Has Trump won a stunning victory in the Persian Gulf?
Should the Memorandum of Understanding hold, MAGA will have achieved the impossible in D.C.
Who won the Iran War? The notion of victory in war presupposes that the state has definite interests which outweigh the costs involved in asserting or upholding them. These interests are not objectively determined, but decided by whomever rules the state, although they tend to be influenced by certain physical constants like geography. A decision requires a will; a will, insofar as it is truly a will and not merely a whim or an appetite, indicates the presence of a rational subject capable of formulating a hierarchy of preferences. In practical terms, as concerns the present matter, this means that the state’s diplomatic and military machinery must be controlled, over an extended period of time, by a small, cohesive administrative caste. In the heroic age of the Westphalian order, this was the prince or perhaps his advisers; today, this element of continuity is more frequently provided by standing bureaucracies that wield their experience and institutional prestige to nudge elected officials in the right direction. To the democratically-minded, the concept of national interest has for this reason always been suspect; the whole premise of Wilsonian internationalism was that worldwide democratisation would pacify the nations through frank and open dialogue and render obsolete the smoky backroom scheming that had characterised the great power diplomacy of old, in which war, as per Clausewitz’s famous dictum, was merely an instrument of policy by other means.
The clerics, jurists, and generals who rule the Islamic Republic of Iran form precisely such a cohesive administrative caste. They have a clear, actionable concept of the national interest, by which measure the Memorandum of Understanding signed with the American President on Wednesday — should it hold with present hitches yet to be smoothed out — represents a dearly won yet unambiguous victory. Has the United States therefore lost? To establish such an assertion as fact, it would have to be shown that the will of America’s equivalent class was thwarted. To do so would involve identifying this class, determining its preferences, and then seeing whether the Islamabad agreement had validated them.
This is impossible. The United States is not — at least not in their current form — a modern nation-state in anything but juristic pretence. They are more akin to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; a tangle of limbs held together by ancient rules and procedures that are mutually respected only insofar as they prevent any one part from enforcing its authority over the other. America’s Congress, sloshing with money from the Gulf, Israel, China, and even Iran, is no more the locus of a unitary national will than the Polish Sejm was under the szlachta’s Golden Liberty. America has no Whitehall; its national security bureaucracy is notoriously fragmented and internally rivalrous. America is not a country, but the hub of a global political and economic order, and that order’s flourishing — perhaps even its existence — depends on maintaining free passage through the Strait of Hormuz in the face of mounting tensions between two regional opponents. The question facing America before February 28th was: would the American state discover within itself a unitary will that could impose a solution to this problem against its own centrifugal impulses?
The one semblance of a unitary will in the American state is the institution of the presidency. The current holder of that office enjoys the backing of a popular movement — MAGA — with a clear and comprehensive hierarchy of values, including precise instructions for American policy towards Iran. Across three election cycles, Trump took the stump against ‘forever wars’ in the Middle East that sapped American blood and treasure and prevented it from devoting its energies to the challenge presented by a newly puissant China. To do this, it needed to lay down the law to an Israeli government with a sophisticated and entrenched lobbying operation in Washington that sought to divert America’s military resources towards imposing its own settlement on the region, with little regard for America’s global interests.
During last year’s Twelve-Day War against Iran, Trump defied this brinkmanship and forced a ceasefire on the reluctant Israelis. Many have correctly argued that the domestic costs of the most recent entanglement are irrecoverable. But the means by which Netanyahu persuaded Trump to change course on February 28th can only be left to speculation — the most important question in evaluating whether President Trump ‘won’ or ‘lost’ this war is whether, given the levers of influence at Israel’s disposal in Washington, it really ever could have been averted. After the American-Israeli coup de main in early March failed to shatter the Iranian regime, the President wisely opted to cut his losses and initiated a slow process of bellicose negotiations reminiscent of the 18th-century cabinet wars that Clausewitz coined his classic formula to describe.
