Ten-and-a-half hours after delivering an apocalyptic threat aimed at the whole of Iranian civilisation and minutes before another deadline was to expire, US President Donald Trump reverted to an old playbook in declaring that he had agreed to a two-week truce. The world will heave a sigh of relief while praying that a permanent peace would come about in West Asia so that the global economy, heavily damaged in 40 days of a billion-dollar-a-day war, would get time to recover.
Mr Trump can declare victory after showing off some American technological dominance in the air and in a daring rescue mission on Iranian ground, but he must understand that this is a needless war that Iran did not lose thanks to its great resilience. In fact, Iran managed to drag an array of Arab nations into the war while raining missile havoc on their oil economies and denting their pride in being safe havens in a conflicted world.
What the world has lost is an old rules-based order in which free trade and associated movement of goods was flowing until the territorial sovereignty of Iran was invaded, which pushed Iran to block a chokepoint in the world’s oil and gas to win a significant part of the asymmetrical war that it waged. What the US has lost is enormous in that its image of solidity as the leader of the free world has become one of a nation led by an unhinged and dangerous President who relies solely on his instincts and starts wars.
Mr Trump’s violent, even obscene rhetoric posted on his social media handle may have featured in this self-inflicted conflict. The question is whether he will realise the gravity of the responsibility that rests on him as technology, which may be quicker than thought and wisdom, might help eliminate national leaders of Iran but it needs to be handled with a spirit of finding peace for all.
India, in its studied neutrality on the war, may have lost a place on an imagined seat at the world’s top table while Pakistan sprang a surprise in being an able mediator of peace regardless of its own propensity to occasionally bomb the Afghan people. Iran may suddenly realise that it has become a world power rubbing shoulders with the US, China and Russia while trying to extract a bounty on the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway that has become the focus of attention.
The irony is that Iran still possesses about half a ton of near weapons-grade uranium though its regime is headed now by the injured son who succeeded his father who had been the Ayatollah for decades and who was killed on the day hostilities broke out. The people of Iran will continue to live on in a theocracy under the thumb of a repressive Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps, but that is their lot and not the business of the US President.
One of the aims of the war quickly became the opening of the Strait of Hormuz which was in any case open before Mr Trump, at the prompting of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, started this war on February 28. Israel’s intransigence in not including Lebanon as territory over which the ceasefire will come into effect is still the warmonger which can wreck the moves for peace that Iran agreed to participate in.
There will be huge hurdles to cross in delicate negotiations in the multiple points peace plans that the US and Iran have put forward. Unless the US leaves its technological dominance alone for a moment and strives to arrive at an acceptable compromise while also reining in Israel, it will not be possible for the world to return to its life as usual. For that, Mr Trump must wake up to reality.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: deccanchronicle.com
