Donald Trump is not negotiating with Iran. He is negotiating with the humiliation of having failed to break it.

Beneath the ceasefires, memoranda, podium theatrics and sanctimonious appeals to “stability” lies a fact Washington cannot admit: the United States entered this confrontation expecting submission and emerged confronting its own limits.

It wanted Iran isolated, disarmed and politically obedient. It wanted its deterrence shattered, its regional influence dismantled and its sovereignty reduced to a flag, an anthem and nothing more. It failed.

Iran endured the pressure, preserved its strategic leverage and forced the most powerful empire on earth to negotiate with the country it had promised to bring to its knees. 

That is not an American victory. It is the management of an American defeat.

Real diplomacy begins when both sides recognize that the other possesses interests, rights, red lines and power. Trump’s version begins from imperial theology: Washington has interests; Israel has rights; everyone else has obligations.

American coercion is called deterrence. Israeli aggression is called self-defence. Iranian resistance is called escalation.

Sovereignty is sacred when invoked by an American client and intolerable when asserted by an American enemy.

Sovereignty is sacred when invoked by an American client and intolerable when asserted by an American enemy.

This is the fraud now being sold as peace in the Gulf: a ceasefire presented as capitulation, an interim agreement marketed as surrender and a renewed campaign of pressure repackaged as de-escalation.

Trump did not win the confrontation. He failed to produce the result he promised. Iran was not bombed into obedience. Its government did not collapse. Its strategic position was not erased. Its enemies discovered, once again, that destruction is not control and military superiority is not political mastery.

Trump did not win the confrontation. He failed to produce the result he promised. Iran was not bombed into........

© Middle East Monitor