Today was Trump’s birthday, and he wanted a blockbuster announcement to celebrate it. He was also desperate to forestall Iranian retaliation for Israel’s latest attack on Lebanon. For these reasons he has announced agreement on a memorandum of understanding (MOU), which one could also describe as a ‘concept of a plan’ in Trumpian terms, to be signed on June 19th. Iran then stood down its planned retaliation and published the terms of the MOU. The American side has said nothing about the terms, likely because they’re entirely favourable to Iran, unfavourable to the US, and catastrophic for Benjamin Netanyahu.
If these terms stand then the MOU amounts to a complete capitulation by the American side. Iran will have achieved virtually everything it had been asking for – control over the strait of Hormuz, the right to charge fees for passage, the end of sanctions, the release of frozen funds, and substantial reparations for damage caused. All of these are things Trump has previously said he would never agree to, and all of them would put him in very hot water with his donors and supporters. This means the likelihood of him walking this back tomorrow is very high. Israel has already said it would not abid by the terms of the deal, so it’s almost certain to fail in any case. Trump has constantly flip-flopped on every pronouncement he’s made, careening wildly from extreme threats to conciliatory remarks from one day to the next. There’s no reason to expect consistency from him this time.
Trumpmis caught between a rock and a hard place. Whether or not this agreement goes ahead, the US has lost the war. All Iran had to do to win was survive until the US exhausted its capacity to continue the war (and Trump’s attention span), and it has done so remarkably well. Trump can accept an obvious and humiliating defeat now, or he can act to keep the war going, which will exacerbate the coming energy crisis exponentially the longer it continues. This will have drastic domestic political implications for him, beginning in the relatively near future, as the US strategic petroleum reserve will be depleted in approximately three weeks. At that point it will no longer be possible to manipulate the futures price in order to pretend all is well, and the futures price will converge with the much higher spot price. A global economic depression is already inevitable, and Trump will be blamed for all of it, and not just in the US, but globally. The longer the war continues, the greater the humanitarian disaster will become. Already the situation has probably signed death warrants for millions of people in Asia and especially the global south. Given Trump’s extremely poor health, he may not live to see the consequences of his actions, which will likely be the implosion of American hegemony globally and civil war domestically. Unfortunately, a human tragedy of epic proportions lies directly ahead.
