Schroedinger's Strait
A truce of convenience brings to an end Trump's war with Iran - for now
Fifty shades of grey does not begin to capture the complexity of the US-Iran negotiations to engineer a deal to end hostilities in the Gulf which have caused billions of dollars of damage and paralysed oil supplies to the rest of the world.
President Trump’s “peace deal” - timed to coincide with his 80th birthday celebrations - is in fact nothing more than a memorandum of understanding. There will no solemn ceremony, no Nobel prizes, certainly nothing to compare with the three-way handshake between Jimmy Carter, Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin which marked the Camp David accords in September 1978, bringing about a lasting peace between Israel and Egypt.
This time, the warring parties have agreed to an electronic signature only - a measure of an abiding distrust between Iran and the US rooted in the history of the 20th century: the US-backed coup against Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953; the “ruinous” oppression of the Shah; the nest of spies in the US embassy in Tehran; the seizure of the American hostages in 1979; US support for Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war; the Tehran regime’s sponsorship of terror proxies throughout the Middle East; and latterly, the US bombing raids which obliterated the regime’s leadership and President Mojtaba Khamenei’s closest family.
Trump insists that the Strait of Hormuz - closed for more than 100 days - will be open by Friday. The strategic waterway will moreover be “permanently toll-free”, he told the New York Times. Trump further insisted that if Iran failed to conclude a final nuclear deal, he would restart military attacks or make the US “the guardian of the Middle East”, taking a 20 per cent cut in oil revenues.
Behind the bluster, there are any number of devils lurking in the detail. The Iranians are masterful negotiators, as Karim Sadjadpour captures in his Atlantic essay on “the bazaar style” which involves continuous and tireless negotiation. (A Gulf diplomat says that one of the more contentious words in an earlier peace deal draft brokered by the Pakistanis involved the word “etc” - a term viewed as routine by the Americans but dangerously open-ended by the Iranians).
I had a taste of the bazaar style during an eight-day trip to Tehran in November 2013, just after the interim (that word again) diplomatic deal to contain Iran’s nuclear programme, the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). During the visit, accompanied by then foreign editor Roula Khalaf, I interviewed former Presidents Rafsanjani and Khatami, businessmen, hardliners and academics, but the ultimate goal of sitting down with President Hassan Rouhani proved infuriatingly elusive.
As I wrote: “Iranians hate being pinned down. Answers to questions either last 20 minutes or are confined to a single enigmatic sentence. As one Tehran businessman with close connections to the regime explained: “You westerners like black or white, or yes or no. But this is the Middle East, where everything is grey. We prefer: it depends, perhaps, maybe – or simply Inshallah (God willing).”
Time is also an elastic concept. After being given the runaround ahead of an interview with Mr Rouhani, our Tehran correspondent finally demanded a 300 per cent guarantee on an 8am encounter. The reply? “We cannot do 300 per cent, we can only offer maximum 90 per cent. Maybe we can offer 100 per cent, but only after the sanctions are lifted and we can import it.”
