From Dire Straits to Done Deal: Triumphant Trump Re-Opens Hormuz
Ever-addicted to the adrenaline rush of the escalatory ladder, Trump has outdone himself again this morn with the most brazen “presidential address” thus far:
Threatening to genocide an entire civilization is a new low, even for the lowest of the low. But this is a “man” who has harbored a secret vendetta against Iran for over 40 years, and his rise to power has supplied him the ticket he needed to believe he can finally fulfill his lifelong destiny.
Trump is a grand thinker and visionary, but he is also a victim—more so, a slave—of his insecurities: the worse he fails the more he overcompensates with acts of perceived historic grandeur. In his eyes, defeating Iran will be seen as the equivalent of Reagan “defeating the USSR”—an historic achievement for America that will surely cement his place in the annals, and chisel his visage into the Mount Rushmore of Great American Leaders.
Trump is one of those classic big-thinkers who is all vision and no completion, all ambition, no follow-through. Psychologically, such a profile typically develops in people with highly entitled lives who never had to deal with the consequences of their failures due to being endowed with infinite padding for ‘soft landings’ in the form of monetary safety nets to the tune of billions of dollars. Such people develop extravagance of vision and taste, but little in the way of mental capacity for critical evaluation of the attendant costs and consequences. Jeffrey Epstein’s development into a ‘dilettante’ was a familiar case: such people accustomed to lives of luxury develop eclectic interests and eccentrically frantic wants and desires, but with little in the way of true mental hardiness in being able to pursue these ends to a high level of facility or expertise. They are the quintessential low-impulse control dabblers ruled by the vagaries of their dopamine cycles.
Trump’s wide-eyed, slur-mouthed grope from one “cookie jar” to the next, from Greenland, to Venezuela, to Iran—always back-peddling then re-doubling—clearly demonstrates this. It is the style of rulership of a spoiled manchild whose life of prodigal luxury has fried his neural circuitry and reoptimized his risk-reward pathways toward low-impulse dopamine scoring, drastically degrading his mental ability to conceptualize or follow intricately long-term, coherent, multi-dimensional planning, the likes of which should be the forte of a true leader.
The deranged outbursts leading to threats of genocide and annihilation accurately depict this low-impulse short fuse: the inability to properly internalize and process failure and humiliation. The fried neural circuitry pathways lead to ape-like limbic hijack and an inability to control basic bodily functions, not dissimilar from that seen in some substance abusers.
Now both sides have announced a major ceasefire deal—or so it seems on the surface:
Trump boasts that Iran bent the knee to him in fear of the awe-inspiring genocide he had promised to commit. In reality, Gulf countries likely pressed Pakistan to intervene because they knew Trump’s ineffective bombing campaign would do nothing more than spur Iran to finish off their own countries’ energy infrastructures.
Further, note that Iran, via Araghchi, specifies it was US that requested negotiations and presumably the ceasefire, and that the ceasefire itself is conditional: IF attacks against Iran are halted.
Secondly, Hormuz will be reopened under the aegis of the Iranian Armed Forces.
It is interesting that Trump in his message admits he has received Iran’s 10-point peace plan and that it can serve as a workable basis for negotiations. That is shocking because Iran’s published 10-point plan is extremely maximalist in nature and would serve as an unprecedented defeat of the United States if implemented even in part.
Iran says the U.S. agreed to:
1—Commitment to non-aggression
2—Continuation of Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz
3—Acceptance of uranium enrichment
4—Lifting of all primary sanctions
5—Lifting of all secondary sanctions
6—Termination of all UN Security Council resolutions
7—Termination of all Board of Governors resolutions
8—Payment of compensation to Iran
9—Withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from the region
10—Cessation of war on all fronts, including against Hezbollah in Lebanon
One small correction to the above: Iran has specified that for its demanded ‘reparations’ it is willing to accept the new transit fees from the Strait of Hormuz as sufficient toward that debt.
Graham was terrified of this prospect just a day ago:
Of course, many of the other points are impossible to implement because they rely on Israel abiding by the agreements, which will never happen. In fact, as of this writing Reuters reports that Israel has already vowed to continue striking Iran:
Israel is still attacking Iran, according to an Israeli military official who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations Wednesday. Moments earlier, the White House said Israel had agreed to the terms of the two-week US-Iran ceasefire agreement. Iran also kept up fire on Israel.
But quickly, and in weasel-like fashion, corrected it to the ceasefire not including Lebanon:
In fact, it’s difficult to imagine how any deal can possibly work with a hostile third party that will openly sabotage it at every turn. How can Iran keep Hormuz open and cease all attacks if Israel simply ignores the US and continues hitting Iranian infrastructure? Will Trump stew in his ‘impotent anger’ at Bibi again?
It’s no different than the Ukraine war scenario, where Europe has no interest in allowing the US to ply a deal with Russia, and Russia therefore unable to make any concrete deals because no security guarantees can possibly exist when the Europeans are openly waging war on Russia through their Ukrainian proxy.
