15 days of ceasefire in Iran: and now what?

BarcelonaThe world breathes a sigh of relief. Trump has ended up retracting his apocalyptic threat to “kill the 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 discussions will be based on the 10-point plan presented by Tehran. In the next two weeks, we will know if the White House has today found the clue it imperatively needed to get out of a war in which it had not calculated Iran's capacity to resist and to strangle the world economy. 

“It will be interesting to know someday who and how they 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 can boycott the talks, and it is also not clear if there can be saboteurs within Iran”. 

The terms of the ceasefire are yet to be seen, but it is not the scenario that 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 keeps intact the enriched uranium reserves from its nuclear program, it 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 shown 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 this and future US administrations will pursue. Trump loses in this, 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 forecasts 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 El ARA, “The United States will be able to say that they have reopened the Strait of Hormuz and the regime will say that it has survived the pressure from Washington and Israel with more than 13,000 attacks and that it 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 for global merchandise transit. As Richard Fontaine, executive director of the Center for a New American Security in Washington, explains in 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 where Iran maintains control of a key energy point indefinitely. This would be a substantially worse outcome than what existed before the war.”

Furthermore, in its 10-point plan, Iran requests to be allowed 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 demonstrate that his war yields better results than his predecessors' negotiations with Tehran over the past twenty years. Obama took two years to negotiate the nuclear deal with Iran, in peacetime, and it is difficult to imagine that Trump can achieve a substantial result in two weeks, simply because he has a sword of Damocles that has not quite worked out. 

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 influence, 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 wounded on the first day of the attack, is part of a generation “more intelligent 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 complete strategic failure. 

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 deal and get Trump to continue bombing his arch-enemy, he does have a free hand to continue on other fronts: Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank. In the first hours of the ceasefire, Israel reacted by intensifying its scorched-earth strategy in Lebanon. All of this will be key for the autumn elections, the first time the man has dominated political life in Israel in the last quarter of a 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 Shiite militia. 

Lurdes Vidal, a researcher of the Arab world at IBEI, points out that the Gulf petromonarchies "are the big losers of this war because their security architecture has blown up and the illusion of being an oasis of peace and prosperity in a burning region has ended for them: the loss of confidence will be felt in investments, tourism... and that is costly 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 have to worry about surviving amidst the destruction of critical civilian infrastructure; and the Lebanese and Palestinians, who see Israel running wild, growing its ethnic cleansing project.