At around 2 a.m. on the last day of Passover in Israel, weary Israelis once again hauled themselves from their beds into air-raid shelters and safe rooms as the sirens started to wail.
Iran had fired yet more barrages of missiles at Israel and the Gulf states. That was its reaction to the announcement that had just been made by U.S. President Donald Trump that Tehran had agreed to a two-week ceasefire. The regime’s response was immediately to break it.
No one in Israel was surprised by this. The Iranian regime regards it as a religious duty to break its word to the “Big Satan.” Scarcely less predictably, and bleakly dismal in its own way, various media outlets reported instead that Israel broke the ceasefire by attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Once again, Western media outlets were regurgitating malevolent Iranian propaganda. Iran has claimed that the ceasefire also applies to Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah. Yet Trump and U.S. Vice President JD Vance said the war in Lebanon hadn’t been included in the ceasefire terms.
This made no difference. The media headlined “Israel breaching the ceasefire” while Western politicians, who have refused to take part in the great battle to end the evil of the Iranian regime, joined instead in the great progressive spectator sport of ignoring Islamist genocidal attacks and blaming their Israeli victim instead.
French President Emmanuel Macron said Lebanon should be included in the ceasefire terms. Britain’s foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, said: “The escalation that we saw from Israel yesterday [a huge Israeli attack on Hezbollah forces] I think was deeply damaging.”
There was no mention of the thousands of deeply damaging Hezbollah missile attacks aimed at murdering Israelis, which give residents of northern Israel living close to the launch sites in Southern Lebanon something like 15 seconds to find shelter after the siren sounds.
Instead, said Cooper, Lebanon must be included in the ceasefire; otherwise, it will “destabilize the whole region.”
But it’s obviously Iran that has destabilized the whole region by using proxy armies to further its fanatical agenda of imposing its murderous brand of Islam throughout the world.
For his part, Vance, who made the strongest objections to the war within the Trump administration, said the Hezbollah ceasefire claim was a “legitimate misunderstanding” by Iran.
If so, that would suggest a remarkable level of incompetence by the people conducting those negotiations. The Iranian regime never negotiates in good faith. It lies and cheats reflexively as a tactic of war.
Its 10-point plan was a ludicrous list of swaggering demands to reward it for 47 years of violent aggression. It included an end to all sanctions and the closure of all U.S. bases in the region, continued Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz, no more attacks on its proxies, reparations for the war, and the freedom to continue enriching uranium—i.e., develop nuclear weapons.
Trump said the plan was a “workable basis on which to negotiate.” According to Vance, however, this was not Iran’s list of 10 preposterous demands but another list that has not been made public. Yet commentators lined up to claim that Trump was giving in to demands that would hand total victory to Tehran.
It’s been chilling to witness a media and political class—mainly on the left, but also on the right—from the start, willing America and Israel to lose this war. The ceasefire terms have thus been spun as a catastrophic defeat: “the disastrous defining act” of Trump’s presidency.
The stupendous military and intelligence achievements of Israel and America have been brushed aside. The decimation of Iran’s military power is dismissed as merely “tactical” gains with no strategic achievement.
Above all, this Greek chorus of doom (echoed by numerous Israeli commentators on the left, for whom the defeat of Iran is of far less importance than the defeat of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu) assumes the war is now over, ignoring the negotiation that has yet to play out.
It’s hard to see how that negotiation can end in a deal at all. Trump’s terms require Iran’s total surrender. Iran’s published terms require its total victory. The area for compromise between these two maximalist positions is nonexistent.
As ever, reading Trump’s mind is a mug’s game. We can’t yet tell whether he’s being played for a sucker by a regime which—by Trump’s own account—has never won a war but never lost a negotiation; or whether he’s delivering a masterclass in geopolitical chess.
The concern is that he’s negotiating at all with religious fanatics, whose infernal agenda is totally non-negotiable and for whom negotiation merely demonstrates their opponent’s weak-minded refusal to go the military distance.
Maybe Trump is using these negotiations as a strategic feint. The suspicion is, however, that he believes that every conflict can be resolved through a deal. If so, that’s a disastrous category error. Iran has always wrong-footed negotiators because they believe that, like everyone else in the world, the regime is susceptible to appeals to personal or national self-interest.
Not so. The fanatics of Tehran would sacrifice the entire population of Iran if needs be, and they regard their own likely deaths as sanctified by the goal of producing Armageddon and the return to earth of the Shia messiah.
Confidence that Trump will see this thing through is not helped by his bombastic rhetoric. Claiming he’s produced regime change is absurd when the regime is the same but even more extreme. Boasting that the regime has been defeated is clearly untrue when it still controls the Strait of Hormuz and can still fire barrages of missiles.
When the ceasefire was announced, it was said that Iran had agreed to reopen the Strait, an international waterway. The truth was rather different. Iran had agreed to run a protection racket, with its armed forces cementing its control over who could pass through the Strait—a power and control that it had never previously exercised.
The regime retains three important points of leverage. The first is the Strait of Hormuz. The second is its still considerable store of missiles and launchers. The third is more intangible but even more devastating.
The regime thinks it can count on being able to absorb far more pain than the West. So it relies on pressure on Trump from things like the oil price, opponents of the war within the Republican Party, and above all, its priceless echo chamber of media propaganda. In other words, its greatest weapon is the cowardice and defeatism of a West that is no longer prepared to defend itself.
What became apparent after the Hamas-led atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and is now blindingly clear is that the axis of evil in the world—China, Russia, Iran and North Korea (known as CRINK)—has an invaluable army of fellow travelers in the Western intelligentsia and political class.
As professor Gwythian Prins, a former adviser to Britain’s defense ministry, observed this week, the war against Iran is a world war against the most evil enemy the West has faced since the Nazis. The linchpin of CRINK is the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is being equipped by Russia with increasingly precise weapons of war.
Prins hailed the brilliance of not only the military and intelligence operation by Israel and America, but the psychological war deployed to great effect by Trump in his widely derided rhetoric.
At the same time, Prins observed, Iran has been winning the propaganda war. Some apparently authoritative voices have been implying, he said, that it might be a good thing if the Americans and Israelis stopped cutting the head off the Iranian snake. In other words, the West has a fifth column providing tacit support to the enemy.
Many Americans may not realize it, but defanging the Iranian regime and ending an evil world order is America’s own cause. We must hold our breath that Trump does not allow himself to be knocked off course.
