What does Trump’s defeat mean for the Middle East?

This week, President Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed a memorandum of understanding outlining terms for an end to the U.S./Israeli war on Iran. After months of bombing, the United States has achieved none of its stated war aims. What does Trump’s defeat mean for the future of U.S. designs in the region? Will the U.S. relationship with Israel change in any way going forward? What does the Iranian victory mean for the country? Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke with Jadaliyya co-editor and Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies fellow Mouin Rabbani about these issues and more. This war with Iran may be coming to an end as these negotiations begin. It’s obviously not a peace treaty, but this agreement is about to be signed. This whole thing looks like a decisive defeat for the U.S. They achieved none of their stated goals. What do you make of this result, and what are some possible long-term implications for the United States? What does the defeat mean for U.S. presence in the Middle East going forward? I’d start with a few comments. The first is that the United States has suffered an unambiguous defeat. The second is that any responses to U.S. diplomacy have to be considered tentative, because Washington has repeatedly demonstrated itself to be a thoroughly dishonest, untrustworthy, and unreliable negotiating partner. Most recently, it launched two unprovoked words of aggression, using diplomacy as camouflage, just in the past year. As you just mentioned, this is not a peace treaty, and so we have to keep the very real possibility in mind that the u.s is simply not serious about any commitments it has made under this agreement, but having said so There are important indications that the U.S. recognizes its defeat and that it will prove extremely costly for the U.S. to try to overturn it. Let’s briefly go through the history. In 2015, the United States and Iran signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action JCPOA. The Iranian nuclear agreement, which ensured that Iran could never develop a nuclear weapon, established the most intrusive monitoring and inspections regime in the history of the nuclear age, and basically fulfilled each of Washington’s explicitly stated objectives with respect to Iran. What we found is that the United States was very slow to meet its own commitments, and the agreement turned out to be a bad deal for Iran because of the benefits Iran was supposed to get from it, including trade and the lifting of sanctions. So they were quite limited, but that wasn’t enough for the United States. In 2018, the U.S. unilaterally renounced an international agreement and replaced it with a policy of maximum pressure, a policy that made things much more difficult for Iran. However, the U.S. failed to achieve any of its objectives in terms of either fomenting regime change in Tehran, reducing Iran’s regional footprint, or affecting its ballistic missile program. More importantly, Iran viewed itself as no longer bound by its own commitments under that agreement, which, according to everyone who has looked at it, Iran was scrupulously observing until that agreement. Then in 2021, Washington renewed negotiations. I’m not talking about Obama and Trump and Biden, because it’s important to understand we’re talking about the policies of a state, of a country, not those of different individuals. That’s why I’m referring to Washington and the United States, rather than the individual leaders involved. In 2021, recognizing the failures of maximum pressure, Washington reopened negotiations with Iran to rejoin the agreement, but rather than simply admitting its failure or its mistake or whatever, however you want to describe the unilateral renunciation of an international agreement, The U.S. tried to impose a new agreement on Iran rather than seeking to resolve issues that arose as a result of the renunciation of that agreement and the subsequent Iranian violation of its own commitments. Here I’m referring primarily to Iran’s decision to begin enriching uranium to increasingly high levels. Washington sought to impose a new and entirely different agreement that would have compelled Iran to make commitments that had nothing to do with the original 2015 agreement. I’m talking about, for example, Iran’s regional policy, its relationships with its partners in the so-called “Axis of Resistance”, and its ballistic missile program. Needless to say, Iran rejected these illegitimate demands, which set the stage for the issues we’re discussing today. I would like to add a personal note: in late 2020, after U.S. presidential elections, I got a call from a researcher at Chatham House in the UK. They were conducting a study on how the incoming administration should handle the Iranian file. I made a very simple point. The U.S. has essentially two choices. It can either unconditionally admit its mistake and rejoin the JCPOA, then raise any objections it has to Iran’s conduct under this agreement, or it can take a different path, like trying to impose new conditions on Iran, and that’s not going to work. It’s going to end badly for everyone concerned. If I say so myself, I’ve been proven right by the Biden administration’s refusal to uphold U.S. obligations under the JCPOA. The Biden administration’s insistence on continuing with Trump’s policies towards Iran, without altering them in any way, in other words, maintaining maximum pressure, even adding new sanctions, set the stage for war. So you can’t just say Trump is horrible and it’s all his fault. We have to look at the consistencies in U.S. policy over the past several decades, and particularly the last one. We had the 12-day war last year. It achieved nothing. Then we had the unprecedented, unprovoked war of aggression launched by the United States and Israel against Iran on February 28 this year. Now the objectives of that war were laid out very clearly, openly, explicitly word for word by the leaders concerned: regime change, a comprehensive end to Iran’s nuclear program. In other words, Iran would no longer have a nuclear program as opposed to having one under proper international supervision with monitoring, you know, every single reactor would be decommissioned, missile material would not be so much be moved out of the country as seized by the United States and taken to the United States. Iran’s ballistic missile program would be comprehensively dismantled. Iran would not be allowed to have any more regional alliances and so on. There was also an unstated Israeli war objective that may or may not have been shared by the United States. And that was essentially a state collapse to make Iran a carbon copy of Iraq during the first decade of the century and Syria during the second decade. It failed. Not a single one of these objectives was achieved. On April 8, the United States, recognizing its failure and the increasing cost of pursuing success, concluded a ceasefire agreement with Iran, mediated by Pakistan in close coordination with Saudi Arabia and with additional input from Egypt, Turkey, and perhaps others. The ceasefire agreement ultimately didn’t resolve any of the issues that led the United States to accept it. What I mean is that you had a global economic crisis caused by this war. Energy prices were increasingly high. What was being termed a price shock was threatening to become a supply shock. In other words, the issue wasn’t so much that you had to pay so much for these things, but that they wouldn’t even be available on the market. A whole bunch of secondary impacts were observed in terms of petroleum byproducts, inputs for agricultural fertilizers, and other products that were prominently exported from the Gulf. None of these issues were resolved because a ceasefire in and of itself was not, for example, sufficient for Lloyd’s of London to begin bringing down maritime insurance rates to a reasonable and acceptable level. In other words, the trade didn’t get