Handing Over Hormuz: Did the Victor Negotiate Like the Underdog?
Why would a power that has just won a war consent to sit down at a table arranged by the side that lost, and begin its conversation by quietly setting aside the single most powerful card in its hand.
Before anything else in this essay is read, let me say what must be said. What follows comes from a place of great humility and from a deep, unembarrassed respect for the Iranian people, for their forty-five-year refusal to be folded into the American imperial order, for their support of the resistance axis when every other regional power had been bought or broken, for their stand alongside the Palestinians and the Lebanese and the Yemenis at the precise hour when standing alongside them carried the highest possible cost.
There is, I am aware, nothing more contemptible than the spectacle of a Westerner dictating from the sidelines how the one country on earth still resisting the empire ought to comport itself. I do not write in that register and I hope I will not be read in it.
I write as one who believes, without qualification, that Iran's resistance in this century equals the resistance my own grandfathers offered to Nazi Germany in the last — that the moral weight is the same, the loneliness is the same, the courage required is the same. It is precisely because I believe this that I cannot keep silent about what I see happening in Geneva. One does not warn a stranger. One warns a comrade.
Memorandum of Moving the Goalpost
Ehsan Safarnejad, friend of BettBeat Media, the Iranian geopolitical analyst whose dispatches from Tehran have, throughout these terrible months, supplied many of us in the wider world with our clearest window into the Iranian street, said something in a recent conversation that I have not been able to put down. He said, with the careful precision of a man who measures every word, that he was less troubled by what is actually written in the Memorandum of Understanding being signed in Geneva than by what the act of signing reveals about the posture of the Iranian decision-makers.
He said the goalposts had moved. First the negotiators told their public that of course Iran would continue to collect fees on vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz; Iran would remain, as it has always remained, the moderator of that water. Then, days later, came the quiet revision. During the sixty days of negotiation that follow the Memorandum, Iran would not collect fees. After that, perhaps… We will see.
It is a small thing, that revision. It is a footnote in a document the rest of the world has barely had time to read. And yet it is everything.
Yesterday I wrote about the psychology of negotiating with evil — about the Stockholm mind that sits down across from the psychopath and persuades itself that this time, with this language, with these guarantees, the psychopath will be a different entity than he has been throughout history. I wrote about Egypt in 1979 and the PLO in 1993 and Lebanon’s slow drift toward an accommodation that the pagers in their pockets later answered. I wrote that the negotiation is not the means to the outcome; the negotiation is the outcome.
What I did not write but what deserves its own reckoning is the question of why a power that has, by every reasonable measure, just won a war, would consent to sit down at a table arranged by the side that lost. And why, having sat down, it would begin its conversation by quietly setting aside the single most powerful card in its hand.
