I HAVE not read the signed document. As of this writing I am not sure a signed document exists. What I know is what US President Donald Trump said on Fox News what the Iranian parliamentary speaker said on social media, and what happened over Beirut before dawn. I am working from those pieces and from everything I have written in this series over the last 104 days. Take this for what it is.
Here is the frame I cannot get out of my head.
You are at a used car lot. The salesman has been telling you for six weeks that this is the deal of a lifetime. The car is beautiful. The price is right. You can hear something in the engine but the salesman says it is nothing. He says the previous owner mentioned it once and it was nothing. He says the mechanic looked at it and found nothing. You sign the purchase agreement. The purchase agreement includes a critical condition: you get your money back if the engine knocks.
That is the Iran peace deal as I understand it this afternoon. [Editor’s note: Monday]
The condition that unravels it is not a hypothetical. It is not a remote possibility. It is the nature of the engine. Hezbollah does not exist to coexist with Israel. It was built, funded, trained and armed by Iran over 40 years for one purpose. Its fighters do not have a retirement plan which involves not firing rockets into northern Israel. The theology of resistance is not a policy position they hold until a better offer comes along. It is the organising principle of the institution. You do not negotiate that out of an organisation by getting Iran to sign a memorandum of understanding. You negotiate it out by dismantling the organisation, which this deal does not seem to do.
Israel is not controlled by America. That is not a complaint. It is a fact. Netanyahu did not ask Trump’s permission this morning before the strikes near Beirut. Trump found out and called him to ask what the expletive he was doing, which tells you everything about the architecture of control here. The most Trump can do is pressure, threaten and express displeasure in memorable language. He has been doing all three today. The strikes happened anyway.
So the deal, if signed, rests on a condition involving two parties America does not control. One of them, Hezbollah, is constitutionally incapable of fulfilling the condition. The other, Israel, is not going to accept rocket fire into its northern cities and do nothing.
I want to be fair to what the deal does accomplish if the American description of its terms holds. An open Strait of Hormuz removes real money from the war risk premium on global oil. Russian President Vladimir Putin loses the windfall the closure handed him. American consumers feel it at the pump within weeks. Those are not nothing. A signed document with Iran’s name on a commitment never to pursue a nuclear weapon is not nothing, even if the highly-enriched uranium question is deferred to a 60-day follow-on which I do not trust.
But a deal structured around a condition that will be violated is not a peace. It is a purchase agreement with a refund clause on a car that is already knocking.
Trump is smarter about exit ramps than almost anyone in Washington gives him credit for. It is possible, maybe even likely, that a condition requiring perfect quiet on the Israel-Hezbollah front was written in precisely because it can be invoked. He gets to sign the deal, take credit for the strait opening, watch the gas prices move, and then point to the first Hezbollah salvo as the violation that ended it. He tears it up on Iranian bad faith rather than American withdrawal. That is a better political position than either endless war or a deal which holds through 60 days of technical negotiations that produce nothing.
Whether that is genius or a symptom of a framework too fragile to survive contact with the region, I genuinely do not yet know. What I know is that the engine was knocking before we pulled off the lot.
I am praying for peace, and I am expecting lots more strikes will happen before we get it in any durable sense.
