehran's orders. All of this paints a very unstable scenario, a fragile peace, and a leader, Donald Trump, desperately seeking a way out of the hornet's nest he himself got into last February.

To begin with, nobody believes that the 60 days given to the parties to reach an agreement on the nuclear issue are sufficient. Obama and the EU needed more than a year to outline a pact that has a high technical complexity. However, the memorandum says that this period can be extended indefinitely and that during all this time there can be no kind of attack. That is to say, the Iranian theocratic regime now has the upper hand and will take advantage of the position of strength obtained on the battlefield to strengthen itself internally. Far from the words of Trump, at the beginning of the war, when he said he demanded an "unconditional surrender" from Iran. And the miscalculation of thinking that this conflict could have a resolution in the style of Venezuela and place a puppet government in Tehran is confirmed. Trump has clashed with the harsh reality of the Middle East and, moreover, has distanced himself from who were his great allies in the region: Israel and the Gulf monarchies.