Cease-Fire at Will
Iran suspended the cease-fire talks to head home for a massive funeral spectacle for their former Supreme Leader Ali Khameni. They took the opportunity – as you do – to attack two ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz and, per reports, leveled some damage to both. The on-going talks were supposed to put and end to this, so the whole thing has more than a whiff of “Honey, I thought we were on a break” to it.
To be fair, modern cease-fires rarely live up to their billing. On average, they reduce the violence by about 80%, but scarcely stop the mayhem altogether. That isn’t exactly a failure. The violations are one party probing the other with low-level brutality which is, in turn, managed by the other with tit-for-tat force. The point isn’t to settle the war, which won’t happen if either side still thinks it has leverage (and both do), but to keep the violence below the threshold of a total war where the stakes become existential. Short of that grim level, negotiation is at least possible. The extension of a pretty shaky cease-fire is not pointless, but just another round in an ongoing strategy of conflict.
Iran still retains its capacity for disruption and America retains its capacity for destruction. Neither had full deterrence over the other. Iran is signaling that it can hold the strait at will, now the status quo. It has dropped the attacks on US personnel and allies that would require retaliation. This isn’t a peace, but setting a pot on simmer so that it doesn’t boil over and cause a bigger mess. It’s also better than the alternative.
A Self-Serving Peace is Still Peace
The global markets have breathed a sigh of temporary relief because markets are more practical that politicians. This simmer may hold into new modus vivendi based on the assumption that neither side sees it in their best interests to escalate. The wider lesson here is that global supply chains, as well as the political order, are more fragile than previously assumed. The war introduced a concept of war that sidesteps catastrophic destruction for persistent disruption at a handful of chokepoints. It threatens centralized and remarkably exposed infrastructures with sustained, low-cost attack at surgical pain points. This is not the kind of risk that can be deterred by nuclear arsenals or even with conventional military superiority. It is diffuse, persistent, and difficult to eradicate. What is left is an annoying equilibria that leaves the world dotted with tripwires – proxy forces, vulnerable infrastructure, contested chokepoints – each capable of triggering renewed escalation. By design or by accident, Iran has rewritten the rules of conflict and exposed the fragility of the American order.
The easy peace of the Pax American is probably over. The Memorandum of Understanding that Tehran doesn’t seem to understand, isn’t anything that we’d call an agreement but a “framework” where both parties agree to what they’ll try to agree to later. Except that neither party can agree to what’s in the framework regarding what, exactly they’ve agreed to try to agree upon. More conspicuous still was what wasn’t in the Memorandum but left to be hashed out some sort of agreement later. There was no mention of the Iran’s proxies or its ballistic missiles program and left the nuclear question to a future “framework” on which neither Washington nor Tehran could seem to agree. I trust you see the problem.
Hairy and tragic though it is, though, the leaky peace process may just be worth playing it out. Still, the Abraham Accords showed that diplomacy and a reasonably free market can work near miracles when it comes to wrapping up close the odd millennia of holy war and poisonous ideology. The why of its success isn’t rooted in universal values, they are more self-serving practicality than hippie love-in, but they’ve got further than previous attempts in turning hated rivals into garden variety neighbors who just don’t like each other. Not liking your neighbor is natural enough, but don’t let it get in the way of business. That simple human desire to make a buck off the other guys just may be what saves us in a world of chokepoints that has entirely too many nuclear warheads.
And therein lies the opening through which the world might slip and avoid the ultimate disaster.