CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Iran Has Changed the Question

Image Source: Wikideas1 – Own work made with Numbers for Mac and data from https://portwatch.imf.org/ – CC0

For more than three decades, the United States has treated Middle Eastern diplomacy as an exercise in writing the terms for others. Iran’s emerging regional strategy is challenging that privilege. The immediate evidence is emerging in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran and Oman are negotiating an arrangement under which Tehran could oversee vessels entering the Gulf while Muscat manages outbound traffic. The proposal remains unsettled, but it represents something larger than a maritime agreement: Iran is attempting to move the diplomatic agenda away from the narrow question of its nuclear compliance and towards the wider architecture of Gulf security.

Since the end of the Cold War, US diplomacy in the Middle East has often begun with a conclusion: Washington defines the crisis, identifies the acceptable parties, and sets the boundaries of the eventual settlement. Negotiation then becomes less a discussion over the political order than a process through which weaker states are asked to accept it. The agreements produced under this system were not literally surrender documents. Yet they frequently carried the political logic of surrender: one side retained the power to decide what counted as compliance, while the other was required to prove its fitness for economic relief, political recognition or limited self-rule.

Iraq was the starkest example. After the 1991 Gulf War, comprehensive sanctions devastated an already battered society. The United Nations’ Oil-for-Food Programme, established by Security Council Resolution 986 in 1995, permitted Iraq to sell limited quantities of oil while the proceeds passed through a UN-controlled escrow system to pay for humanitarian goods. It was presented as relief, but its deeper message was unmistakable: Iraq could access its own principal resource only within a structure designed and supervised from outside. Sovereignty had become conditional and punishment – including punctual bombardment by the United States – became commonplace.

The Oslo process operated differently, but it reflected a similar imbalance. The 1993 Declaration of Principles was negotiated directly by Israelis and Palestinians through a Norwegian channel and signed in Washington. It brought mutual recognition and created Palestinian interim institutions, but the arrangement postponed the decisive........

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