How The Iran Peace Deal Falls Apart
Unstable foundations
The war in Iran is over, according to headlines and the released-today diplomatic agreement between the US and Iran. The war, which cost the US billions in munitions, killed over a dozen US soldiers, roiled global energy markets, wedged Europe away from Israel and the US, drove US forces from bases occupied for decades, and wounded countless hundreds more Americans, could be said to be nothing short of a total Iranian victory, even before US reparations come into effect. And those reparations will be steep: $300 billion at minimum, to say nothing of Iran's continued dominion over the Strait of Hormuz (an international waterway pre-war) and the lifting of sanctions.
The Iranian theocracy, in other words, went from “apoplectically, irrevocably doomed” to “quite stable; indeed well poised to become the world’s Fourth Great Power” in the short span of less than 6 months. This sort of stunning reversal is heretofore unseen in American history; only the War of 1812 rings as bad, with Napoleon in Europe proving the distraction we needed to save our bacon. Only there's no Napoleon this time, no saving grace of a greater threat to distract our foes.
This is not “bad for America”; this is imperial catastrophe. Iran proved that America's military industrial complex, with all its cost complexities, can be beaten by $200 drones with explosives taped on top. Multidecade plans to acquire more expensive air frames and carriers are being thrown into total disarray in the Pentagon; it's one thing to make a ship that enriches your buddies and also fulfills the mission. It's another thing entirely to build a multibillion dollar ship and have it be next to worthless other than as a slowly moving long range missile platform. One thing US war planners will start appreciating is that is cheaper and faster to build lots of small ships with lots of missiles and drones than one really big ship with the same firepower. Still, that change in doctrine will take decades to filter down to the military industrial level and back up, during which America will be critically weakened by investing in tech that just doesn’t do the job. It would be like a country in the 19th century investing for decades in steel plated armor, only to watch in horror as their brilliantly shining soldiers were ripped apart by powerful grape and powder shot.
Again: in every way, this war is catastrophe for America. That being said, it is survivable for US empire. Internal rifts aside, we face zero credible external threats. Iran has no fleet and no air force to threaten US continental shores, and won't even if they started speccing into that for at least a half-century.
For Israel and the Gulf States though, this war is existential. For the former, it dooms their whole strategy of divide and conquer. Israel being forced to make peace with Hezbollah is an indignity to them but it is survivable. What is not survivable is every single state in the region aligning itself against Israel, with tacit US approval of that outcome. That's exactly what this peace deal leads to though: a rapprochement with Iran between the Gulf Arab states that ices Israel out; an Abraham Accord but for Iran.
As for the Gulf states, the idea of Dubai is dead. The green transition won't be led by the UAE anymore but by China, and the whole of the region will shift from being US vassal entities to being Iranian ones. For the current unpopular Gulf monarchies, each of whom went along with the doomed Israeli-US-led war effort, it is impossible to say if they will all survive the 21st century. If they do, it will be under an Iranian protective umbrella and trade agreement. If you’re someone like MBZ or MBS (war criminals who keep their populations under the thick lock and key of brutal oppression), you might start to get a little anxious about your unpopularity, especially after getting so decisively owned. It is easy to imagine another Arab Spring blooming through the region in the shadow of this war, perhaps sooner than we think (albeit impossible to accurately predict).
Despite all that though, the conditions for a long-term peace holding are extremely elusive. The fact is, the US Army remains undefeated in the battlefield. Not the fleet or the air force, but the actual boots on the ground, the million-plus manned march carving a bloody sweep through Iran all the way to Tehran. This is a known fact, acknowledged by all parties. In Iran, this fact will gnaw at a growing insecurity regarding their demonstrated capabilities—they’ve proven they have strength; now they need to solidify their gains. There is a risk that Iran will try to humiliate the US even more militarily, to drive home the impression that a ground campaign would be futile, even at the risk of restarting hostilities.
But it’s not Iran we really need to be worried about. It’s America. Of course, Israel is the screeching, shit-throwing monkey in the room; if they’ve not already bombed Lebanon again they will soon, restarting the conflict again, if only for an afternoon. This then will obviously lead to either a resumption of the status quo or the final US-Israel break. Either way, Lebanon is not the main theater of the war, and the US will not commit to marching their own soldiers to Beirut.
