First, just because Donald Trump is an inveterate liar, don’t assume that Iran is a reliable narrator about anything that was agreed to in this deal. (Was there a deal? We’ll get to that.) One thing both sides explicitly agree on, coming right from President Trump himself, is that the 10 point Iranian plan will serve as the basis for discussions over the next two weeks. The early accounts of what that document included focused on a lot things Iran wants, even including things it wanted before the war broke out. It doesn’t really focus on the things the U.S. notionally got into this war for. (We’ll get in a moment to what’s included in the document Iran released today.) For the U.S., this ceasefire is at best a ceasefire on the basis of a stalemate, where the fight is about a draw and both sides want to see if they can bring the fight to an end.
That’s the optimistic view. The U.S. has clearly been more eager to get to the negotiating table. It’s the U.S. that wants out most. The items on that list tilt heavily toward Iran. The Iranians appear to be exercising continued control of the Strait of Hormuz even if they may allow ships to go through — “allow” being the key word.
Iran has now released a new version of its ten points that seems wildly more aggressive then what Trump appeared to be referring to. It’s a maximalist set of demands which requires the U.S. to abandon the region and leaves Iran as the local hegemon. It sounds like they’re now trying to come in with a maximalist set of demands. Or maybe Trump was so desperate to get to a ceasefire that he agreed to this set of demands regardless. What’s true in either case is that to the extent we are going to see a negotiation it definitely seems like one in which the U.S. has the weaker hand and comes to the negotiation as the loser in the conflict. To emphasize the point, Iran doesn’t seem shy about embarrassing Trump during the early hours of the purported ceasefire. They’ve now announced that they will let only 12 ships transit the strait each day, even after Trump claimed he’d forced the Iranians to reopen it entirely. That’s just a fraction of the normal traffic. The Iranians are humiliating him at every turn, likely because they know he wants the ceasefire too badly to throw it into doubt.
Every way to look at this, whichever documents decisions are being based on, the U.S. is trying to get out of the war more than Iran is. That’s notwithstanding the fact that Iran has suffered almost incalculably more damage. But this comes back to a point we discussed at the outset of the conflict. It’s never about the absolute amount of damage. It’s about the stakes for each side. For Iran, it’s the survival of their government and an entire theological-political worldview. Donald Trump is trying to avoid losing control of both houses of Congress. Those aren’t comparable things. Trump stumbled into this conflict. He’s botched it badly and is now looking at the choice between a manageable strategic defeat or doubling or tripling down and guaranteeing something far worse. Trump seems to be working to get out on embarrassing but not catastrophic terms. But it’s not clear he can, given his need to dominate in all cases and how in hock he is to regional players who are aghast that Trump has somehow managed to create a situation where Iran emerges stronger from a conflict in which it has taken such a tactical beating.
This is what it’s like when you’re losing and you’re trying to wriggle out before you lose more. There’s no real other way to put it.