A deeply flawed cease-fire – what to do about it
The cease-fire against Iran comes at a strange and unfortunate moment. This is because by Tuesday 7 April, the 39th day of the war and the day before the cease-fire, the Allies had obtained very significant military successes against Iran. On that day United States Central Command reported it had attacked more than 13,000 Iranian targets, including more than 155 vessels of Iran’s naval forces. More than ten thousand strikes by the world’s most powerful military necessarily mean that Iran suffered a very great deal of damage, not just to its maritime capabilities.
The intensity of the Allied attacks had only been increasing, as confirmed by observations of the Iranian opposition Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA). On 6 April, Israel had destroyed a variety of Iranian transport aircraft and helicopters, directly weakening the regime’s ability to move its forces around Iran in the future. The following day, Israel began attacking land transport infrastructure, reinforcing the paralyzing effect on Iranian military movements. Simultaneously, Israeli air strikes on Iran’s petrochemical industry were destroying the last vestiges of Iran’s capacity to produce the components for the missiles with which it menaces its neighbors.
Iran was in disarray. In addition to the damage to its military and war production, Mojtaba Khamenei, the supposed new Supreme Leader, was nowhere to be seen, and quite possibly had been permanently incapacitated. As a direct consequence of this, Iran was having difficulty even with what sees as its core task, terrorizing Israel’s civilian population. It had been forced not to attack Israel at all for a period of 12 hours before the early morning of 7 April. Over the course of the previous day, Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah had managed to moderately injure a mere five Israeli civilians.
In parallel, American forces had achieved a significant moral and psychological victory, by rescuing both crew members of shot down F-15E Strike Eagle, callsign Dude 44, and also hitting a “bunker with 50 IRGC leaders” in the process, according to CBS News. It is worth reflecting just how much effort was necessary to achieve that success. A total of 151 aircraft; including four strategic bombers, 64 fighters and 48 aerial tankers were sent, and 339 munitions dropped on Iranian forces. All this was needed even though Israeli air forces alone had destroyed more than 130 Iranian air defense systems, and American forces will necessarily have destroyed a significant additional number. Now, if Iranian forces can partially reconstitute their air defenses during the cease-fire, there is a real prospect that another dangerous and expensive rescue mission will have to be undertaken, if the war resumes.
A cease-fire of dubious motives and quality
In the context of Iran’s weakness, caused by Allied attacks, stopping them for a cease-fire is a very dubious idea. President Donald Trump himself had stated on Monday that all Iran could potentially do in the Strait of Hormuz was “drop a couple of mines,” while lamenting that “all you need is one terrorist” to impede maritime traffic. The logical step based on this understanding would have been to increase the military pressure on Iran to the point that the regime would capitulate, but this was not the road taken.
President Trump has acknowledged that China helped Iran in the cease-fire negotiations. China, of course, is America’s most powerful adversary, so the President’s idea that a cease-fire secured with Chinese involvement can lead to “longterm peace with Iran” is without foundation. Vice President JD Vance admits publicly that the supposition that Iran will negotiate in good faith is “a big if.” All the more so, of course, since Iran has never negotiated in good faith before, which is why the Trump administration was forced to go to war. The President insists that this time, the US will “dig up and remove” Iran’s highly enriched uranium, which would be a significant achievement, but there is no sign that Iran has or will agree to this.
In fact, there are plenty of signs of the opposite, that Iran’s various co-conspirators will help it resist American pressure. On Tuesday, China worked together with Russia and other members of the UN Security Council to neuter a proposed Resolution against Iran and remove any authorization for the use of force from its text. Not satisfied with their efforts, or perhaps satisfied that President Trump was willing to concede, China and Russia then vetoed even the neutered text. Colombia abstained, as did Pakistan, the supposed effective mediator in negotiations with Iran.
This activity at the UN gives the report by the New York Times that China nudged Iran ‘to show flexibility and defuse tensions’ a very particular hue. Rather than putting pressure on Iran, China is attempting to save the regime. This is especially repulsive when one remembers that around 90% of Iran’s oil exports, including millions of barrels sold during the war, go to China.
Of course, Iran’s regime has more assistants than just China and Russia. When Oman’s foreign ministry seeks “solutions capable of resolving the crisis,” it certainly does not intend to consider the regime’s surrender as a solution. Even more seriously, Pakistan’s attempt to impose a cease-fire “everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere” by statement shows that it, too, is actively attempting to support the Iranian regime’s views and interests.
On Wednesday, the day when the cease-fire was declared, it is not even clear it has any substance. Supposedly, Iran will ‘open’ the Strait of Hormuz, or rather not impede traffic through it, but there are rumors that both Iran and Oman will be allowed to charge fees for passage. President Trump is saying that he is considering joining this as a ‘joint venture,’ which would go against every past principle of American policy. Even if normal commercial traffic will resume in full or in significant part, this is very thin gruel for a cease-fire which supposedly fully or largely resolves the grave issues that caused America to resort, at the last moment, to war against Iran.
Iran has even fired ballistic missiles at Saudi Arabia on cease-fire night, as well as several salvoes at Israel. The United Arab Emirates carefully counted 17 ballistic missile and 35 drone launches from Iran since the beginning of the supposed cessation of hostilities. Kuwait has also been attacked. So far, this is a cease-fire which serves exclusively the interests only of Iran and its informal allies, and not of anyone else in the world.
The West’s weakness is at the root of the problem
The existence of this woeful cease-fire is rooted in the West’s extraordinary weakness. This includes industrial incapacity, which makes the Middle East a critically important source not just of crude oil, but also refined oil products, including jet fuel. If Western countries cannot produce their own oil, or at least purchase it from less war-ridden parts of the world, they certainly can refine their own jet fuel. The problem is they are not, as a matter of practical policy, dedicating attention and resources to this matter.
