15 days of ceasefire in Iran: and now what?

BarcelonaThe world breathes a sigh of relief. Trump has ended up backing down from his apocalyptic threat to "destroy" Persian civilization in one night if Tehran did not reopen the Strait of Hormuz and has accepted a 15-day truce to negotiate with Iran. This negotiation will be carried out with two premises: Iran continues to control the strait and it will be discussed based on the 10-point plan presented by Tehran. In the next two weeks we will know if today the White House has found the clue it imperatively needed to get out of a war in which it had not calculated Iran's ability to resist and strangle the world economy.

"It will be interesting to know someday who and how stopped Trump," because we were very close to disaster," Eduard Soler, a professor of International Relations at the UAB specializing in the Middle East, explains to ARA. "I don't think it was a masterstroke by Trump nor that he had this negotiating strategy from the beginning: there have been internal or external forces in the United States that have pressured to avoid the precipice," he adds. It is also not clear that the path of negotiation is sustainable, he warns: "Israel did not want to stop the war and could boycott the talks, and it is also not clear if there could be saboteurs within Iran."

The terms of the ceasefire are yet to be seen, but it is not the scenario the United States and Israel wanted when on February 28 they launched the joint attack against Tehran, demanding unconditional surrender from the regime. Now Washington has to sit down and negotiate, and, no matter how much Trump claims otherwise, it has to do so without having achieved any of its military objectives. The Iranian regime maintains intact the reserves of enriched uranium from its nuclear program, has managed to have its ballistic missile and drone arsenals survive more than five weeks of bombings with the capacity to continue attacking. But above all, it has demonstrated that it can close the Strait of Hormuz without the world's leading military power being able to prevent it: it has materialized its threat for the first time, strangling the global economy. Something that will haunt this and future U.S. administrations. Trump loses here, with his bases divided between those who are still loyal to him and those who accuse him of having broken the promise not to involve the United States in unwinnable wars in the Middle East. The Democratic opposition in the United States, which sees its predictions confirmed, wins. And all this when things can still change again before the midterm elections. 

The battle of the narrative

Victories in wars are also a matter of narrative. As Iranian political scientist Anahita Nassir explains to ARA, "the United States will be able to say that they have reopened the Strait of Hormuz and the regime, which has survived the pressure from Washington and Israel with more than 13,000 attacks and has done so by straining the global economy." It is not clear how Iran's demand for its imposed toll on the strait to be accepted will materialize, a measure that has already been in effect for days at this crucial point of global merchandise transit. As Richard Fontaine, executive director of the Center for a New American Security in Washington, explains to The New York Times, "Iran continues to control the Strait of Hormuz, and it is hard to believe that the United States and the world can accept a situation in which Iran maintains control of a key point for energy indefinitely. This would be a substantially worse outcome than what existed before the war."

Furthermore, in its 10-point plan, Iran demands to be able to continue enriching uranium, the withdrawal of US troops from the region, and the lifting of all sanctions against it. Trump has the hot potato to show that his war yields better results than his predecessors' negotiations with Tehran over the last twenty years. Obama took two years to negotiate the nuclear deal with Iran, in peacetime, and it is difficult to think that Trump can achieve a substantial result in two weeks, just because he has a Damocles sword that has not quite worked for him.

On the political front, the balance is no better for Washington and Tel Aviv. Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, is dead, but the Revolutionary Guard, the regime's praetorian guard, has gained power, and executions of protesters and opponents have continued. Trump began this war by inciting the Iranian masses to rise up against their government. Now he says that Khamenei's son, the new Supreme Leader, although his health status is unknown after being injured on the first day of the attack, is part of a generation "smarter and less radicalized." US intelligence services doubt this.

Moreover, Washington has seen its alliances weakened. The Gulf petromonarchies have discovered that the United States cannot protect them. Washington has further soured its relations with Europe. China and Russia emerge strengthened. A strategic failure in every respect.

Netanyahu, impunity on other frontsIsrael wanted to continue the war and seemed more interested in permanently destabilizing Iran than in a regime change. But if Netanyahu cannot boycott the agreement and get Trump to continue bombing his archenemy, he does have carte blanche to continue on the other fronts: Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank. Israel has reacted in the first hours of the ceasefire by intensifying its scorched-earth strategy in Lebanon. All of this will be key for the fall elections, the first time the man has dominated political life in Israel in the last quarter-century that will go to the polls since the Palestinian attacks of October 7. It is not clear that Iran is willing to risk it for its ally, Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia militia. 

Lurdes Vidal, a researcher of the Arab world at IBEI, highlights that the Gulf petromonarchies “are the big losers of this war because their security architecture has been blown up and their mirage of being an oasis of peace and prosperity in a region in flames has ended: the loss of confidence will be felt in investments, tourism… and this is hard to recover.” Pakistan, especially, and also Turkey and Egypt have emerged as new mediators in the process that is now opening up, taking over from Qatar and Oman. 

And as always in all wars, it is the people who lose out. The Iranians, with more than 2,300 dead, who now have to endure a reinforced dictatorship that has gained oxygen and must worry about surviving amidst the destruction of critical civilian infrastructure; and the Lebanese and Palestinians, who see Israel unleashed, growing its ethnic cleansing project.