We’ve heard about potential peace accords before, yet the specifics of the supposed tentative agreement between Washington and Tehran remain under wraps.
However, one aspect is undeniably evident: the 12-week conflict has produced both victors and significant casualties. Regardless of the final terms, the conflict has already altered the Middle East landscape.
Among the hardest hit is Israel, particularly with its Gulf allies, Bahrain and the UAE, suffering economically from Iranian missile attacks. Additionally, Iran’s blockade of the Persian Gulf has disrupted their oil exports.
The UAE, which had taken the lead in shifting its economy away from reliance on oil, sees its ambitions threatened. Efforts to attract investors and tourists to Dubai through business-friendly initiatives are hampered by the looming danger of drone assaults. These Sunni-led, oil-rich nations are now eager to secure a settlement with Shiite Iran.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is believed to have been instrumental in convincing U.S. President Donald Trump to initiate an attack on Iran, during a clandestine meeting at the White House in February.
This move was seemingly based on the notion that military force could topple the Iranian regime.
Yet the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp continues to control Tehran, an awkward fact that will make Israel’s coming general election tricky for Netanyahu.
Most Israelis support a hard line against Iran and its two proxies on their borders – Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu , is widely thought to have been the one who persuaded US President Donald Trump to attack Iran in the first place
China’s President Xi Jinping and his Pakistani allies seem to have quietly manoeuvred America and Iran into a deal that suits Beijing nicely, writes Mark Almond
But three years after the bloody Hamas outrage on October 7, Netanyahu has won only tactical victories. Despite assassinating the leaderships of Iran and its proxies, thousands of enemy rockets and fighters are still in place.
Britain and Europe are losers, too. The oil shock means that inflation and interest rates are rising, putting paid to any hopes for badly needed growth.
Worse, the continent has been exposed militarily.
Europeans, including most Britons, are angry at Trump – not without reason – but gloating over a setback for the US cannot disguise our weakness and continued dependence on Washington for defence from threats closer to home than Iran.
Its vast resources – and two great oceans – might seem to insulate the US from the worst consequences of its actions in the Gulf, yet Washington is hardly a winner.
Trump can, and will, claim that Iran’s capacity to make a nuclear bomb has been severely reduced, yet that was the case before the latest round of conflict began. Washington has spent billions reducing much of Iran to rubble, yet it is hard to see any final outcome that is not worse for America and its allies than the situation before the first bomb was dropped.
Which brings us to the winners. Who doubts that Trump’s visit to China last week set the stage for compromise and the terms of his retreat from the Gulf?
Without humiliating Trump, China’s President Xi Jinping and his Pakistani allies – who staged the negotiations – seem to have quietly manoeuvred America and Iran into a deal that suits Beijing nicely.
World trade, not only in energy, can sputter back to life. China will be seen as the arbiter of peace. If negotiations fall apart, it won’t be Beijing that gets the blame.
Russia, too, is just about a winner. Although infuriated to see Iran, a leading ally, so badly mauled, Putin has made billions of dollars from the spike in oil and gas prices.
Worse, Tehran knows it can have – when it chooses – de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important shipping lane for oil and gas
Putin has also had the pleasure of seeing the conflict poison relations between Washington and European capitals – which the US blames for failing to support Trump’s ‘little excursion’.
As for Iran, it is certainly suffering economically and badly needs Trump to call off the dogs of war. Yet there are good reasons to think its new leaders are even more intransigent, more hardline than the predecessors killed by precision strikes from America and Israel.
Worse, Tehran knows it can have – when it chooses – de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most important shipping lane for oil and gas, a lamentable development for world trade in general and Iran’s opponents in particular.
In the short term, Iran, China and Russia can be mightily pleased that Trump looks set for a climbdown having achieved little. But remember this: only the US President can decide if any deal is acceptable.
After he faced down the Soviet Union in the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, President John F Kennedy warned his team not to boast because he didn’t want humiliated Kremlin hardliners to overturn the agreement.
Let’s hope Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei Jnr – today’s victor on points – is an unlikely JFK. And that he reins in the sort of triumphalism likely to provoke Trump into a disastrous Round Three.
- Mark Almond is director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford
