The Icebreaker Effect in Trump’s Rhetoric
Commenting on a ‘Memorandum on a Memorandum’ without an officially published text remains premature. Yet, a more fundamental question arises today: why is an agreement framework being pursued with such persistence with those who do not represent the sole center of decision-making in Iran, nor possess the resources for its full implementation and verification.
It is not that Washington is ignorant of Iranian diplomatic culture, the concept of taqiyya, or the nuances of taarof—they have undoubtedly been warned. The issue lies in the West’s distinct perception of temporality. The short electoral cycles of American politics, combined with an inherently low tolerance of Western society for protracted, grueling strategic processes, generate a form of selective political amnesia. The structural reliance on transactional pragmatism locks administrations into the same illusion that previously trapped both Obama and Biden, and which Trump now inhabits with particular structural fidelity: treating a highly fragmented system as a singular corporate partner, even though Iranian foreign policy remains embedded within a volatile balance between formal institutions, security apparatuses, and ideological power centers.
However, amid Trump’s recent reprimands of Israel for “disrupting” his grand bargain with Beirut airstrikes, it is his broader rhetoric on Lebanon and Syria that captures the long-term strategic horizon. When he suggests that Syria should ‘take care of’ Hezbollah, the conversation shifts from tactical maneuvering to the active legitimization of regional revanchism.
Syrian claims over Lebanon are a well-established construct. It is a persistent Ba’athist narrative that views Lebanon as an historically detached fragment of Syrian space, and the border as a product of colonial partition that also crystallized Lebanon as a distinct political entity, with a strong Maronite institutional and political core. This narrative can easily outlive its original ideological framework and be pragmatically co-opted by new actors—including forces like Hayat Tahrir al-Sham—operating under an entirely different, non-Ba’athist logic. Once such a framework receives external legitimacy from a superpower, the White House is effectively bringing a global trend toward the revisionism of all post-colonial politics and borders for the sake of momentary arrangements back to the world stage. In this reality, Lebanon’s non-Sunni populations—Christians, Druze, and Shiites who fall outside these emerging Syrian-Sunni axes—are instantly downgraded from citizens of a sovereign state to mere collateral in an external demographic and military realignment.
Since February 2022, the world has already witnessed the return of forceful revisionism as a tool of great power politics. Regardless of any assessment of the motives or objectives behind that conflict, the event acted as a geopolitical icebreaker, shattering the long-standing international consensus on the inviolability of the post-war order. Its ripples extend far beyond any single theater precisely because precedents operate by expanding the boundaries of the permissible. Now, a similar logic of revisionism is being applied under the guise of “business pragmatism.”
The distinct danger of the current moment lies here: if the normalization of revanchism is legitimized from within the Western system itself, isolating it as an anomaly becomes impossible. What guarantees the integrity of any post-colonial borders in any nation across Asia or Africa, if historical grievances and proxy enforcers are welcomed back into the toolkit of great powers?
These processes do not expire with the short political cycles of individual leaders. They unravel with the heavy inertia of already executed choices. Even if this specific deal never materializes, the very act of pursuing it and normalizing such rhetoric has already eroded the rules of the game. We will inevitably have to manage the fallout of today’s transactional cynicism—which is actively hardening into tomorrow’s structural reality—years after Trump’s presidency has concluded. And we will have to do so primarily across the landscapes of the Global South, including Africa, where post-colonial borders remain the fragile, solitary bedrock of political order.