Worse, several Western countries have seceded from the West, de facto. Prominently France, which conducted a side negotiation with Iran to retrieve two French hostages, Cecile Kohler and Jacques Paris, on Tuesday. Equally repugnant is the role of Spain’s socialist government, which copies Pakistan and declares that “all fronts must cease, and all fronts also means Lebanon.”
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is a less disgusting character, yet he wishes for a “durable end to the war” and somehow conceives that this can “only be achieved by diplomacy.” The Chancellor cannot understand that war is not a bad film viewing, which can simply be stopped. Wars are won and lost. If the war against Iran is not won by military means, it will certainly be lost at the negotiation table.
Taken more broadly, the West has largely lost a sense of reality and an understanding of what war is. I have written about this a week ago, but there is now more to add. A hundred individuals who describe themselves as ‘US-based international law experts’ ludicrously declare that the Allied war against Iran is “a clear violation of the United Nations Charter,” even as they ignore that Iran’s regime has done nothing but violate that Charter, and every other law and norm, for its entire 47-year existence.
Frank Gardner, the BBC’s security correspondent, took the rhetoric a step further and implied that Trump’s threats towards Iran made him comparable to the Taliban and ISIS. Sky News’ American correspondent James Matthews also chose to take Trump’s statements very literally and declare that he was threatening to wipe out an entire civilization, which would “put all of us on a course for the end of the world.” Neither Gardner nor Matthews made any mention of Iran’s threats to annihilate Israel, or the regime’s anti-Semitic ideology, of course.
The dishonesty is not limited to correspondents. European Union officials talk of the need to abolish individual country vetoes over foreign policy in order to sanction Israeli settlers, not in order to take serious action against Iran. Pope Leo, the first American to lead the Catholic Church, inserts himself into politics for no better purpose than to welcome the cease-fire and insist on negotiation with Iran, without making even a token mention of the danger that Iran poses. Much of the West is disintegrating, unwilling and unable to defend itself against aggressors of any kind.
The immediate negative consequences
As a direct consequence of the insubstantive cease-fire and the great Western weakness that lies just beneath the decision to agree to the truce, terrorists are rejoicing. Hezbollah declared its own cease-fire, while announcing at much the same time that it anticipates “a great historic victory.” Its friends in Hamas celebrate not only the diminishing of American, but the “imminent demise of the illegitimate entity,” their antisemitic term for the State of Israel. The terrorist regime in Tehran, in its own announcement, emphasized that passage of maritime traffic would only be possible by means of “coordination with Iran’s Armed Forces.” All of this is not merely bluster, but a reflection of an understanding that only America and Israel stand against Iran and its friends, and America is currently intent on taking a break, at the very least.
If the war is not resumed, the costs Iran imposed on world trade, and more importantly the prospect that it will impose these costs again at its own discretion, will leave a deep wound. As an example, Sri Lanka is in discussions with Russia to replace energy and fertilizer supplies from the Middle East. If Iran is decisively defeated, such news will not matter. If Iran survives, it will work with Russia and others to systematically extort much of the world.
America cannot afford the effects of this extortion. Nor can it afford to put endless strain on its military with the prospect of another war with Iran at some distant point in the future. A delayed war might well lead to many more losses than the one which was suspended on Wednesday. A single shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile, perhaps of Russian origin, shot down the Strike Eagle. Russia and other countries might supply Iran with thousands of new missiles, if they get the chance. US resources, which will be needed to cope with the consequences, are far from unlimited. As a case in point, the US Air Force has a only a very small number of CASA CN-235 transports, the type of aircraft which were urgently sent to recover the second Strike Eagle crew member.
On the broadest possible view, a cease-fire which solves nothing and lets the Iranian regime survive will imperil the wider prospects of America and the West. The Artemis II space flight around the moon took years to prepare and cost $93 billion. If Iran’s menace is not removed and the problems continue to fester, will Artemis IV, which should bring man back to the moon for the first time in almost 56 years, ever fly? The world cannot be perpetually trying and failing to solve the problems on Earth, if real space exploration is ever to become sustainable in terms of money and political attention.
What to do now
It is very important that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office has asserted that the cease-fire does not include Lebanon, and President Trump has concurred. Anything else would have taken the military pressure completely not only off Iran, but also Hezbollah. It is even better that Israel followed up with a large wave of air strikes which, according to Defense Minister Israel Katz, had hundreds of Hezbollah operatives as its targets. If there is any chance, however low, that Iran will make serious and permanent concessions in negotiations, it exists only because Iran and Hezbollah fear Israeli military power, and Israel’s willingness to use it. The terrorists in Lebanon, in particular, with six IDF divisions now arrayed against them, know they are running out of time.
The United States, if it wants to emerge from the war with anything other than a limited and incomplete success, should follow Israel’s example. Once it becomes obvious that Iran does not intend to make fundamental and permanent concessions, which is essentially certain, America should resume the war with even greater force than hitherto.
American bombing can crush a hostile regime. It has done so before. The Second World War in Europe was won to a significant degree because of the Allied air campaign known as the ‘Transportation Plan,’ which paralyzed transport links in Western Europe from early March to mid-August 1944. This plan was complemented by the ‘Oil Plan,’ which obliterated Germany’s fuel economy from May 1944 onwards. Iran is far less resilient than Nazi Germany, which had a vast and highly disciplined military machine. If versions of the Transportation and Oil Plans are implemented against Iran, the regime will fall of a precipice.
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