"Good Grief"

"Good Grief"

by No1

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"That is the most consequential string of weasel words I’ve seen since “weapons of mass destruction - related program activities”. Largely. Negotiated. Subject to. Finalization. That’s not a deal. That’s not even a ceasefire! No formal document, no signed terms, no local commander on record. The blockade is still running, which by any classical definition is an act of war.

Trump held a call with eight countries about Iran - Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, without Iran. A memorandum of understanding was reached, understanding being conditional, the memorandum being provisional, the reaching being subject to a later reaching, and the whole thing pending the participation of the participant who didn't participate.

Meanwhile Israel got... a separate call. Not the main call. A side call. The country that lit the match in the first place got pulled aside for a one-on-one, outcome described as having gone “very well”, and the Strait of Hormuz is going to be opened, and the final details will be “announced shortly”. Whenever that may be.

The neocons are already losing their minds on X. Pompeo, Levin, Graham, the whole fingerprints-up-their-asses crowd - furious. Which, for what it’s worth, is the one legible signal in all of this that something real might be happening.

So what might actually happen from here?The White House@WhiteHouse: “The negotiations are proceeding in an orderly and constructive manner, and I have informed my representatives not to rush into a deal in that time is on our side… Both sides must take their time and get it right. There can be no mistakes!” - President Donald J. Trump 🇺🇸

Saturday night, Trump told the world the deal was “largely negotiated” and would be announced “shortly”. Sunday morning he posted that he’d told his negotiators “not to rush into a deal” because “time is on our side” - and the blockade stays until everything is “certified and signed”. Twelve hours. Give or take.

So as of Sunday we have two reports, one from the NYT and one from Reuters, both citing sources, both presumably correct. In one, Iran has agreed to give up its highly enriched uranium. In the other, Iran has agreed to give up nothing, and the uranium was never on the table to begin with. These are facts.

The stockpile is simultaneously surrendered and untouched, the nuclear issue is both the centrepiece of the deal and not part of it, the Strait is both reopening and under Iranian management, depending on which capital’s press release you read. Which is impressive, when you think about it. It usually takes years for the signatories of a treaty to start disputing what it says. These two managed to do that before anyone even found the document.

Netanyahu, or his AI counterpart, said that any deal needed to include “dismantling Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites and removing its enriched nuclear material from its territory” - and separately that Israel would “maintain freedom of action against threats in all areas, including in Lebanon”.“Largely negotiated”… Right?!

Whatever the fine print says about the uranium, the deal itself is the issue here. A deal is something you sign with someone who is still there to sign it. And for the past three months the official position was that this someone in question had been totally destroyed, completely eliminated, and reduced to a cautionary tale. Eliminated regimes are famously difficult to negotiate with. They miss meetings. They do not RSVP.

So if the United States is now sitting across a table from Iran, lifting blockades and haggling over a stockpile, then either the elimination didn’t take, or it’s the most expensive way anyone has ever found to lose a negotiation to a corpse.

Option one is that the deal holds. The Strait opens, for a price, Trump claims THE GREATEST DEAL IN THE HISTORY OF DEALS, and the country that was totally destroyed eighteen weeks ago dictates the terms. Everybody agrees not to look too closely at who got what.

Option two is that Israel moves before finalization. The “separate call” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Netanyahu is not a party to this agreement in any visible way - and he just told the world he expects complete dismantlement as a baseline. The neocon wing of Washington, the one that got Thomas Massie primaried out for daring to vote against the war, will be in his ear for the duration.

This afternoon, while the deal is supposedly being finalized, his office released this marketing poster. For the sequel, I assume, since the first one totally obliterated the reviewers. THAT trailer is going to be explosive! The pattern for the last decade is that when a US-Iran deal gets close, something happens. Something loud. And with a lot of body bags.

Option three, and that’s the one I think gets underpriced: nothing lands now, both sides lick their wounds, and in six months or a year from now, someone tries again.

Except by then something will have shifted. Every Gulf leader on that call has just watched what happens when you let USrael use your territory as a staging area. Saudi Arabia. The UAE. Qatar. All of them on the phone, begging Washington to stop - their own economies on the line, their own populations in the blast radius of a decision made in Tel Aviv and rubber-stamped in Washington.

The GCC’s god ain’t Allah, it’s $$$. But the dollar only works if the oil keeps flowing and the refineries keep standing. Iran knows exactly where every desalination plant and every refinery in the Gulf is. Iran itself is too big to destroy - too much territory, too much depth, too much bombs - and the GCC are exposed in ways that Iran simply isn’t. So not friends. Not enemies either. Frenemies. And frenemies can do business. So the calculation will be shifting. Slowly, quietly, but shifting.

If USrael comes back for round three, Iran could play it smart: keep the fire on Israel, leaves GCC infrastructure largely untouched unless they allow the use of their airspace again. Because why would you bomb the refinery of the country you’re trying to peel away from the American orbit? A Hormuz transit toll runs for about $1 a barrel which translates to roughly $0.03 at the pump. No1’s going to notice that. But what everyone will notice are Gulf refineries turned to rubble. Iran will collect their toll once the Americans are gone. The GCC will keep the oil and the money flowing. Nobody has to like each other for that to work.

That’s the long game, and it runs regardless of whether this “largely negotiated” deal ever becomes a real one. Push the Gulf hard enough, often enough, and the thing that breaks probably won't be Iran. It'll be the petrodollar."

- https://no01.substack.com/