The other reason for the ceasefire was likely oligarch pressure on Trump to allow markets time to cool and renormalize. We’ve been writing for a while now how Trump’s “strategy” is simply keep bombing to buy time in the hopes that Mossad and the CIA can figure out what’s happening internally and orchestrate a real overthrow or total chaos.
But Iran seems to have wisened up, its remaining leadership going into a kind of elusive ghost mode, with no one in the West seemingly having a clue as to who’s even running the country. At first this was deemed a major ‘weakness’ of a ‘degraded’ Iran—but the West quickly realized this ‘mosaic-en-masse’ strategy has turned Iran into an incommensurable enigma.
Western intel agencies are lost and no longer have any footing. Part of the reason for this—going on logic—may have to do with the killing off of the stodgy old guard, which typically scleroticizes a country’s leadership. The new younger and more cunning elites aren’t as eager to be martyred, and are willing to play cat-and-mouse with the clay-footed colossus at their doorstep.
Others have pointed out that Trump’s admin appears to be trying to pretend they forced Iran into negotiating when in reality Iran had already openly presented its 10-point plan long ago:
This is the same trick used against Russia—one that apparently only works on propagandized American audiences—wherein Russia’s openly stated demands are constantly ignored and then re-injected into the news cycle when it suits the administration’s political agenda in crafting the narrative that some new “deal” is on the table.
At this point, it’s old hat: this administration’s political tricks are extremely easy to see a mile off.
It’s just as easy to see that the “deal” was reached a day after the US suffered its most disastrous losses in decades, not long after many of the US’s most significant regional bases were abandoned, its aircraft carriers disabled and sent running, with even the Marine-carrying Tripoli said to have faced missiles and sent scurrying yesterday as well. It’s clear that it was the US in the weak position and in desperate need of this ceasefire.
NYT even declared that the war has done the total opposite of its stated objective—rather than destroy the Iranian civilization, it supercharged it into superpower status:
In recent years, the conventional geopolitical wisdom has been that the world order was moving toward three centers of power: the United States, China and Russia. That view assumed that power derived primarily from economic scale and military capability.
That assumption no longer holds. A fourth center of global power is quickly emerging — Iran — that does not rival those three nations economically or militarily. Instead, its newfound power derives from its control over the most important energy choke point in the global economy, the Strait of Hormuz.
FT goes further toward the war’s logical conclusion:
“The conflict could be the catalyst for an erosion in petrodollar dominance and the beginnings of the ‘petroyuan’,” argues Deutsche Bank strategist Mallika Sachdeva. In other words, Trump’s war could normalise non-dollar energy sales.
Finally, the conflict boosts China’s image as a more stable partner relative to the US across the developed and developing world. Just last week Chinese premier Li Qiang convened more than 70 global chief executives at the China Development Forum to tout the country’s reliability and supply chains. China’s favourability compared to the US is indeed rising, exclusive survey data from Morning Consult shows.
To conclude, talk of the ceasefire is likely a moot point because there is no way the contradictions between the two sides can hold. It is nothing more than political theater for now meant to give Trump a much-needed PR boost, with Iran obliging for the time being because it has nothing to gain from continuing the conflict it itself did not even start, particularly when global perception has already declared Iran as the unanimous victor.
That said, it leaves the question of what will happen after the deadline passes, or when Israel inevitably violates the truce. We know to a large extent Trump’s threats of “total destruction” of Iran were bluffs for two reasons:
The US doesn’t have the capability to even remotely “destroy” Iran at the scale Trump imagines, at least not without nukes. Iran is too large a country, its industries too vast in scale, and US has too few munitions. Even the major factories that have already been hit have only been slightly damaged and will be repaired in days to weeks.
The repercussions and blowback from any such strikes would harm the US indirectly more than it harms Iran, given that Iran will redouble the pain back onto Gulf countries twice over, and this will not only critically harm US interests but cripple the US as an empire for all time.
Thus, Trump knows his weak bluffs have to be papered over with continual ‘deadline extensions’ in order to find some off-ramp from the disastrous miscalculation of his own making.
Reminder of the naive bravado from early March:
We went from “no deal except unconditional surrender” to a truce based on Iran’s maximalist demands. Reality bites hard.
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We end on some truly jaw-dropping statements from Trump:
First he explains how Iranians love to be bombed. Then he states protestors are shot by the regime’s troops, only to admit that he armed those very protestors…for the purpose of shooting at the regime. How do you arm people for a violent insurrection then complain when those armed insurrectionists are put down?
But we’ve seen this story before.
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In its unflinching agitprop, Iran reminds the world that after all is said and done—peace deal or not—there is much blood on this regime’s hands. The world will not forget the Minab school massacre, and will forever wonder if the souls of its perpetrators will be haunted in eternity.
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The Straits were not closed, except to US and its ally aggressors and it is still closed to them. And the US has betrayed every deal and shitrael has never honoured a ceasefire in its existence so why would anyone believe anything Frump says?
The ceasefire will be derailed by the usual suspects in Tel Aviv.
Interesting though, to see the War of Perception evolve as much as the real War.