Trump and Netanyahu face a reckoning
Summary: the ceasefire that Donald Trump accepted has stopped the
war and with the president signalling he does not want a resumption
Tehran has secured a significant victory over its greatest enemies.
Is this the emperor has no clothes moment for Donald Trump? The two week ceasefire he announced at the 11th hour, literally the 11th
hour saw him “staring into the abyss in the Trumpiest way possible, as
if he were a reality-show producer teasing the season finale” as The Economist’s Greg Carlstrom put it.
The New York Times in an exclusive piece
took readers into the Situation Room on 11 February when Benjamin
Netanyahu sold Trump the ultimate bad deal convincing him that a quick
win was possible and that regime change was a few easy steps away from
being achieved:
Mr. Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as
pointing to near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile program could
be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it
could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran
would land blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was
assessed as minimal.
He also baldly claim that the Iranian people would rush into the
streets to overthrow the regime abetted by Mossad’s intervention to
encourage rioting and revolution (see our newsletter of 19 January.)
In the days that followed the Times says that various people
questioned the narrative Netanyahu had stitched together. The head of
the CIA John Ratcliffe told the president that the notion of achieving
regime change was “farcical.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio was a tad
earthier. He told Trump it was “bullshit.”
And yet no one, other than the vice president JD Vance, argued in a
forceful way that the war was utter folly. Vance noted that the Iranians
would close the Strait of Hormuz with huge consequences for, amongst
other impacts, the price of petrol at the pump. He warned the war would
alienate his supporters which it did (as Jon Hoffman argued in our podcast
of 1 April pointing to a growing split between MAGA always Trumpers and
America Firsters angry that the president had broken his promise not to
engage in foreign wars.)
Trump brushed aside those concerns because as he told Tucker Carlson
who had also intervened at a late stage “everything will be OK because
it always is.” The president’s instincts were what mattered and those
around him accepted against all the evidence and all the odds that he
must be right when in fact he could not have been more wrong.
The president claimed a win even as in an extraordinary volte-face he embraced the Iranian counter-proposal to his 15 point surrender document:
We received a 10 point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a
workable basis on which to negotiate. Almost all of the various points
of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and
Iran, but a two week period will allow the Agreement to be finalized and
consummated.
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Iran has declared a "historic and crushing defeat" of the US and
Israel after 40 days of war, forcing Washington to accept a 10-point
Iranian proposal that includes a permanent ceasefire, the lifting of all
sanctions, and the withdrawal of US combat forces from the region.
The defence and security analyst and our podcast contributor Andreas Krieg (you can find his latest AD podcast here) used social media to describe the ceasefire deal as:
the worst strategic defeat for the US since Vietnam and possibly
the worst strategic defeat for Israel ever. IF the ceasefire term are
translated into an agreement, Iran will be able to rebuild capabilities
within a year.
Benjamin Netanyahu had no choice but to confirm that Israel would
join the ceasefire while attempting to save face by declaring the war
against Lebanon will continue. As Haaretz noted the prime minister in doing so had not achieved two of his key aims when he and Trump launched the war:
The first is Iran's nuclear program, with the fate of its
enriched uranium still unclear. There is also, for now, no Iranian
commitment to abandon its ballistic missile program, which Netanyahu has
defined as an "existential threat" and which has been a primary focus
of Israeli air force operations over the past month.
Netanyahu’s chief opposition rival Yair Lapid who had backed the war when it was launched was quick to go for the jugular:
There has never been such a diplomatic disaster in our history.
Israel was not even at the table when decisions were made on core issues
of our national security…. Netanyahu failed diplomatically, failed strategically and did not meet a single goal he himself set.
Iran’s National Security Council issued a statement
that concluded “Iran has achieved a massive victory and forced criminal
America to accept its 10-point plan.” While the degree of the victory
will be debated it is without doubt a win for the Iranian regime. Not
only has it survived by playing leverage of the Strait of Hormuz with
great skill it has won a huge propaganda success by forcing the world’s
most powerful military to come to the negotiating table on its terms.
The war has also forced a reckoning on the Gulf states. Another of
our podcast contributors Chatham House’s Sanam Vakil in a social media
posting argues:
the Gulf will be more vulnerable than ever before and therefore
in need of U.S. help. But Gulf populations have begun to question the
United States’ reliability and the value of hosting American bases. To
better protect themselves, Gulf leaders must therefore now try to wrest
some autonomy from the United States by strengthening cooperation,
foremost among themselves.
(Sanam Vakil’s latest AD podcast Iran and regime survival is here.)
For Trump a career both in business and politics that has long defied
gravity has crashed to earth with a thud that is echoing around the
world and most emphatically in America. The loyalists he has surrounded
himself with in his second term have seen the would be emperor without
any clothes. That will shake them. But beyond the confines of the White
House his attempt to sell to a majority of Americans that the ceasefire
was a win is not likely to succeed with political implications for the
president and the party he had claimed to make his own.
Netanyahu too will face a reckoning. His brutal and genocidal war in
Gaza, the ongoing ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem and the West Bank,
the destruction of Lebanon and the ruthless bombing campaign he and the
Americans inflicted on Iran have turned Israel into a global pariah
state. Most crucially his self-serving policies have squandered support
for Israel in the country that matters most: the United States.
Benjamin Netanyahu had boasted that the war would change the Middle East forever. It has but not in the way he thought it would.
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