Trumped-up peace deal at the mercy of another nation, and it’s not Iran

June 16, 2026 — 3:00am

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

Donald Trump has given himself a birthday present. He’s stopped hitting his own thumb with a hammer.

“Let the oil flow!” he wrote on Monday (Australian time). He announced that the US and Iran had agreed to allow commercial shipping to resume through the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump called it a “peace deal”. It is not. It is, at best, a 60-day reopening of the strait and a ceasefire while negotiations on the big issues can take place.

The agreement begins to restore the status quo ante before this avoidable and pointless war. Or, as the prominent Australian strategic commentator Mick Ryan puts it: “Let’s stop shooting and give ourselves 60 days to get back to where we were with the [Obama-era nuclear deal, The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] JCPOA, except that it’s cost us a lot more to get here.”

“How necessary was this war in the first place? It appears not to have been. The US was negotiating with Iran when they started bombing on February 28,” Ryan says.

But even this limited easing is the most positive news for the world economy since the day Benjamin Netanyahu pitched the war concept to Trump’s inner circle and Trump responded: “Sounds good to me.”

In one of the most reckless decisions of this reckless war, Trump rejected his military’s advice to anticipate that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz. Because the oil interruption was “indeed the biggest crisis ​in history” for the global energy supply, said the head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, in........

© WA Today