Trump Buys A Persian Carpet
Notes on the US-Iran-Israel 'ceasefire'
Donald Trump is popular because he is perceived as strong. If Trump fears looking weak, he will lash out at someone below him in the hierarchy of power. Trump has always lashed out at real or potential partners to make himself look strong, doing the same with electoral opponents, or White House reporters, or Volodymyrr Zelenskyy. The denigrating, bullying talk is always about projecting strength whenever Trump senses that he may appear weak.
Donald Trump is transactional. He thinks that everything is for sale. Since the Revolution, Iranians have consistently sold Americans their own illusions of Iran. American presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama have fallen for the Persian carpet salesmen offering the deal of a lifetime. Trump does not reckon with the sacred, the things that are not for sale. The destruction of Israel and America are sacred in Iran. As long as the clerics remain in power, these will remain sacred pursuits of the Iranian state. The regime cannot be trusted to bargain these things away in good faith.
Donald Trump is also kayfabe. He warned Iran about Operation Midnight Hammer in advance, and then Iran did the same before firing their ineffectual missile salvo at the US-British airbase in Qatar. Trump was offended however when Iran broke the agreed-upon ceasefire to shoot missiles at Israel, which predictably struck back. “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard, they DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEY’RE DOING,” Trump said. But he is wrong. Bibi and the ayatollah are the ones who know what they are doing. Trump is the one who thinks he knows what he is doing, but he is merely the latest American president to buy a Persian carpet.
It remains unclear just how much damage the weekend B-2 raid did to Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility. Trump of course claimed “complete destruction.” CNN raised White House hackles by reporting a leaked “low confidence” preliminary assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) that Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile had escaped destruction. Marco Rubio says that Iran is now “much further away from a nuclear weapon” than before, while the Israelis tell Axios the strike inflicted “very significant” damage, though they still haven’t got a final assessment either. Tulsi Gabbard announced on X this morning that “new intelligence” has confirmed “Iran's nuclear facilities have been destroyed” just as Trump said.
Who is telling the truth? There is no way that Fordow escaped massive damage. There is also no way that the entire facility was completely destroyed. Rubio gets closest to the truth when he says that Iran’s uranium enrichment program has definitely been set back. Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that contrary to some early reports, Iran did not move any nuclear material out of the underground facility before the strike. “In fact, we actually believe they stored more of it in Fordo because they believe Fordo was impenetrable. They thought it was a safe place to be.” This would be consistent with the regime’s track record of hubris.
We are left with the impression that Iran may yet be able to dig out the facility and recover some portion of their highly-enriched uranium. Nor should we expect the mullahs to give up on their nuclear dreams just because one mountain facility has been caved-in, no matter how completely. Per Rubio, the most that anyone can realistically do is set the Iranians back — suggesting a game of nuclear whack-a-mole in our future, rather than the “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” that Trump demanded.
Trump’s defensiveness regarding the effectiveness of OP Midnight Hammer and his brokered ceasefire tells us that the perceived integrity of both things is very important to him. Trump wants to be the president who solved the decades-long crisis of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. He also wants to be the president who stayed out of wars. His appellation of “The 12-Day War” tells us how he wants the affair to be remembered: as a short, victorious, self-contained adventure rather than a step into strategic quagmire. “It was my great honor to Destroy All Nuclear facilities & capability, and then, STOP THE WAR!” To the extent that the Trump administration is now free to focus on the Far East and the ‘Pacific pivot’ that five successive presidencies have tried to make, this projected image may even prove true. And to the extent that his ceasefire “appears to be holding” at this hour, Trump does look like the stronger partner in his relationship with Netanyahu, right now.
