The world breathed a sigh of relief when Donald Trump agreed to a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to end the conflict with Iran on June 17.
But now there is a palpable sense that hostilities are not over. The agreement between Washington and Tehran, signed in Versailles on June 18, is best understood as a deferred crisis – a crisis whose contradictions are already apparent.
Iran’s closure of waterways since February it has caused one of the major supply disruptions in the history of global energy markets, fueling inflation across the Western world and burdening American drivers at the gas station. It was this economic strangulation that brought Trump to the table.
The payoff for the US is unclear. Like former US President Barack Obama said recentlyit is “doubtful that any deal that emerges will be significantly different from, or represent a significant improvement from, the deal” that Obama himself oversaw in 2015.
Iran’s closing of the strait gave him the power to secure concessions from Trump — potentially overriding the Obama-era nuclear deal — without offering more on the nuclear issue than he had presented in Geneva days before the war began in February.
Even top Republicans like Sen. Bill Cassidy have complained about the deal financial incentives to the Iranian regime.
Within 72 hours of the MoD, Iran’s military command ALLEGED to have closed the Strait of Hormuz once again. This was no surprise. It’s indicative of an emboldened Iran that is flexing its leverage — leverage that the Trump deal has inadvertently produced.
Iran has absorbed heavy penalties, survived, and is now dictating the terms of the ceasefire while dangling the constant threat of economic misery in Trump’s face. This is not a basis for a sustainable solution. In fact, it signals a serious loss of control for both the US and Israel.
Iran’s justification – Israeli strikes against Hezbollah – for wreaking economic havoc and holding global energy markets hostage illustrates the structural flaw at the heart of Trump’s approach to deal-making. Iranian officials have explicitly stated that the “most important item” on their agenda is preventing further Israeli attacks on Lebanon.
Iran’s strategic logic is unclear. Whenever Israel retaliates against Hezbollah, which it is legally and politically obligated to do, Iran holds the global economy hostage through the Strait of Hormuz.
This puts Israel in an impossible position. It cannot permanently suspend its right to self-defense as a condition of a US diplomatic agreement.
It is difficult to see Israel’s security cabinet accepting a framework in which Iran-backed forces in Lebanon can attack their territory with impunity, because the consequences of retaliation lead to increased pressure on global oil markets and US inflation figures.
As Israel’s Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, put it: “Israel is not subject to the United States and we are an independent and sovereign nation.”
This is not a viable and sustainable prevention strategy. It is a brass neck brace worn as diplomacy.
For Trump, the domestic arithmetic is just as shaky. While he insists that his deal has delivered everything it was intended to achieve, for his part own admissionhe also declared at the recent G7 summit in France that he “didn’t want to see an economic catastrophe”. It certainly wouldn’t improve his party’s prospects in the upcoming midterm elections in November.
It is an honest admission that his decision-making was driven by the perception that continued military pressure was producing diminishing returns. The decision to stop the war had ceased to be a strategic choice. It was the result of an American president who no longer believed he could operate with complete control.
The problem is that the deal doesn’t restore that agency in a meaningful way. Iran has now shown itself, its regional partners and the world that it can act belligerently and still negotiate from a position of strength.
Vicious cycle
What is currently happening can best be described as a cycle: Israeli military action in Lebanon, Iranian threats to close the strait, US pressure on Israel to leave, and Israeli resistance to doing so.
Each repetition of this cycle will intensify the narrative that containment is no longer a viable course of action—for Israel, for Trump’s domestic base, and for the Gulf states that have felt the brunt of Iranian drone strikes.
Despite the destruction of most of Iran’s military capabilities, infrastructure and political leadership, Iran remains determined to change the order of things in its region. Its foreign policy behavior is driven by a combination of revolutionary ideologya deep distrust of the US and a religiously driven identity as a self-appointed protector of the Shiite Islamic world.
Nothing in the last four months has given Tehran reason to revise this worldview. Quite the opposite.
Lebanon has become the fault line on which this deal will either stand or break. Israel has understood this from the beginning. Trump is reaching. His threat to “blow the crap out of them” if Iran doesn’t comply, suggests a president whose patience with his deal is already wearing thin.
The Memorandum of Understanding is a ceasefire with a built-in detonator. When political actors come to believe that restraint no longer allows them to act meaningfully—as both Trump and Israel increasingly do—escalation ceases to be a choice. It may be the only logic available.
Ben Soodavar is a lecturer in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London
This article was reprinted from Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read on original article.
