They are the very definition of the odd couple, possibly the least likely partners to head off full-scale war in the Middle East. Yet U.S. President Donald Trump and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seem to have resolved to do just that.
The dramatic result was a sudden de-escalation Monday of their violent showdown over Iran’s nuclear program.
And that was followed by an even more dramatic announcement from Mr. Trump: a cease-fire between Iran and Israel as well, due to take hold on Tuesday.
Why We Wrote This
The US president and Iran’s top leader shared a concern that seems to have pulled them back from the brink of continuing war: that the conflict would get out of hand and consume both of them.
A long history of Mideast conflict suggests caution may still be in order, and that the real test in the coming days will be whether the new spirit of détente holds.
But ironically, if it does, that will be because America’s MAGA president and the viscerally anti-American supreme leader of Iran share an overriding interest: to prevent the American bunker-busting attack on Iran’s main nuclear-enrichment complex from spiralling into a conflict that neither could fully predict or control.
And Iran’s deliberately limited military response yesterday, followed by a conciliatory statement from the U.S. president, suggested awareness on both sides of the importance of taking the diplomatic off-ramp.
Iran fired missiles on Monday evening at the American Al-Udeid base in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar – the same number, Tehran said, as the munitions used by the U.S. in attacking its nuclear site two days earlier.
But Tehran provided advance warning, and the Americans had been able to move planes and personnel out of danger. Qatar closed its air space a full hour before the missiles arrived, and all were either intercepted or diverted.
Mr. Trump, in a social media post, thanked the Iranians for the early warning and voiced the hope that “Iran can now proceed to Peace and Harmony in the region.”
How long this mutual restraint will last is impossible to say. Any major further attack, by either side, could still quash prospects for diplomacy. So might any exchange of missile barrages between Iran and Israel.
Yet there is no shortage of international voices urging them to talk.
America’s European allies were co-signatories to the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement negotiated under President Barack Obama and jettisoned by Mr. Trump.
They met Iran’s foreign minister only days before the U.S. attack and have been pressing Washington and Tehran to avoid further escalation.
Iranian Army Press Service/AP
Arab Gulf states – whom Mr. Trump visited in April on the first major overseas trip of his presidential term – are playing an even more active role. It was Qatar that persuaded Iran to accept the ceasefire that Mr. Trump was proposing
Omani officials have hosted five rounds of talks between Iranian and U.S. negotiators in search of a more stringent successor to the 2015 deal. A sixth session had been due to convene when Israel attacked Iran on June 12. It is not clear whether or not Washington and Tehran will resume these negotiations.
Iran’s allies, too, advocated restraint. China’s foreign ministry, commenting on a call by the Iranian parliament to shut the Strait of Hormuz and choke off Gulf shipping, stressed that these were international waters and called for “de-escalation.”
The rival leaders, themselves, were aware of the benefits of an exit route, and the potential perils of failing to find one.
For Ayatollah Khamenei, the military calculus was stark.
Having spent years building a network of regional allies and proxies through which it could project its power at arm’s length, Iran has seen these groups neutralized. Israel has hobbled Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, has fled to Moscow.
After severely damaging Iran’s air defenses in response to a missile barrage last year, Israel launched its attack on Iranian nuclear installations, nuclear scientists and military commanders this month without meeting any significant resistance.
America’s B2 bombers could also be confident of a trouble-free mission in and out of Iran – hardly a situation in which the ayatollah would want to risk prompting larger-scale U.S. attacks.
President Trump also has good reason to avoid further military action. For a start, he has always opposed foreign military entanglements on principle.
He has been proudly trumpeting last weekend’s attack as a sign of American might and prowess, in contrast to the weakness of his predecessors. But he knows that further escalation would carry risks.
Speaking during his visit to the Arab Gulf, he took aim at past U.S. interventions such as the war in Iraq. “In the end,” Mr. Trump said, “the so-called ‘nation-builders’ wrecked far more nations than they built – and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”
He also cited his own brief military campaign against Iranian-allied Houthi forces in Yemen, which had been attacking Red Sea shipping. He called the airstrikes off in a deal that ended those attacks, though leaving the Houthis free to keep firing missiles at Israel.
“We hit them hard, we got what we came for – and then we got out,” he said.
That appears to be the outline of Mr. Trump’s approach to Iran, where he can draw on the broad framework for a nuclear deal that has been taking shape in the Arab-mediated talks of recent weeks. It calls for a far tighter version of the 2015 agreement, putting a verifiable end to uranium enrichment beyond the level needed for civilian power. Even that would be performed by a consortium of other Mideast countries.
With time, and the creative hedging of traditional diplomacy, the remaining obstacles might not prove insurmountable, allowing both sides to claim that they had got the best possible deal.
But the situation is still fragile, and will need careful handling. Without early signs of progress, there is always the danger of a return to violence.
