5 hours ago
Jeremy Bowen Beirut
The war has been President Donald Trump's worst foreign policy blunder – so far.
It makes it harder for the United States to deter its enemies.
It has damaged its alliances with the oil-producing Arab monarchies of the Gulf, whose business model as islands of stability in the turbulence of the Middle East will take years to repair.
Privately, their officials already talk about diversifying their allegiances, and about the necessity of finding ways to live alongside Iran, its neighbour across the water. China will have been watching closely as the United States burned through hard - to - replace stocks of weapons and came up against the limits of its power.
The agreement, assuming no more last-minute hitches, ends a war that was based on America and Israel's misreading of the strength of their enemy in Tehran. That will create a huge sigh of relief among all those whose lives have been turned upside down by the war, starting with civilians in the firing line.
The agreement re-opens the Strait of Hormuz, Trump says, taking the pressure off the global economy and the real lives of hundreds of millions of hard-pressed people around the world.
Thousands of people in the Middle East have been killed. Homes and businesses have been destroyed. The impact on fertiliser production that depended on supplies shipped through the strait could mean people in poor countries going hungry later in the year, with Africa south of the Sahara particularly at risk.
The agreement is not a peace deal. The full text, which negotiators have said has 14 points on two pages, has not been published yet. But as well as reopening the strait, the memorandum of understanding extends the ceasefire and lifts the US Navy's blockade of Iranian ports.
It defers the thorniest issues to future negotiations. That agenda will include the future of Iran's nuclear programme and the level of sanctions relief it will get in return for concessions.
A line has, at last, been drawn under the war that the US and Israel started on 28 February.
EPA
US and Israeli surprise attacks killed Iran's supreme leader but did not collapse the regime
Now turn the clock back to 27 February, as American and Israeli forces were preparing to strike, arming their aircraft, briefing their crews and programming targets for their missiles.
In Geneva, Iran and the US were involved in what the world had been told were essential talks aimed at controlling Iran's nuclear plans. Multiple sources have told me and others that Iranian negotiators believed they were in a serious process and had put concessions as well as demands on the table.
At the entrance to the Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz was open, allowing the passage of around 20% of the world's requirements of oil and natural gas, as well as byproducts of the petro-chemical industry that have become vital components of modern life, including agricultural fertilisers and semi-conductors.
The memorandum of understanding clears the way for the nuclear negotiators to reconvene and for ships to transit the strait. That is exactly where they were 24 hours before the US and Israel went to war.
In the first of a series of devastating surprise attacks, Israel killed the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his closest advisers. Around the same time, an American strike flattened a school in Minab in southern Iran, multiple investigations have shown . More than 150 civilians were killed, including at least 120 school children, mostly girls under the age of 12.
Both Trump and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made video appearances to announce the start of a war that they believed would be short, sharp and victorious. It was a stunning misjudgement.
Reuters
Re-opening the Strait of Hormuz would take pressure off the global economy and the real lives of hundreds of millions of people
Their speeches predicted the fall of the regime in Tehran. Instead, survival has strengthened the regime. Its worst nightmare was a full-scale attempt at regime change by the United States and Israel. It happened and failed. The hard men in Tehran who survived have emerged emboldened.
Khamanei and his advisers were replaced rapidly, by his son Mojtaba as supreme leader and by a younger generation of commanders, dominated by senior leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. They are every bit as ideological as the old guard, but less cautious, ready to take risks in what they considered, correctly, to be a fight for the survival of the Islamic regime in Iran.
They pushed to the limit a well-planned strategy of closing the Strait of Hormuz and attacking Iran's Arab neighbours as well as US forces and bases, and Israel itself. The bellicose rhetoric of the US Defence Secretary Peter Hegseth claiming that American power had crippled Iran's armed forces turned out to be exaggerated and untrue.
Israel was America's full partner in the war. But it was excluded from the negotiation on t…
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