This post follows up on the previous two posts about President Trump’s weak hand in trying to end his Iran War with something short of a humiliating climb-down from his demands for “regime change” and “unconditional surrender.” Trump’s claim yesterday of “very, very strong talks” with Tehran turn out, predictably, to be third-party talks aimed at coaxing Tehran into talking at all. As Reuters reports in this new (paywalled) story, Iran is actually dramatically upping its demands since the start of the war. Those include guarantees of no future attacks, reparations for war damage and formal control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Now, you can demand anything you want. That doesn’t mean you’ll get those things. But when one side is begging for talks and backing off threats, and the other is making maximal demands you know who has the whip hand in the negotiations and indeed in the larger conflict itself. And don’t be surprised if Iran actually gets some of those concessions. In an Axios piece that ran three days ago, a U.S. government official suggested on background that reparations might be doable with a bit of finessing: “They call it reparations. Maybe we call it return of frozen money. There’s many different ways that we can wordsmith so that it solves politically what they need to solve, to develop consensus in their system.”
If the U.S. were to release a few billion in frozen Iranian assets — an issue that goes back to the revolution — it might be fair for the U.S. not to call them “reparations.” Obama did some of that with his nuclear deal, a fact Trump himself and most Republicans castigated for years. But cash payments to Iran is a far, far cry from “unconditional surrender.”
And there’s another part of the equation. The U.S. has claimed that the intensity of its bombing has only increased. The message being: foot-dragging only hurts Iran. More days, more punishment. But this article in The Jerusalem Post suggests that the pace of bombing actually dropped off dramatically starting roughly a week ago. The reason is partly the need for rest for pilots and maintenance of plans and partly running out of targets to bomb. This further strengthens the point I made a couple days ago, which is the war is now going on not in pursuit of the original U.S. objectives, whatever those might have been, but to get Iran to stop punishing the United States essentially through holding the global economy hostage. Let’s be a bit more direct: the main aim of the war is to get Iran to stop doing what it did to retaliate against the United States for starting the war.
Meanwhile the Brent crude benchmark price for a barrel of oil is back over $100 as traders realized they got punked yet again by a sudden, dramatic claim from Trump that because of a new secret plan everything was about to be awesome again.