CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Why the Post-War Reality Belongs to Iran

Photograph Source: Mostafameraji – CC BY-SA 4.0

Oil is trading near its lowest levels since the war began in late February, with Brent hovering close to pre-war prices even as Gulf producers pump barrels back into a recovering market. The immediate trigger was a Qatari statement that indirect U.S.–Iran talks in Doha had made “positive progress.”

Yet in the same stretch, Iran ordered commercial ships onto the routes it designates through the Strait of Hormuz and promised force against any that strayed. Two facts, one market: traders bought the peace while Tehran advertised its grip on the world’s most important oil chokepoint. They cannot both be right, and the market is the one that is wrong.

The slide in prices can at least partly be attributed to supply, not sentiment. Saudi and Emirati exports have climbed back toward pre-war levels, OPEC is raising output, and the glut of stranded barrels is clearing. But a market pricing the return of supply is still pricing a durability no one has been promised. And the durability question hinges on the situation in Lebanon.

The ceasefire now priced into crude rests on a single document: the framework Israel and Lebanon signed in Washington on June 26, their first direct accord since the failed agreement of 1983. Beneath the ceremony it does one thing. It makes Israel’s withdrawal from the fifth of Lebanon it occupies conditional on the “verified disarmament” of Hezbollah. That is not a settlement. It is a fuse, and it is already lit. Hezbollah called the deal null and void within hours.

Seen from outside Washington, the striking feature of the American debate is how thoroughly it has confused motion with victory. The consensus, at least among the foreign policy elite, holds that the United States and Israel won the war and Iran lost it. That verdict measures the wrong war. Operation Epic Fury destroyed the parts of Iranian power that were expensive, visible, and strategically useless: the ballistic-missile force that invited the strike but........

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