No victory, no defeat: Iran war pauses with fragile freeze

The drones are grounded, tankers are reportedly moving again through the Strait of Hormuz and an electronically signed memorandum of understanding has formalised the pause. After 108 days, thousands dead and hundreds of billions of US dollars stripped from the global economy, the US-Israel war on Iran has ended – for now. Not with victory. Not with defeat. With a freeze. The United States and Israel assassinated Iran’s supreme leader and many of its top officials, then went on to degrade the country’s air defences, military infrastructure and industrial capacity. But they could not make Tehran capitulate, abandon its nuclear know-how, dismantle the Revolutionary Guards, surrender its missile programme or break with Hezbollah and the Houthis. “Tactical success did not translate into strategic success,” said Andreas Krieg, an associate professor of defence studies at King’s College London and a Middle East risk consultant. What the MOU offers instead is 60 days of further talks on Iran’s nuclear programme – time that analysts and veteran Middle East observers who spoke to This Week in Asia believe Tehran has little incentive to use constructively. Many of them expect those talks to fail. No exit strategy The central military lesson from the war was the same one America failed to learn in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, observers say. “Geography matters,” said David Des Roches, a former senior Pentagon official now at the Thayer Marshall Institute. “And air power alone still doesn’t have the ability to defeat a determined enemy.” Indeed, despite the “enormous destructive military power” on display, Krieg described the war as “one of the most damaging strategic episodes in modern Middle Eastern policy” for the US. Washington escalated quickly but lacked what mattered most, he said: “a coherent theory of victory or a credible exit strategy”. “It also exposed the limits of American coercion,” Krieg added. After the Strait of Hormuz was effectively closed off, oil markets had gone haywire and the Gulf Arab monarchies came under sustained Iranian attack, Washington “had to move back towards diplomacy”, he said. Air power alone still doesn’t have the ability to defeat a determined enemy David Des Roches, former Pentagon official For Israel, the outcome was “similarly problematic” because while it retained its regional military superiority, it had “once again shown that military dominance alone does not produce sustainable political outcomes”, Krieg said. Iran’s regime survives. The missile threat remains. Hezbollah, battered and betrayed by Tehran – ordered into a conflict “it was not ready for”, according to Des Roches – has been methodically dismantled by Israel, but analysts say its decimation merely alters the balance of power in the Levant. “Israel can destroy, delay and disrupt, but it has not made itself more secure in any durable sense,” Krieg said, adding it was also now “more internationally isolated than before”. Gulf lobby wins Perhaps the war’s most consequential subplot played out not on the battlefield but in diplomatic backchannels, where the Gulf states – working through Pakistan and Qatar – managed to string together a ceasefire that the belligerents could not. It was, Krieg argued, the opening duel of a new Middle Eastern cold war that could be chalked up as “a win for the Gulf lobby and a defeat for the Israel lobby”. When Saudi Arabia and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council pooled their diplomatic resources with Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt to push for peace and manage US-Iran negotiations, they showed that they have the “economic and diplomatic weight to shift Washington’s Middle East policy, even against the preferences of the Israel lobby”, according to Krieg. This same Arab-Islamic coalition is reportedly working to provide Beirut with a regionally backed alternative to US-backed pressure, refusing to tie an Israeli military withdrawal from Lebanon to a formal normalisation of ties between the neighbouring states. Gulf capitals were “ultimately more relevant to ending this phase of the war than the military maximalists in Washington or Tel Aviv”, Krieg said. One notable outlier was the United Arab Emirates, which maintains closer ties to Israel than many other Gulf states and had – until recently – largely steered clear of Saudi-led diplomatic efforts. Still, Krieg said the Gulf Arab monarchies might yet “emerge as the region’s real centre of gravity, if they can act together”. Des Roches expected the regional balance of power to shift away from Tehran in future, especially after its sustained attacks on Gulf states that had initially refused the US access to their airspace and bases “put the lie to the idea of Iran as a good neighbour and potential partner”. Iran was now seen as a “would-be hegemon” by the Gulf Arab monarchies, Des Roches said, adding: “It will take regime change and a generation for this perception to change”. No safer? Overall, the outcome of the war has been “paradoxical”, according to Krieg. “Iran has been militarily damaged, but politically it may emerge more emboldened than many expected,” he said. The regime withstood a sustained US-Israeli assault and showed, through its control over the Strait of Hormuz, that it could impose costs on the global economy – not just on its immediate adversaries. “That matters enormously,” Krieg said. Meanwhile, what is known of the US-Iran MOU does little to address Iran’s offensive capabilities or its regional proxy network, leaving the Gulf states to largely fend for themselves. Their response has been to prioritise “narrower and more practical” objectives: opening the Strait of Hormuz, maintaining freedom of navigation and attempting to secure guarantees against future US or Israeli disruptions. “The region is not safer,” Krieg said. Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Washington-based Arab Gulf States Institute, believes a lot depends on what happens next. If 60 days of nuclear talks collapse – as he considers “almost inevitable” since Iran now has “no reason to compromise further” – the US must choose: impose a sustained containment regime of the kind used against Iraq in the 1990s, complete with periodic use of military force “to keep Iran from going nuclear”, or effectively concede the “de facto US imperium” in the Gulf. A third option, of genuine diplomatic resolution, Ibish considers remote. The Middle East now faced either “the beginning of a new era of Iranian power or the rearrangement of local power involving a consortium of forces countering Iran”, he said. “Or, if the US decides to meet its responsibilities and clean up Donald Trump’s mess, it will take the lead in containing Iran and preventing the country from becoming a nuclear-armed regional hegemon bullying its neighbours.” What is certain is that the MOU bearing the names of the US president, Vice-President J.D. Vance and Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf changes little on the ground. Iran still has its missiles. Its Axis of Resistance endures, much diminished but not destroyed – despite proving itself, in Des Roches’ words, to be “a sham to lure Arabs into the service of the Iranian state”. The Gulf states remain exposed, having “learned a very hard lesson” that they can neither “rely fully on Washington to protect them” nor rely on Israel to “behave responsibly”, according to Krieg. And all the while, negotiations that have not historically ended well are ongoing between parties whose distrust is absolute.

No victory, no defeat: Iran war pauses with fragile freeze

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Thousands dead, hundreds of billions lost and an agreement many analysts expect to collapse. The Iran ceasefire, explained

Thousands dead, hundreds of billions lost and an agreement many analysts expect to collapse. The Iran ceasefire, explained