In the days before President Trump signed his preliminary deal with Iran after a dinner at Versailles \u2014 where World War I officially ended \u2014 he and his aides described their strategy: The Strait of Hormuz would open to traffic, and the United States would open the spigot so that Iran could sell billions of dollars of oil.<\/p>\n
The theory, Mr. Trump said, is that after years of sanctions, Iran would quickly get addicted to a torrent of revenue, and access to dollars in Western banks. It was a \u201creally good deal for Iran,\u201d the president said in a call to a New York Times reporter three days before he signed the June 17 memorandum of understanding.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are actually proud of it,\u201d he said of the Iranian negotiators. \u201cI think they were tired of getting hit.\u201d<\/p>\n
Apparently not. Less than a month into the accord, strikes on three ships passing through the strait, in a channel beyond Iran\u2019s control, led Mr. Trump to revoke the waiver that allowed Iran to sell oil. The United States has bombed more than 170 Iranian military targets over two nights. And no negotiations are scheduled, at least for now, on the far larger, more complex and ostensibly permanent agreement that the two sides had agreed to negotiate in 60 days.<\/p>\n
If Mr. Trump and his aides now have a Plan C \u2014 after bombing and a preliminary accord failed \u2014 they have not described it. Instead, it appears that they are returning to the oil sanctions and bombing runs that Mr. Trump describes as devastating, but that so far have only led to the current tangle.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, the deal is very simple,\u201d Vice President JD Vance said on Wednesday. \u201cIf they shoot at ships, we\u2019re going to knock the hell out of them,\u201d added the vice president, who opposed the initial Feb. 28 attack but has since been tasked with defending the war and negotiating a way out of it.<\/p>\n
In other words, carrots are out. Sticks are back. But the administration has yet to answer why it believes this combination of economic warfare and bombing will yield a different result this time.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are at something of a strategic dead-end,\u201d said Richard N. Haass, a longtime diplomat who served at the State Department and the National Security Council under several administrations, including George W. Bush\u2019s during the early days of the Iraq war.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe dilemma here is that the more we attack, the more the Iranians attack the Gulf oil and energy infrastructure,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd the administration still has not figured out how to defend those sites.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Trump, he said, \u201cfirst hoped he could bomb them into regime change, then he hoped he could bomb them into capitulation \u2014 neither worked.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nor, it seems, did the decision to let Iran reap the benefits of oil sales, which for Mr. Trump was a complete reversal: In his first term, and until a month or so ago, he seemed far more interested in sticks. The granting of oil sales was rooted in the belief \u2014 one that permeated the negotiations over Gaza last year \u2014 that even revolutionaries have visions of modern, smooth-running economies that will shower their people with profits.<\/p>\n
Mr. Trump is also caught in the sharp divisions in Iran<\/a>. Those were vividly displayed<\/a> this week, during the funeral services for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader who was killed in the opening hours of the attack on Tehran.<\/p>\n One of the key negotiators, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, had a rock thrown at him at one of the funeral processions and was accused of appeasement. Attackers cursed him, and called for his death. President Masoud Pezeshkian did not fare much better, and had to be rescued from an angry crowd by his security detail.<\/p>\n But when Mr. Trump talks publicly about Iran, he rarely speaks of the divisions that cut through the society. Instead, he talks as if it is organized as a top-down government, led by Mojtaba Khamenei, the slain supreme leader\u2019s son and one of the group of emerging leaders that just a few weeks ago Mr. Trump was calling more \u201creasonable\u201d than their predecessors. (On Wednesday, in Ankara, Turkey, for the NATO summit, he called them \u201cscum.\u201d)<\/p>\n On Thursday, just back from the summit, Mr. Trump and his aides said little in public about their next steps. A U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the administration was still committed to finding a peaceful resolution, and expected that what the administration called \u201ctechnical talks\u201d would continue.<\/p>\n But even that phrase is full of contradictions, because the divisions facing Tehran and Washington are not \u201ctechnical\u201d \u2014 they are political, and lower-level negotiators will not be empowered to solve them.<\/p>\n One example concerns the future of the nuclear program. The June cease-fire agreement is vague on all the major issues, including whether Iran would retain control of its stockpile of nuclear fuel. Under a 2015 accord that President Barack Obama signed but Mr. Trump later withdrew from, Iran turned over 97 percent of its then-existing stockpile. Mr. Trump is highly sensitive to any suggestion that he might get less than Mr. Obama did.<\/p>\n But the first political struggle may be over the question of who controls the strait, where the administration is paying the price for a vaguely worded paragraph in the memorandum of understanding that Mr. Trump signed at Versailles. It is a prime example of what happens when Iranian and American officials fudge the differences in a negotiated document, then interpret it very differently.<\/p>\n Paragraph 5 of the agreement reads: \u201cUpon the signing of this M.O.U., the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels, with no charge for 60 days only, from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman, and vice versa.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Trump and his aides thought that this was the key to unlocking ship traffic, and that it put the onus on the Iranians. The Iranians took it as an opening to control the key oil-shipping passage, insisting that ships travel in a channel closest to its shore. Ultimately, Iran has indicated it plans to charge for passage through the strait.<\/p>\n When the U.S. Navy began not so secretly escorting ships through a different channel, close to Oman, Iran\u2019s reaction was to fire on some of the ships. Now, according to Lloyd\u2019s of London, there is very little movement through the strait. That is what has frustrated Mr. Trump, and led to his declaration that the accord is \u201cover.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Trump\u2019s aides insist that they are not in violation of the accord; the memorandum of understanding, they say, is performance based, and Iran\u2019s actions failed that test.<\/p>\n All of which takes Mr. Trump back to where he was in April, when he discovered that military force could not solve the problem \u2014 and that many in Iran see any diplomatic solution as nothing more than a holding pattern until the next Israeli-American attack.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the days before President Trump signed his preliminary deal with Iran after a dinner at Versailles \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51249,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[9937,6238,8,19,3746,9,6241,12566,6242,282,7,1071,3745,6237],"class_list":["post-51248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-top-stories","tag-defense-and-military-forces","tag-donald-j","tag-headlines","tag-iran","tag-live-detached","tag-news","tag-oil-petroleum-and-gasoline","tag-peace-process","tag-ships-and-shipping","tag-strait-of-hormuz","tag-top-stories","tag-trump","tag-united-states-defense-and-military-forces","tag-united-states-international-relations"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@news\/116896758636867418","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51248\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}