The Current Balance in This Pause—Not End, But Pause, Perhaps Perpetual Pause—in the War in the Persian Gulf: MOST IMPORTANT THING
The Trumpists say “victory”; Tehran calls it “reconstruction payments”; the meter on the Strait of Hormuz is running either way; from “maximum pressure” to war indemnities and investment funds, Trump’s Iran adventure is ending in a very expensive defeat…
Hold on tight to this:
Ian Bremmer; <https://x.com/ianbremmer/status/2060399422186361279>; ‘expected outcome of us/iran agreement:
strait opens and blockade dropped immediately.
ceasefire extended for 60-days
qatar transfers $6 billion of iranian assets to iran, the united states says it has nothing to do with that transfer (call it a coincidence)
us and iran continue (restart) negotiating nuclear issues, probably keep extending the deadline with little progress
no meaningful expansion of abraham accords…
As Noah Smith says:
Noah Smith: <https://x.com/Noahpinion/status/2060507078335345115/>: ‘LOL, Trump started a war with Iran, and then ended up paying Iran a war indemnity. Pathetic…
You can look at as:
the United States paying $6 billion in order to open the Strait of Hormuz—or “Vermouth” as Scott Bessent once called it—to oil shipping for 60 days.
the United States paying Iran $6 billion in reparations for its reverse Pearl Harbor attack.
Both are valid. Both are true.
We are also told that US-Iran nuclear-program status negotiations will “start”. And we can bet that the US and Iran will have contradictory announcements: each declaring “victory”.
And in sixty days there will be a new round of negotiations about a further extension of the ceasefire.
What, exactly, does the White House say that Iran is agreeing to? This:
Lucian Tresscott: Fumbling mumbling bumbling crumbling: Trump’s war in Iran isn’t over yet <https://luciantruscott.substack.com/p/fumbling-mumbling-bumbling-crumbling>: ‘[The White House claims that:] Witkoff and Kushner have managed to get Iran to agree that things should go back to the way they were the day before Trump started bombing the shit out of them….
The Strait of Hormuz – which was not part of our vocabulary previous to February 28 – will be reopened.
There will be a new 60-day pause in hostilities….
Iran will “pledge” to never develop a nuclear bomb.
Or Trump will accept some kind of “deal” that Iran will agree to drop its nuclear ambitions for 20 years. Or all of Iran’s “nuclear dust” will be shipped out of the country. Something like that, anyway…
But:
Lucian Trescott: ‘Iran, however, is…
not promising that the Strait will reopen without tolls…
say[ing] they’re talking to Oman about jointly controlling the Strait…
not promising an end to their nuclear program…
not giving up their enriched uranium….
The problem, of course, is that Trump doesn’t keep deals. So everything that is not an immediate, short-term transfer of money or movement of goods is simply hot air. Thus it seems that the most likely future now is one in which talk-talk continues, and every 60 days the ceasefire is extended in turn for another $100 million a day opening of Hormuz payment to Iran—until somebody decides that it’s time to go back to war. Will that person be Trump? At the moment he appears to believe his generals and admirals who are telling him that the attrition logic is favorable to Iran, unless—perhaps—the United States military commits the war crimes on a civilian-megadeath scale that Trump has threatened to commit, and that have not been seen in this world since World War II.
And there is more: