Less Than Nothing
Thoughts on the US-Iran peace deal, and the self-destructive war itself
Trump’s self-destructive war is supposedly over. Last night, the US and Iran announced that a peace deal had been reached, though it leaves the most difficult questions for the weeks and months ahead. The so-called “memorandum of understanding” allocates the next 60 days for intensive negotiations on the fate of the Iranian nuclear program, effectively kicking the can down the road in much the same way that the April 8th ceasefire did. The MoU therefore represents another reprieve more than a decisive peace, the termination of the current battle within a much longer campaign.
Despite the remaining questions and lack of finality, it’s worth taking stock of the past 107 or so days since the war began. Even by the debauched standards of the Trump administration, wherein inflicting short-term shock and awe and sending ratings and stocks soaring matter more than any durable strategic objectives, the war achieved less than nothing. There’s no question that Iran’s military and nuclear program have been hobbled somewhat, but they can be rebuilt. And having been attacked twice by the US and Israel in the middle of peace talks now, they’ll have much more incentive to do so than ever before.
Trump recently described the war as having achieved a regime change “of sorts” owing to the numerous murders of high-level Iranian officials by the US and Israel during the conflict. But such a claim will not satisfy the dejected regime change fanatics in Israel, nor the truly loathsome Pahlavists in the Iranian diaspora, the latter who’ve now permanently discredited themselves before the eyes of the world.
It’s also possible that by picking off individual Iranians one-by-one, Trump again achieved less than zero: rather than a simple return to status quo ante, what Trump has actually done is far more damaging. The US and Israel assassinated diplomats who, with zen-like calm, had recently given interviews to CNN; they killed moderate philosophy PhDs and Islamic scholars and religious leaders. Even critics of the current Iranian leadership could see that there was something abhorrent here, something cowardly that made the skin crawl. The surprisingly erudite representatives of the Islamic Republic, who’d entered the war looking like leaders of yet another sclerotic, repressive regime, grew comparatively sympathetic to many observers in the conflict’s first weeks, appearing steely and calm as they gave Goliath a black eye. Thanks to its dizzying output of Lego propaganda videos, Iran was able to connect with a 21st century global audience like never before. There’s little doubt who won the global propaganda war with this one. In the end, not even America’s closest allies would give their full-throated support for Trump’s war.
Finally, the world cannot and will not unsee the fact that Iran managed to threaten the entire global economy by closing the Strait of Hormuz. The fact that they could has revealed a fundamental weakness in the organization of the global American empire, something now laid out for all to see. The US has suffered big defeats–the Vietnam War, the more recent disastrous retreat from Afghanistan–but this feels like a more global loss. Besides, neither the Vietnamese nor the Taliban ever occupied quite the same obsessive function in the neoconservative American imagination as Iran; after all, they matter far less to Israel.
The Trump administration will try to bounce back from this by going after low hanging fruit, which probably means the government of Cuba. But it won’t be enough to restore the already flatlining global confidence in the US to pre-war levels, or to Make the American Empire Great Again. More disturbing, we can be assured that the full ramifications of what Trump’s done will only reveal themselves later, in the months and years to come. But the current round of the US-Israel war on Iran has undoubtedly created new fissures and cracks that will someday fully break.