Iran's Forever Leverage

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Edited by Sam Thielman<br>" LET THE OIL FLOW ," said the man who did not, does not, and will not control the spigot.<br>As all but the most MAGA and/or Zionist observers expected, Iran is not playing around when it comes to Israeli assaults on Lebanon. This morning, the day after the long-awaited Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was supposed to be signed in Switzerland, the new and harder-line leadership in Teheran responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Prepare for a lot more of this, for long after Donald Trump leaves office.<br>Iran has correctly ascertained that Israel's goals in the Iran War are not the United States' goals. That's all the more the case now that Trump is actively seeking an accord with Teheran. Trump needs to end the war before its economic disaster dooms his movement politically. Israel seeks to continue its territorial expansion into Lebanon. Iran is eagerly exploiting the divide. The Israelis and their American supporters, fully aware that Trump is out for a separate peace, have entered a deeply satisfying season of lamentation now that the war they have for so long sought to manufacture is the fiasco I told them for decades it would be. For the first time that I can remember, the Israelis are widely understood as an obstacle to a peace that the right in America desires.<br>It's just going to get worse for them from here on out.<br>At the risk of stating the obvious—worth doing, since Trump is out to obscure the obvious, lest it cause a sustained market reaction he can't afford—the Memorandum of Understanding does not end the war. It inaugurates a 60-day period of negotiations, scheduled to begin tomorrow (we'll see), for which every difficult question deferred by the MOU, particularly the nuclear file, must be resolved.<br>While extendable by mutual consent, the collapse of negotiations will mean Iran closes the Strait again, despite the risk of American bombing. If the Iranians perceive Israeli intransigence over the MOU's demand for "the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon," they will close the Strait. Should the Americans prove intransigent, including after any hypothetical deal is reached, Iran will—you guessed it—close the Strait. Welcome to a new regional reality.<br>The terms of the MOU reflect how thoroughly the United States lost the war it and Israel initiated. Section Four stipulates: "The United States of America further undertakes to remove its forces from the proximity of the Islamic Republic of Iran within 30 days after the final Deal." I don't presume to know the form that fulfillment of this clause will take, if it gets fulfilled at all. But the Trump administration has agreed in principle to a transformation of its military posture in the Middle East.<br>Every previous retrenchment from the Middle East or South Asia, with the exceptions of the 2019-20 Taliban negotiations and the collapse of the 2011 U.S.-Iraq basing negotiations, have been unilateral American decisions. All of them in the past 15 years have come in the form of bivouacking to what was thought to be defensible positions arrayed against Iran. However much Section Four is compelled by accurate Iranian missile and drone fire cratering the airfields and blowing up the radar systems of the constellation of U.S. bases hosted by now-nervous Gulf and regional allies, it's an unambiguous retreat. This is categorically different and far worse for the U.S. than 2019-21 or 2011. Iran is flexing a might that neither the Taliban nor post-Saddam Iraq could possess.<br>On top of that, Section Seven pledges the U.S. to "terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran." Section Eleven obligates Washington to "make fully available for use, the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran upon the implementation of this MoU."<br>In other words, no more American economic or military coercion. That's how badly the U.S. lost. And if the United States needs a reminder, Iran can always close the Strait.<br>Much as Trump needs for propaganda purposes to posture as if the Iranian leadership are moderates, they're anything but. Trump and Netanyahu killed the moderates and discredited any who remain. Now Iran is in the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps that the United States has spent decades confronting by proxy. The IRGC and its allies are under pressure from even more hardline elements, who consider any deal with Washington to be capitulation, and who prefer to return to shooting. The current Iranian leadership will need to present Iran's diplomatic achievements as codifying its battlefield achievements. Either they'll produce that at the bargaining table or risk being marginalized by the ultras, just like the faction that negotiated with the Obama administration was. The easiest way to force the Americans back to the table? You guessed it: close the Strait of Hormuz.<br>The Israelis say, and not incorrectly, that this pattern will...