Ceasefire Deal Hands Tehran Major Wins

The latest and most fearsome round of fighting in the long shadow war with the Islamic Republic of Iran is not ending well for the United States and Israel. The ceasefire agreement signed by President Trump in Versailles on 17 June is not a full peace treaty, but Iran’s leaders have nonetheless greeted it as an unalloyed triumph. They had, they boasted, “through the imposition of their divine and iron will upon the humiliated American and Zionist enemies, demonstrated with strength that the enemy has no path other than accepting defeat and surrender.”

Though salient details of the “memorandum of understanding” remain opaque and open to interpretation, it is clear that the Trump administration’s desperation to restore the status quo ante and extract itself from the Middle East resulted in a collapse of its own leverage and a lopsided agreement. Four of the fourteen points in the MoU offer Tehran sanctions relief and the release of billions of dollars in frozen assets. Tehran has even been able to dictate terms in Lebanon to secure immunity for Hezbollah, its most important proxy. The Trump administration has effectively pledged to prevent Israel from bombing Hezbollah, even as the militia continues to kill Israeli soldiers and fire rockets and drones at civilians in northern Israel. Whether or not Israel agrees to be bound by the terms of an agreement it didn’t sign—and about which it was not even consulted—remains to be seen. Further negotiation over Iran’s nuclear program—for a period of sixty days, as stipulated in the agreement—will almost certainly be fruitless.

Operation Epic Fury has been an epic failure from inception because the war aims and the theory of victory were hopelessly muddled in the minds of its divided architects. This resulted in confused messaging that invited the Islamic Revolutionary Guards to prepare for the worst while a bewildered US public struggled to identify a coherent rationale for the war. As the costs of the conflict accumulated, Trump simply aborted the mission, abandoning the United States’ allies, and capitulated to its foes.

This disaster was the predictable upshot of extravagant objectives sought by insufficient means. At the outset of hostilities, Trump—whose voice always matters most—set out his war aims as follows:

We are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally—again—obliterated. We are going to annihilate their Navy. We’re going to ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces and no longer use their IEDs or roadside bombs, as they are sometimes called, to so gravely wound and kill thousands and thousands of people including many Americans. And we will ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon.

He concluded by addressing the citizens of the country he was attacking:

Finally, to the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.

Trump also offered a shoddy justification for this extremely risky enterprise. Contrary to the available evidence, he claimed that Iran posed an imminent threat to US national security. A more prudent and scrupulous case would have (correctly) described the Islamic Republic as a threat to regional security and to US allies and interests. It was a highly vulnerable state that could be weakened and contained at reasonable cost.

By the time war broke out at the end of February, Iran’s clerical regime was already a diminished force. Although it retained the capacity for ruthless internal repression, its ability to project power across the Middle East had been severely curtailed by Israel since 7 October 2023. Before the Hamas assault that day, Iran’s formidable network of proxy and surrogate forces encircled the Jewish state and threatened to erode other pillars of Pax Americana, the Iranian nuclear program was steadily accumulating ever-larger quantities of highly enriched uranium, and the country’s economy—the material basis of its burgeoning hegemony—was constrained by Western sanctions but intact.

Over the past two years, Iran suffered a string of bloody reverses and defeats. Its jihadist allies from Beirut to the Bab al-Mandab Strait—especially Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis—were smashed and humiliated. After more than a decade of the Syrian uprising, Iran’s strategic satrapy in Damascus was deposed. Its nuclear materials were buried under rubble last June by concentrated Israeli and American airpower. The Iranian rial went into freefall, and the immiserated Iranian population was again panting for “the death of the dictator.”

Facts like these might have augured a successful military campaign by an administration with sound judgment and a modicum of political courage. But such a war would have required strategic clarity, perseverance, and a willingness to absorb considerable costs. If regime change were not the outcome, then Tehran would certainly have to relinquish its enrichment capabilities and allow safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. That would have been the kind of “unconditional surrender” that President Trump demanded but was unable to obtain. 

The actual war against the Islamic republic went nothing like this. Prosecuted by a fickle and impatient president fearful of high oil prices and a falling stock market, combat operations ceased after barely six weeks. The war unleashed a spasm of violence that strained America’s already depleted munitions stocks and created a strategic liability in its global posture. The Trump administration failed to anticipate foreseeable developments like the bombardment of its regional allies and US military installations or the blockading of the Strait of Hormuz that cut off traffic through a vital energy chokepoint. Trump begged Europe for help, and then showered its leaders with contempt when assistance was not forthcoming. He balked at the use of further armed force against Iran’s military-industrial infrastructure, preferring to issue bloodcurdling threats against Iranian civilisation. Trump evidently hoped that this rhetoric would terrify the Iranians into making concessions at the negotiating table. Instead, he sounded frantic and they called his bluff.

“War,” the 19th-century Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz once wrote, “is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.” That is why any military intervention demands a healthy dose of anxious foresight. “Every war is rich in unique episodes,” Clausewitz observed. “Each is an uncharted sea, full of reefs.” The ubiquity of surprise has been a theme of all warfare since antiquity, even when a belligerent has the measure of its enemy. In On War, Clausewitz insisted:

[T]he first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.

But the Trump administration showed no interest in understanding the nature of either its opponent or the kind of war it was fighting. From the start, the US president and his surrogates misread the enemy and what would be required to secure its surrender. If the administration’s recent comments about a “far less radicalised regime” in Tehran and a willingness to extend an “outstretched hand” are any indication, it remains unwilling or unable to learn. This ignorance is what has left Tehran with the whip hand under the mortifying terms of the MoU.