At the Breaking Point

The title is a slogan placed by the Iranian leadership on a giant billboard in the heart of Enqelab Square in Tehran, depicting the Strait of Hormuz above the mouth of Donald Trump, president of the state of the "Great Satan" that must be defeated, just as the state of the "Little Satan" — Israel — must be destroyed. Yet the facts tell us this week that an agreement is taking shape, precisely "at the breaking point," with both Satans, the Great and the Little, an agreement that may be signed next Friday.

It has not occurred to the Iranian media machine that breaking points can strike its own leaders too, and not only its enemies, even as the Iranian leadership believes it has achieved an unprecedented divine victory at this breaking point — whether in the strait or in South Lebanon.

If American and Iranian intentions prove sincere and the American-Iranian "memorandum of understanding" or "framework agreement" aimed at halting hostilities and lifting the blockade on the closed strait comes to be signed, we will find ourselves facing a situation in which Tehran will have succeeded in seizing by the throat to wrest the desired victory through total suffocation of the world's economies, while Washington will have succeeded in grabbing the nose and mouth to force the Iranian head under water through naval blockade and comprehensive paralysis of port traffic. Thus the time factor turned against the one who holds only the throat, as the billboard says and shows. While we await the signature expected in the course of this week, there are observations worth making that bear directly on this agreement.

First observation: the announced memorandum of understanding cannot be taken at face value alone, insofar as the mediators have succeeded in building a solid lining conducive to the agreement's success by providing undeclared solutions of considerable political, security, and economic weight, solutions that accord with the mediators' vision grounded in a strategic reading different from that of either party to the conflict. This deserves to be credited to the mediation actors, even if it displeases the partisans of the hard line and the perpetuation of war, for the weight of the mediating countries and the states that support them in this battle can no longer be measured by their current role alone, nor by the immediate results we will draw from it: this weight has become one of the pillars of the geopolitical equation, one that can no longer be bypassed at the international strategic level or in the regional power struggle of the new Middle East. This opens a space of civilizational and prospective competition, in place of militia-based warfare with all the filth, destruction, and slaughter of peoples it has carried in its wake.

Second observation: this "memorandum of understanding" or "framework agreement" has laid bare the atrophy of Iranian power, which refuses to acknowledge its defeat and summons the arsenal of ideology, its last weapon for preserving the cohesion of the regime's core and the hard nucleus that composes it, made up of Revolutionary Guards and doctrinal militias capable of arresting and eliminating anyone who holds a dissenting opinion. For refusing to acknowledge defeat is fundamental to the plan of remaining in power, a plan itself built on a particular understanding of American policies and their internal contradictions within the deep state, an understanding in which the Iranian leadership has known how to exploit American containment policies to the fullest, whereas the Trump administration has failed in its reading and assimilation of the Persian mentality, the true crown jewel of the Velayet-e Faqih system.

The crudest example of this failure lies in the way Netanyahu convinced Trump to launch the initial attack at zero hour, the one that was to bring down the regime, which allowed Netanyahu to pride himself for a long time on the title of godfather of this war whose every request Trump granted without question. Yet as the war unfolded across time and the scope of its repercussions on the nations of the world grew, a new equation took shape, one that brought Netanyahu back to his true stature: that of an irresponsible political gambler, indifferent even to the potential fall of the White House itself.

The spectacle of master and servant plays out daily before our eyes: when Trump is vexed by the damage Netanyahu causes, he scolds him like an ungrateful son, and when he needs him, he heaps praise on his achievements, to the point that the relationship of the Trump-Netanyahu duo irresistibly evokes Bertolt Brecht's satirical play, Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti, where the master, in his hours of intoxication, displays an overflowing magnanimity, and where, upon his lucid awakening dictated by his interests, he reverts to brutality and domination.

It would have been wiser for Netanyahu, before proclaiming himself master, to revisit the remark made by Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan upon reading the terms of the first agreement with America after the June war, titled the "Growing Security Partnership": "Israel is a small state signing an agreement with a great power; this means we have become a client state." And at the signing of the first strategic partnership in 1981 with Prime Minister Menachem Begin, American Secretary of State Alexander Haig declared that "Israel is an American aircraft carrier that cannot be sunk." In an irony of reality, Netanyahu himself now demands of his government that it work to produce its own munitions, so that its decisions may once again become autonomous.

Third observation: the provisional "framework agreement" rests on the Iranian regime's inability to achieve a clear and convincing victory, following the considerable destruction inflicted on its military, security, and economic apparatus. All that remains to it is its missile arsenal and its paramilitary instruments, harmful certainly, but without any real power to alter the equation. The United States, for their part, massed the bulk of their military power in the hope that the mere deployment of arms and the threat of their use would suffice before resorting to them, a relatively failed wager that brought them back each time to direct participation in the fighting; for the surplus of power and its costs are no less damaging than the battles themselves.

When the profound inability to produce a solution began to manifest its effects in Congress, among MAGA supporters, and at gas stations, the sleights of hand on stock markets and shareholdings were no longer sufficient to mask a deficit whose cost the people pay from their own pockets.

After these observations, as we move toward a "preliminary agreement," an "agreement of principles" whose inner workings remain opaque and whose surface resolves no fundamental question beyond the ceasefire and the consecration of negotiation as the sole means of resolving conflicts, while neutralizing the practices of Iranian paramilitary racketeering and the mechanisms of absolute American domination and hegemony, are we not faced with a balance of power between the Islamic Republic and the United States comparable to the balance of power that once prevailed between the State of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had nothing but the "Intifada of Stones" as its sole means of neutralizing the army of occupation and forcing the Rabin government to abandon its bone-breaking policy and negotiate a withdrawal from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip?

Was not the preliminary agreement of principles known as the "Oslo Accord" produced according to the same political philosophy that today presides over the making of this provisional "framework agreement"?

When the PLO signed its agreement with Israel, the "Little Satan," it was forbidden, and its leaders were accused of treason. When the Iranian leadership signs its agreement with America, the "Great Satan," it becomes permissible, and some will celebrate its victory.

But one can say, without much hesitation, that this agreement is the Iranian Oslo.