American power has a market. When faced with a war it wants to end, Washington develops a comprehensive plan that includes phased withdrawals, monitoring arrangements, economic incentives and a timeline. He then acts as if the document itself were peace.
This has continued for decades, through one Middle East conflict after another, with the same faith in the process and the expectation of the same outcome. One side flies with hope and a document. The other lives with history. That gap has trumped every deal before it, and no drafting exercise has ever closed it.
For years, I was asked to assess the legal risk in deals like this in the Middle East and Africa: whether a given commitment would work as the interests of the parties shifted. I thought about that work this week as Washington celebrated its memorandum of understanding with Iran.
The relief is real and deserved: a 60-day ceasefire, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the end of hostilities after a hard-fought war. However, the old patterns persist because it offers only a temporary window to de-escalate nearly 50 years of hostility. This cannot serve as a final solution.
Sanctions waivers are being issued, while more difficult issues are being postponed to future negotiations that have yet to begin. The key promise – that Iran will not develop a nuclear bomb – has been made repeatedly by Tehran over the years.
Even the signing process showed signs of instability; The vice president’s initial meeting in Switzerland was canceled at the last minute and Israel attacked Beirut on a morning when the White House was optimistic about peace. Ultimately, it appears to be a carefully designed process imposed on forces beyond its control.
This goes beyond any administration. It is the reflex of a whole order. The generation that built the post-war system did so amid the ruins of two world wars. The United Nations, Bretton Woods and NATO: all these institutions were not projects of idealists, but a shield, improvised by frightened people against a catastrophe that they had personally experienced.
Their descendants took up the shield, but lost sight of its original purpose. As the fear that once motivated its creation faded, the machine continued to operate independently, with its own summits, agreements signed, and rules established. Over time, the process itself became more significant than its intended purpose.
The recipients understood all this long before the diplomats who authored the documents. The proposals did not convince because they reflected a reality that the recipients had already experienced – in the contested land, among the dead, with grievances that no timeline could resolve.
They were kind to visiting negotiators, like guests who traveled great distances but brought the wrong tools. While the gap between the written proposals and the ongoing conflict was obvious to any observer, hardly anyone recognized it.
Two men made a career out of saying it out loud. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump both realized that the order had been hollowed out and that those running it were moving on, no longer believing in it.
But noticing the breakdown is not the same as remembering why the order was built in the first place. Putin chose to destroy it from the outside. This week, Trump holds a deal in one hand and the threat of going “right back to dropping bombs” in the other. Neither man has what the founders had: knowledge of what it costs when there is no order at all, paid in ruin.
That’s the hard lesson buried in this week’s deal, and with each engagement I was asked to weigh the risk of it falling through. The postwar order was not created by clever frameworks. It was built by people who had seen the alternative first hand and were horrified by it.
You can’t produce that terror in a conference room, and no memo can replace it. The next solution that really exists, in the Middle East or anywhere else, will probably be built the way the last one was: not out of wisdom, but out of exhaustion, since the catastrophe it was supposed to prevent has already arrived.
I’d like to be wrong about that. Nothing I’ve learned weighing these deals has ever given me reason to think I am.
Eric Alter is a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs and a former UN civil servant.