“Both Israel and Iran wanted to stop the War, equally!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social network Tuesday. While it is true that both combatants were ready to stop, they had opposite motives: the Israelis had nothing more left to win, while Iran wanted to stop losing. Likewise, both Israel and Iran are declaring victory: Israel says they have won because they have achieved their goals, whereas Iran says they have won because the Islamic Republic cannot possibly admit that it has suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Jewish state. Insofar as neither the United States nor Israel has been able to effect a regime change in Tehran, the mullahs can truthfully say that they themselves — though not the rest of Iran — have “won.”
Survival is a kind of winning. Recall how this worked out with Saddam Hussein. In 1991, the George H.W. Bush administration balked at supporting Shi’ite rebels in the south of Iraq following the complete rout of Iraqi forces in Operation Desert Storm. Survival emboldened Saddam, and in order to continue surviving, he refused to allow United Nations weapons inspectors to certify his country was WMD-free. Indeed, Saddam’s regime did such a fine job of pretending to maintain nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare programs that they accidentally convinced the George W. Bush administration to invade and topple them.
Trump has no appetite for such a scenario as invasion and occupation of Iran. Nobody does. A strike on Fordow is easy, costing little in treasure and no price in American blood, whereas regime change is hard. No one on Team Trump is interested in regime change. Trump said he wanted “regime change” on Sunday, then walked the statement back on Tuesday. “I don’t want it. I’d like to see everything calm down as quickly as possible,” he told reporters on Air Force One. “Regime change takes chaos, and ideally, we don’t want to see so much chaos, so we’ll see how it does.” As always, Trump makes the most sense when we take him seriously rather than literally: he would like the regime to change its act. He wants a negotiating partner in Tehran who is both serious and powerful, and furthermore acts transparently, in good faith.
He will never get it, but he might end up buying a rug anyway.
Iran is not about to change by force. A nationwide security crackdown is underway, with two men already executed on Sunday and Monday for allegedly spying on behalf of the Israelis, and Iranians appreciate it. “Many have long resented the Basij for their role suppressing anti-regime protests and civil society,” Najmeh Bozorgmehr writes at Financial Times. “Yet many have also rallied around the flag as the US and Israeli strikes stirred a renewed sense of patriotism over what they see as a threat to Iran itself, not just the government.”
“This reminds me of the first years after the revolution,” said Afsaneh, a resident of Tehran. “It’s unsettling, but also somewhat reassuring to see them near my house. I could never imagine seeing Basijis and feeling happy.”
In this environment, Trump will not find an honest interlocutor. Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s elected civilian president, has little real power. Even though his office ostensibly controls foreign policy, the supreme leader has an effective veto over any deal Pezeshkian cuts with the US regarding Iran’s uranium enrichment. Iran is always full of carpet salesmen pretending they can offer more than what is within their power to give. Nor is an alternative leader available outside the country. Reza Pahlavi, the latent Crown Prince in exile, is a carpet salesman with a pedigree. At best, he might be an acceptable transitional figure — if the regime fell on its own, first.
Donald Trump has ambitions to create a ‘Mar-a-Lago system’ that resets the global order on more advantageous terms for America and secures the peace of the world. Iran was always going to be a problem for these ambitions. Trump will find that engagement with Iran is always fraught. Any dealings will be nothing like the kind of business deal that Trump is used to making. He will not find the kind of men with whom he is used to doing business.
Rather than a corporate boardroom, Trump is entering the Grand Bazaar of Tehran: an ancient, colossal, labyrinthine place filled with hidden alleys, false fronts, and obscure arrangements. Iran has twice the normal number of constitutional organs, and the longest national constitution in the world, so that power is distributed and overlapping and Byzantine, preventing anyone from giving up too much. We have seen that the regular armed forces of Iran are hollowed out from regime neglect; the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which gets the lion’s share of Iran’s defense spending, is an example of this designed inefficiency. In such an environment, it is easier to walk away with a new rug than whatever it was you came looking for.
No Peace In Our Time
By this stage, Ukraine is not just a country that the MAGA right has never visited. It is a fantasy country that they imagine they know everything about — and all of it is bad. Douglass Murray at The Free Press this week
I like the metaphor. Nails it.