Yet it will be Iran’s strategic albeit not tactical defeat of America that will consume US warplanners for the months and years to come. During and after the Vietnam War, there is a conception that the US did not go hard enough against North Vietnam, and that is why we lost. This of course is a wrong, stupid view of the war. America lost Vietnam because it tried to foist an unpopular, genocidal Catholic regime upon a mostly Buddhist population, and then when the population resisted that fate, the US could not hope to stamp out that resistance fully without risking total nuclear war with China and the USSR. But it was this humiliation in Vietnam that in turn fueled US revanchism, that first led to the interventions in Grenada and Panama, and eventually to Iraq and Afghanistan, and now, to Iran.
Unlike Vietnam, the Iranians did not grind US ground forces to a standstill. Outside of classified special operations, the US never marched more than a battalion into Iranian territory during the entire conflict; an initial invasion of Iran would take at least 1,000 battalions (each possessing about 1,000 men). If the US does decide that a rematch is in their interests, they already possess the means to do so.
This has been detailed before:
The reason why neither of the above were chosen is simple: Trump is averse to large ground operations. He always has been, ever since he used his bone spurs to avoid the Vietnam draft. It’s also the reason why the US can rip up the peace deal anytime and go back to war, and we mean really go back, with an actual ground force: once Trump and his mental peculiarities are gone, the next US President will be well within his rights to relaunch the war under the above parameters.
Congress, of course, will never agree to the peace, especially one that so short-shrifts Israel’s ambitions. The only thing that is keeping the peace aloft right now in Washington is Trump’s own fickleness to both win and avoid US casualties like the plague.
This doesn’t even have to come from the Republican Party. One could easily imagine a 2029 Democratic President, riding a wave of revanchist nationalism into office, promising a just war, a just victory, against the Islamic Republic. Of course, it’s just as easy to imagine a Democratic President lining up to kowtow to the Ayatollahs, coming in just after Trump just finished kowtowing.
Maybe then peace holds for a few more years, ten or twenty or more or so. But that little nugget of forbidden knowledge, that fact will stink up American political minds for a generation; the fact that the US never really tried to either fight or win this war, not really, until it consumes us fully. The Kurdish invasion was an insane pipe dream. The attempted civilian revolution was even worse: nothing more than a command from Mossad to unarmed civilians to march out into the streets and confront and thus to be slaughtered by IRGC militias. “We lost, but we never really fought,” will be the defining fact that will fire up the furnaces of the American revanchist industry, and that fire will one day perhaps be enough to relaunch the war, only this time with a direct US ground invasion.
Unlike in Vietnam, there’s no Russian or Chinese nuclear umbrella over Iran. The US could march into Tehran without facing direct nuclear retaliation (assuming Iran does not complete the bomb). This means that the only thing actually preventing the US from marching a million plus men into Iran is just US willpower. Today, the US (represented by the sole singular figure of Trump) has broken willpower, with no desire for further conflict. Tomorrow, JD Vance might be President, or Marco Rubio, or Gavin Newsom. Once that happens, it won’t take long for them start ripping up this peace deal, bit by bit. Every Iranian act of aggression becomes justification, every insult they utter an indignation of our national will.
For peace to hold, cooler heads in the US imperium must prevail. America should “take the L”, to speak colloquially, and reconsider its global force posture. A broader reconsideration of US geopolitical force posture is required. We cannot patrol and maintain all six habitable continents as our exclusive backyard anymore. We likely will spend the next few decades retrenching the core American continents and the surrounding islands, with US forces driven from everywhere but the far western reaches of Africa and Europe. The alternative is to double, even triple-down in Iran, with the risk being that win or lose, we would be too weak to oppose other rising powers competing for power in our hemispheres.
In other words, for peace to hold, everything has to go exactly right. The US needs to accept defeat, Iran needs to accept it’s gotten all it will get out of America, and Israel needs to accept its military and diplomatic isolation. For war to restart, just one thing needs to go wrong: a burst blood vessel in Trump’s head, a bit of unexploded ordnance going off inside Iran, Israel being Israel.
Celebrate the peace then, but don’t expect it to last. And as always, never forget:
“Igitur qui desiderat pacem, præparet bellum.”
(English: “Therefore, he who desires peace, let him prepare for war.”)
— Vegetius