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Notes -
Third Gulf War Negotiations Thread
As we approach the end of the 5 day pause(?) before the USA ramps up attacks again, reports are coming in that the Trump team has sent Iran a 15 point plan for peace. I don’t think the full text has been credibly made public at this time, as should be expected, but from what I’ve gathered the points can be reduced from redundant and detail points, Iran gives:
— Iran stops funding proxies abroad, especially Hamas and Hezbollah
— Iran pinky promises to never get a nuclear weapon, surrenders nuclear material, agrees to various future restrictions/inspections
— Iran opens the Strait of Hormuz
In exchange Iran gets:
— Full sanctions relief, including removal of the snapback provisions that removed sanctions would go back on Iran immediately if Iran violated the agreement
— American assistance with their civilian nuclear program.
Iran, after denying that negotiations were happening at all, has come back with the following demands:
— Bombing of Iran ends, assassination of Iranian officials ends, guarantees that it won’t start again
— Reparations
— Recognition of Iranian sovereignty over the strait of Hormuz
— They won’t negotiate with Steve and Jared, only with JD Vance
Trump has delayed bombing Iranian civilian infrastructure for this week, while Iran has let some ships through the strait as a gesture of good faith, or as Trump put it a “very expensive present.”
Now none of this is being reported clearly, and this all might be bullshit, and maybe one or both sides is engaging in distractionism.
But I’m filled with a deep sense of disquiet and defeat. The Iranian regime is rebuilt, reinforced, made more powerful. The Iranian regime is given new credibility, where before my diasporic friends could claim that with a push the rotten structure would collapse, now they know it will not. Iran gets effective, if not formal, sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. Iran gets sanctions relief. Iran gives up more or less nothing, just some fissionable material that is easily enough replaced and a few proxies that have already been degraded. I don’t really credit the promises Iran is making here for much, especially if the snapback provision is removed.
Giving Iran anything after they close the Strait is tantamount to recognizing their sovereignty over it, de facto if not legally. Simply by asking for it, and then making a deal, Iran is going to be perceived as getting sovereignty over the strait. The USA, by accepting Iran's "gift" of letting ships through the strait, is already acknowledging that Iran has control of the strait! And this would be disastrous.
The flip side is that there’s little guarantee that the US would keep its promises in the future, but that doesn’t feel very good to me either. I’m not sure where I see the off-ramp at this point that isn’t a full invasion of Iran.
Another view is that given the conditions, this isn't really the Iran war, it's the Lebanon war and the Iran war is a sideshow and a distraction. The casualties are higher in Lebanon, there are troops on the ground in Lebanon, Israel is considering expanding its territory into Lebanon, occupation will inevitably result in settlements which will not be removed, etc. Perhaps the purpose of the Iran war never had anything to do with Iran herself, which is why the goals against Iran never seemed achievable, but were instead more local to protecting the Israeli homefront against Hezbollah. The USA distracts Iran and forces it to accept Hezbollah's defeat.
I suppose at least we’ll get good pistachios and saffron now? I’d love to see sanctions relief on a personal level, and I think sanctions are a wildly ineffective method of international relations, but on a geopolitical level this seems like the US admitting defeat.
A couple of thoughts
Assuming they are even honest, the negotiating points seem to far apart to mean anything. Like, the US is not paying reparations to Iran, Iran is not going to become a de facto US protectorate, etc... Iran is also clearly concerned about bad faith negotiations. All in all, it seems like we're nowhere close to progress on this front.
This conflict seems to break a certain kind of person's brain, including a lot of people inside the Trump administration. They look at the raw power differential between the US and Iran, the difference in scale of destruction meted out on either end, and are simply baffled by the idea that Iran could still be in the fight or even in an advantageous position. It has a whiff of "that's not blood in my mouth, it's victory wine." What this fails to grasp is the difference in what this war means for the belligerents. The IRI has far more to lose and gain than the US does, far greater ability to make its populace accept suffering/losses, and an asymmetric need for force (simply put: the US needs way more force to achieve its goals than Iran does, and is operating much further away from its military base). Might-makes-right thinking habitually overestimates the efficacy of raw power and underestimates the importance of intangibles like morale and wanting it more.
A number of people have observed that it now seems the goal of this war for the US is to re-open the strait of Hormuz, which was already open before the war. (Realistically, the goal is to extricate itself without looking stupid/weak, but that ship has probably already sailed). It's still conceivable that the US is going to try some kind of special operation to seize Iranian uranium, but I'm going to hazard to guess that US military really doesn't want to do that. I am still left with the impression that the administration really thought they were going to pull a repeat of Venezuela (we also have some indication that Netanyahu thought kicking in the door would bring the whole rotting edifice down) and all the people saying "trust the plan" are huffing pure, unfiltered copium.
I have to wonder about the wider long-term impact of this conflict. There's going to be a lot of uninvolved countries suffering the economic consequences of the strait being closed, and I predict they're mostly going to blame the US for that. When you're global hegemon, they let you do it, but I can't help but suspect that the current administration is blindly drawing down US soft power without even realizing it.
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