CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The U.S. Debacle in Iran

JD Vance points at Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif during a press briefing on the Iran ceasefire negotiations. (Screengrab from video posted to X.)

By some miracle, Donald “Blockade Everybody” Trump may have achieved a peace deal with Iran. That is, if and only if he decides to snap a leash on the U.S. attack dog in the region, namely Israel, whose nearly universally loathed prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, flatly rejected el jefe’s deal the minute it was announced. As observers far more astute than yours truly would note, this is all for show. Israel will do exactly what the U.S. tells it to do, and Washington can coerce Jerusalem quite easily. Trump must WANT to control Netanyahu. If he doesn’t, all bets for peace are off. Because not only does the U.S. foot Israel’s bills, but it supplies a phenomenal amount of its armament, as vice president J.D. Vance pointed out with astoundingly unforeseen honesty on June 18. Without the U.S., Israel is no regional power in West Asia, indeed it’s no power there at all.

The rosy recent news of a ceasefire looked most unlikely in the days leading up to it. Tehran had rejected Pakistan’s claim of an imminent U.S.-Iran agreement on June 13 and also, for good measure, Trump’s claim of a deal to be signed on June 14. Meanwhile explosions occurred in Iran, Kuwait, UAE…this was some ceasefire. According to Drop Site News on June 13, protests erupted in Iran because of “a proposed framework agreement that some Iranians believe is too favorable to the United States.”

And as military expert Will Schryver posted on X the same day, “another U.S. early warning radar blown to smithereens, this one in Kuwait. The precision of these strikes is extremely impressive. It’s no wonder the U.S. is very reluctant to provoke more Iranian strikes. U.S. bases in the region are indefensible.” Yet the Trump regime insisted on bombing things like the water supply. This did not sound like wisdom, if the goal was to prevent ceasefire collapse. Wisdom would be not to........

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