The Lebanon and Gaza Models for The Iran 'Ceasefire'

'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace 

Edited by Sam Thielman

THIS IS WHAT the current post-April 8 status quo with Iran has led to in the past four days: multiple U.S. strikes on Iranian positions, said to be "defensive" measures against incoming Iranian drones. An Iranian strike on one of the U.S. military bases in Kuwait. A series of threats by Washington against not only Iran, but its own coalition members. All of this has happened under cover of not only a ceasefire, but a murky indirect negotiation for a multi-stage end to the war that was said on Friday to show some promise.

While precedents for such a fire-and-talk approach abound throughout history, we've seen a lot of it since October 7. You'll notice for all the emphasis on attaining a ceasefire and entering into negotiations, none of these wars/genocide have made it to a concluding phase. Remember this each time you hear, usually from Washington, about a diplomatic breakthrough on the horizon. 

The Trump administration lost the Iran War the moment the Iranians throttled passage through the Strait of Hormuz. For reasons of habit and prestige, it is operating as if it possesses leverage to force an Iranian surrender over a nuclear program Teheran has consistently been willing to negotiate away, as well as on a regional defense posture Teheran has decidedly never been willing to negotiate away. Having watched the Iranians reset the terms of the war and subsequent diplomatic engagement, Trump is left with threats of bombing, something the U.S. has the capability to accomplish, on the theory that such bombing will create the leverage the U.S. lacks, something the U.S. has repeatedly shown it can't create through bombing.

As a testament to both that lack of leverage and the frustration it creates in Washington, Trump is resorting to weird shit. He's demanding his own coalition— and, somehow, Turkey and even Iran—recognize and normalize relations with Israel. (These expansions of the "Abraham Accords" are weapons deals that benefit U.S. arms manufacturers in the first instance and then the walled garden of U.S. military patronage in the second.) On top of that, now he's threatening Oman for potentially joining Iran in an unclear process to control transit of the Strait of Hormuz. Oman was, before the U.S.-Israel War on Iran, the crucial diplomatic go-between for U.S.-Iranian nuclear negotiations. And while a major aim of Iranian diplomacy is to emerge from U.S. and allied sanctions, now Trump is putting new sanctions in place. Does this seem to you like the behavior of a man—of a state—capable of controlling an escalatory spiral? 

Both sides are attempting to stay below the threshold of resumed open hostilities. They're trying to avoid diplomatic blame and material consequences. No one has any idea what that threshold actually is, since both sides are determining that as they go along. As the impasse persists, the pressures for greater escalation increase. The line between war and not-war becomes a question of perception management, which is to say spin and propaganda. This is a formula for dragging a war out, not for ending one. 

The meaning of this process has been on display in the Levant for going on three years. Israel formally entered into a ceasefire with Hamas last October. The ceasefire most certainly did not end the genocide. Since then, Israel has killed something like 922 people in Gaza, including children on Eid al-Adha. Through its "yellow line" mechanism, Israel has seized Gazan territory with the suggestion of permanence. In Lebanon, Israel has never stopped its bombing. The ceasefire there is a cynical cover from both the Biden and Trump administrations for Israel to continue its onslaught. Israel has similarly seized southern Lebanon, forced the displacement of upwards of a million people, and is now demanding the evacuation of Tyre, one of the largest cities in Lebanon.

This is what a ceasefire permits in Gaza and Lebanon. We might also add to that recent list that the 2015 Minsk ceasefire accord in Ukraine permitted Russian consolidation of territory its proxies seized in the Ukrainian south and east in advance of the 2022 invasion. 

And while I hate to be an I-Told-You-So, an earlier version of the American side of this dynamic was very prominently on display in the fall of 2023. Back then, as Israel was beginning its genocide in Gaza, the Iranian 'resistance axis' coalition targeted American bases in the Middle East, in the hope of leveraging U.S. pain into American measures to impose restraint on Israel. Since the Biden administration did not want, at that point, to draw Teheran into the conflict, it would launch retaliatory measures while insisting they would be the last as long as Iran did not escalate. I am living proof that you did not have to be a genius to see this would not work. All it did was lead us to where we are. Neither Trump, Biden nor their respective supporters will be pleased by the fundamental continuity in their approaches, but it's one of the clearest aspects of the present murky strategic picture. 

IT ISN'T JUST the cost of gasoline at the pump. Over the past three months, my home gas and electric bills have skyrocketed. I mean like never before. I am not about to post my utility bills in this newsletter, so you're going to have to take me at my word here, but I suspect your bills may look similar. I will not play fake energy-policy expert here, but there can be no doubt that the throttling of something like 20 percent of global oil and natural-gas exports is a contributing factor. While the Iran War has never been popular, these sorts of utilities price hikes are a war cost the U.S. public has simply never had to bear during the post-9/11 era.

If you're a rare reader for whom this increase is a negligible portion of your household expenses, I am absolutely begging you to upgrade to a paid FOREVER WARS subscription, particularly as air-conditioner season approaches.

YOU WON'T GET BAILED OUT but the defense contractors will: The Center for Strategic and International Studies finds that the burn rate for U.S. missiles, particularly Tomahawks, Patriots and the super-expensive THAADs in the Iran War means that the U.S. will need three years just to get back to its February 2026 magazine depth, an absolutely crucial task for U.S. power projection in Asia, something everyone with influence over this process of wealth transfer agrees is a strategic imperative. This timetable factors into the windfall to military hardware manufacturers in the $1.5 trillion defense budget proposed by Trump. What would you have done with all that money? It is, after all, yours. 

SEN. CHRIS VAN HOLLEN (D-MD.) published in the New York Times perhaps the most pro-Palestine op-ed I can recall seeing from a sitting U.S. senator, which admittedly is a low bar to clear. While Van Hollen can't bring himself to abandon the two-states delusion, he's expanding the political space, particularly within the Democratic Party, for "withdrawing taxpayer support from Israel and conditioning arms sales" to achieve Palestinian statehood. Van Hollen's intensification of a factional struggle within the Democratic Party over Israel gains a sharper edge when he goes after the Biden legacy of facilitating genocide:

Primary voters won’t trust any Democratic presidential candidate who does not have a record of moral and strategic clarity on these issues, especially if, as a legislator, he or she voted to send Mr. Netanyahu bombs even as his government imposed a total blockade on Gaza. Nor will they support a candidate who plans to re-enlist the senior Democratic decision makers who whitewashed the truth during the Biden administration and refuse to acknowledge their complicity.

I'm also unable to remember the last time I saw a senior elected Democrat declare persona non grata the advisory corps around a foreign-policy disaster made by an administration of their own party. It's usually Republicans who have the stomach for internecine combat like this. Them and irascible journalists.