Trump now has a deal that brings Iran in from the cold and makes its reconstruction dependent on funding allocated by Washington (and presumably to be put up by the Gulf states. It cannot be rejected by Congress; the consequence is that the Iranians would close the Strait again, plunging the world into economic crisis and causing not a few representatives and senators to lose office. It is a deal that truly reflects the objective balance of power as revealed through battlefield tâtonnement, and for this reason is infinitely more durable than Obama’s JCPOA, that airy diplomatic sonnet of nice, aspirational phrases grounded on no more stable reality than the temporary distribution of lobbying power within Washington. Birthed in court intrigues, the JCPOA was flimsier than the little plastic cards that hung from the lanyards of the Foggy Bottom boys and girls who spun and briefed for it. Its fatal flaw was that the Israelis and their allies in Washington could simply bypass it and try to impose their own solution through armed suasion. As long as this option remained on the table, the necessary condition for the Pacific pivot, namely the pacification of the Middle East via the diplomatic normalisation of the Islamic Republic, could never have been achieved.
Trump’s Memorandum of Understanding removes this option by de facto accepting tactical defeat in a war in which American arms have otherwise acquitted themselves honourably, and which, in confirming that the current state of military technology favours the defender, has positive repercussions for America’s force projection in crucial imperial border regions like Taiwan. If a deal can be finalised, it will be an unmitigated strategic triumph for the President, MAGA, and, ultimately, for America.
And what of the Israeli veto? The crucial test is still Lebanon, and the fact that the Islamabad Memorandum — signed over Israel’s head — imposes a ceasefire on this country’s territory is a signal that Washington is finally willing to rein in its obstreperous ally. The question now becomes one of what pressure is Trump willing to impose, versus what is necessary to impose on Israel to get an agreement based on the MoU over the line. Should Trump’s will prevail, ‘The Lobby’ once described by Mearsheimer will never again have the untrammelled access to direct American power it once enjoyed. Israel’s star has fallen in Washington in the eleven years since the JCPOA; the whole distasteful business in Gaza, the Epstein disclosures, and the current war have soured the popular mood and elite opinion among Republicans and Democrats alike on Netanyahu’s government. For the first time in decades, the political capital exists for the President (regardless of his personal disposition towards the State of Israel) to renegotiate a one-sided American-Israeli relationship that has prevented rapprochement with an Iran whose interests do not meaningfully collide with those of the popular movement that brought him to power. It is a cliché that only Nixon could go to China; by the same currency, it is only Trump who can go to Tehran.
Unipolarity, American realists have long argued, is an unsustainable position. The imperial centre invariably finds itself riven by the demands of competing players within the system, each jostling for the centre’s support against its rivals; every local conflict within this monistic world order is thus elevated to a systemic crisis commanding the centre’s attention, while rising powers, unburdened by the costs of policing the globe, are able to devote their resources more discriminatingly towards their own development. This hydraulic scheme is too neat to tell the full story — America’s relative decline vis-à-vis China may be an inevitable consequence of the structural forces inherent to the international system. Still, it has been accelerated by specific policy decisions made in Washington, and there is time to slacken the tempo to something more manageable.
The ‘American Empire’ has arrived at a crossroads where, with the Chinese threat on the horizon and its own military-industrial base atrophying, the costs of upholding the system are too heavy to bear without greater contributions by allies, both current and potential. As Britain’s Foreign Office mandarins found themselves doing during their own midcentury imperial handover, America must align itself with those local forces able and willing to guarantee the long-term stability of the system. But who is to be America’s partner in this dance? The lobbying roulette in Washington provides little useful guide; this can only be ascertained by heading onto the floor and dancing the delicate two-step of war and diplomacy. Britain delegated the management of its former empire to old antagonists who had proved themselves in anti-colonial struggle — Smuts, Nehru, and Lee Kuan Yew; not to speak of our own indispensable Levantine ally during our own long-ago Suez, a mere decade on from the bombing of the King David Hotel. Trump has already done something similar in Venezuela; if he can repeat the trick with Iran, history will not begrudge him the means of having done so.
This article was written by Franz Pokorny, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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