Cyrus no more
The Trump administration's apparent naivety towards Iran is either imbecility or dissimulation
The shock and distress in Israel are palpable. President Donald Trump’s apparent volte-face on Iran is being felt as an abandonment.
Israelis are used to the indifference or hostility of American presidents. They managed to survive the malevolent manipulation of the Obama administration and the intimidation and threats of the Bidenites.
But in Trump, here was a president who brought about something no-one had thought would happen — the United States and Israel fighting side by side to defeat one of the greatest evils in the world.
On that terrible day of October 7 2023, when Israel was subjected to a barbaric invasion that exposed its weakness against a seven-front attempt by Iran to exterminate it with hundreds of thousands of missiles pointing straight at it, who would have thought that within a couple of years Iran and Hezbollah would be on their knees with their senior ranks taken out, their missile stocks radically depleted, Iran’s air defences obliterated and its nuclear weapons programme, which had been on the cusp of coming to murderous fruition, set back by years.
It was Trump, to his enduring credit, who made that possible. Accordingly, he was hailed as a new Cyrus, the 6th century BCE Persian king who freed the Jews from captivity and helped rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.
Yet this week, the same Trump seemed to be pulling defeat from the jaws of victory. By signing an agreement with the very Iranian regime that he should have been continuing to destroy, he has instead thrown Tehran a lifeline; reduced America to a paper tiger; accordingly put a spring in the step of Russia, China and North Korea, as well as emboldening Islamists seeking to destroy the west — and having undermined Israel’s security, aggressively turned on Israel for presuming to defend itself.
The US not only excluded Israel from discussions leading up to the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) but also, while currently keeping its terms secret from the world, has refused even to show them to the Jewish state.
That’s Israel, America’s close ally and indispensable “unsinkable aircraft carrier;” Israel, which Iran is making every effort to wipe off the face of the earth; Israel, whose soldiers have been dying not just to save their own country but in defence of an America that refuses to put its own troops in danger but is all too happy for Israelis to die in defence of itself and the free world.
Contrary to much misreporting, the MOU is not a deal that ends the war. It’s rather a framework for negotiations during a 60-day ceasefire. In a blizzard of claims and counter-claims, we don’t know what its terms are. But what’s undeniable is that Trump has chosen this moment, when the Iranian regime was weakening by the day, to take his knee off its windpipe by lifting the US blockade of Iranian ships. Going into the 60-day negotiation, he has thus chosen to make Iran stronger and the US weaker.
Worse, there are suspicions that he will allow money to start flowing into Tehran’s coffers. Vice-president JD Vance has repeatedly stated that Iran won’t benefit unless it complies with US demands. “The agreement says they are not getting a single dime of American money,” Vance insisted on Fox News. But the money in question isn’t America’s but Iran’s own frozen assets.
Israeli TV’s Channel 14 reported a claim that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps that runs Iran had no intention of honoring the agreement. IRGC Commander Ahmad Vahidi was quoted as saying:
Let’s take all the money right now, and then we’ll do whatever we want.
The CIA seems have borne out this bad faith. CIA Director John Ratcliffe reportedly told Trump and other senior officials that intelligence gained by the US raised serious doubts about Iran’s willingness to make the nuclear concessions that America is seeking in any final deal.
While we don’t know the terms of the MOU, statements by Trump and Vance are themselves causing great concern.
The US originally said Iran must not enrich uranium, period. Yet Trump has told The New York Times that Iran would be permitted to enrich uranium at a low level and never for military purposes. But how low? It’s possible to get quite easily from some relatively low levels to weapons-grade enrichment in a short space of time.
Trump has said repeatedly that Iran will never get a nuclear weapon, and if it tried it would suffer “unbelievable consequences”.
But he has also said:
We are talking to them about a 15 to 20-year ban.
Well, which is it? This sounds exactly like the 2015 Obama deal which, with the US declaring then too that Iran would “never get a nuclear weapon,” explicitly green-lit an Iranian bomb after just a few years’ delay.
At the same time, Trump says Iran has agreed to “never have a nuclear weapon”. If so, why then does it need a 15 to 20-year ban? And since the Iranians have always lied through their teeth about this, how could anyone believe a word they ever say?
The naivety being expressed by both Trump and Vance borders on imbecility. Or is it cynical dissimulation? Vance says the big difference from the Obama deal is that Iran will be required to verify its commitment not to build a nuclear weapon. But the Obama deal also requited verification. Tehran merely hid what it was doing in sites unknown to the nuclear inspectors or from which they were barred.
At the G7 summit, Trump said the Iranian regime had changed because so many former leaders had been killed. The people in charge now were “very rational” people. He said:
They were nice to deal with. They were strong people, smart people. I think actually they’re smarter than the first and second group, but they’re not radicalised and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.
But the Iranians charming the apparently witless US team are obviously telling the Americans what they want to hear — such as, according to Trump, that they now realise their four decades of waging war on the free world had been a mistake. How can any sentient being believe such patent nonsense? Iran is still being run by the IRGC who are no less fanatical than the regime has ever been — maybe even more so.
Meanwhile, on Monday night Hezbollah broke its own ceasefire for the umpteenth time by firing numerous rockets toward IDF soldiers in Lebanon. Defeating Hezbollah is absolutely critical for Israel, whose north is at risk of becoming depopulated under the never-ending bombardments from Hezbollah.
But this proxy army is vital for Iran. So it’s demanding that the MOU ceasefire must include Lebanon. And although it does not, Trump is now appallingly taking Iran’s side by pressuring Israel to stop fighting there to keep his “deal” on track.
His remarks on this at the G7 summit in France were deeply shocking. He said:
Israel’s fighting Hezbollah for too long, and too many people are being killed. You don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody because there’s a lot of people in those apartment houses and they’re not all Hezbollah, that I can tell you..
I’m not happy with the way Israel has handled themselves with Lebanon and with Hezbollah. They should have been able to do the job faster. It just goes on forever. And when that happens, it throws a negative light on the big deal, and that’s the deal with Iran…
I suggested to Israel to let Syria take care of Hezbollah, Because to be honest with you, I think they’d do a better job of doing it.
And he said of Syria’s president Ahmed al-Sharaa:
He’s very capable. And he’s been very good for me. He’s protected everything that I’ve asked for. If Israel can’t do the job without killing everyone else, he’ll do the job. Syria will do the job…
Without the United States, there would be no Israel. Without me, there would be no Israel — because no other president was willing to do what I did. I had a great relationship with Bibi, but now Bibi has to be more responsible with respect to Lebanon.
Thus Trump ignored the fact that, just like Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah situates its machinery of war in and around civilian homes which Israel tries not to hit; and he would deliver Lebanon to al Sharaa, who is ISIS in a suit — all the while denigrating Israel’s formidable challenge in Lebanon, its skill in dealing with it, and the terrible sacrifice of its soldiers’ lives it is being forced to make there.
So Israel now faces an excruciating choice — between abandoning its northern citizens to Hezbollah attacks, and risking a vindictive Trump cutting off the military support necessary to keep itself alive.
Americans may not realise it, but Trump’s lethal fantasy that he has transformed the genocidal fanatics of Tehran into people whose highest goal now is to emulate the prosperous burghers of Switzerland, where Friday’s MOU signing ceremony is to take place, is putting America itself at grave risk.
As for those Israelis who allowed themselves to put their trust in this most capricious of princes, they forgot the basic lesson of their history — that the Jews are always alone.