I’ve been looking for more information on exactly what the “peace deal” actually provides. There’s not much. Trump is making a lot of claims that I suspect are not accurate. Iran is making a lot of claims that Trump may not know about.
The best thing to read about this alleged deal is Tom Nichols’s Trump Celebrates While America Capitulates at The Atlantic. Here’s a bit:
The details of the agreement remain unconfirmed, but the president, of course, is eager to spin the outcome as a victory. (Trump was in a hurry to sign the deal on his birthday; the Iranians, who now seem to be in charge of this whole business, instead said they will send someone to a meeting in Switzerland on Friday.) But even before we have the details, it is clear that Trump has failed to achieve every one of the goals he put forward for this war of choice, and now he is determined to sign, seal, and deliver America’s capitulation as quickly as possible.
Do read the whole piece. It’s very informative.
The basic agreement, gleaned from several news stories:
The Strait of Hormuz will open. Probably. Pretty soon. Trump said Friday, but there is also talk of needing to clear mines out of it first. Trump says Iran will not charge a toll to ships passing through the Strait. Iran says of course they will not charge a toll. Instead, Iran will charge a service fee.
The U.S. is ending its naval blockade of Iran’s ports. This is one point everyone seems to agree on, for now.
Iran will get paid money. $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets will be released, also pretty soon, per Iran’s version of the deal. The Iranians also expect that sanctions on Iranian oil, petrochemical products and related exports will end, allowing Tehran full access to the resulting revenues. They also expect the United States and its allies to provide $300 billion for reconstruction to Iran.
Iran’s enriched uranium will be further discussed. There is an official sixty-day period set aside for discussing Iran’s uranium. If no agreements are reached, it’s possible military action could resume. But I doubt even Trump is dumb enough to start his war up again.
An Iranian official told Reuters that the draft memorandum includes an agreement by Tehran not to produce or acquire nuclear weapons, allows it to maintain the current status of its nuclear programme and prevents it from further uranium enrichment and expansion of its nuclear facilities.
The United States has agreed to allow Iran to dilute its stockpile of highly enriched uranium on Iranian soil under a more detailed future agreement, according to the reports.
That doesn’t look like exactly the same page to me. Tom Nichols:
The Trump administration will claim that it achieved a victory because it got an Iran without nuclear weapons. But this claim is both silly and redundant. Tehran had already pledged 10 years ago in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action not to seek nuclear weapons. No one should trust the Iranians, but before Trump unilaterally canceled the agreement in his first term, the JCPOA seemed to be working. More to the point, at the time Trump chose to go to war, Iran was nowhere near getting a bomb, and certainly not within weeks of a weapon, as Trump asserted. The effort to claim that this war has defeated Iran’s nuclear ambitions is merely an effort to distract from the administration’s failure to achieve regime change, which was always its main goal. …
… Trump has for weeks talked about getting rid of Iran’s “Nuclear Dust”—his odd term for the uranium now lying under the rubble produced by U.S. bombings—and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claimed this morning that the United States has multiple plans for removing this material. The Iranians, however, are busily planting booby traps around the uranium to ensure that it stays where it is, and despite Hegseth’s blustering, America is not going to march into Iran and dig it out without Tehran’s consent. If anything, the Iranians now have every incentive to sprint to a bomb, and can do so with far less transparency than they had to endure under the JCPOA.
U.S. officials say that Iran has agreed “in principle” to allow international International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors to verify the removal of enriched nuclear materials from specific sites. But it doesn’t sound to me that the Iranians have agreed to any such thing, in principle or otherwise.
And then there’s Israel. Israel was not party to any of these negotiations. Trump seems to think he has the authority to order Israel to stop attacking Lebanon. And, of course, he doesn’t. As of this writing Netanyahu has not issued a statement about the deal. Other Israelis are calling it a “catastrophe” and say the agreement does not bind Israel.
The peace deal really is a disaster for Netanyahu. The New York Times is running an analysis headlined Israel Counts the Ways That Netanyahu’s Iran Strategy Failed that’s worth reading. The deal so far doesn’t say anything about Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal or its funding of groups like Hezbollah or the Houthis. It hasn’t yet clarified anything about Iran’s nuclear program, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it never does. . Plus Netanyahu pissed off Trump.
Worse still for Mr. Netanyahu, who faces re-election in a few months and is behind in the polls, President Trump, the Israeli leader’s most valuable political asset, has publicly rebuked him multiple times in recent weeks.
While Mr. Trump has praised Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, as pragmatic, he has called Mr. Netanyahu “crazy,” ungrateful and lacking in judgment.
If this episode leads to Netanyahu losing power in Israel, that would be a great outcome.
So that’s all I know. My sense of things is that Trump is desperate enough to sign anything Iran puts in front of him. But we’ll see.
From Nichols' last paragraph:
"Had Trump toppled the regime in Tehran, he would have had the thanks of most of the world—and congratulations from even his most dedicated critics."
This implies that Trump's mistake was NOT in going along with Bibi's [immoral and stupid] plan to install a compliant government by bombing them back to the Stone Age, but rather in failing to keep bombing them until it worked.
I absolutely reject this perspective, and I would hope that everyone else here would, too.
You're misreading Nichols. He was just saying that if the Iranian people could have been freed, as Trump originally promised, that would have been a good thing. He has been against Trump's war from the beginning, in part because he was a professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College and knew it would fail militarily.
Regarding "toppling the regime…", how many times does the human race have to witness this lesson: when a nation-state perceives another nation-state as evil an the first nation embarks on a military action to "decapitate" the current evil regime, in order to free the ordinary people from tyranny, that military action will fail to achieve the goal, in one of a few ways, unless a third condition exists that is sufficient to lead to success. The first way the military action could fail is when it becomes apparent that a significant portion of the population of the invaded nation decides it will resist the invaders and has some wherewithal to jam the gears of the invasion machine. Quagmire (think VietNam & Ukraine). The second way that the military action could fail is when it is successful militarily but is unable to establish a viable functioning non-evil replacement for the former regime (Afghanistan). This involves a state of foreign occupation by the invaders, which I count as a failure. A variation on this is that even if there are groups of people in the "defeated" nation organized enough and empowered enough to attempt to establish themselves as a governing faction (or put in place by the invaders), the medium term state is likely to be chaotic, an environment in which various bad-actor groups can thrive and there isn't a workable political system to unite the people (think Iraq, giving rise to ISIS, etc).
IMO the only way this kind of thing can work is if there is, at the time of the initiation of war, a group of non-evil people within the target country who are actively working to overthrow their own tyrannical government, politically, militarily (usually guerilla warfare), or both. The only example I can think of, which is an imperfect example, is: The American Revolution, where the foreign "invader" helping the internal rebels was France.
I've put this together kind of slap-dash, but in general, I think world history has taught lessons along these lines in recent centuries. (The era of colonialism via wooden sailing ship navies is a separate topic.)
The moral is that we need to stop electing stupid people. The U.S. military knew good and well what would happen if the U.S. attacked Iran. Trump wouldn't listen.
This may be the first ever totally top secret classified burn-before-reading peace treaty . The doc they sign on Friday will say that all the big stuff is to be negotiated later .
Trump did the rich guy thing again.
He made a mistake.
He found the amount of money it would would take to make it go away.
Except this time it’s our money.
middlerage.bsky.social