In a few weeks the United States will be celebrating its 250th birthday. By any standards, its existence has been nothing short of remarkable. What was a quarter of a millennium ago a backwards, agrarian state conducting a novel experiment with a limited form of democracy matured into a planet-bestriding juggernaut that has dominated global affairs for the guts of the past century.
An American century.
Yet if history teaches us one thing it is in the impermanence of power, that every rise has an apex and then a fall and that today’s losers may beget tomorrow’s winners. Iran is a country that should know this more than most. Compared to the United States, Iran has an astonishingly ancient pedigree and a civilizational legacy that few can compare with. Two and a half thousand years ago, ten times the age of the United States, there were Iranian Empires that stretched over the Middle East and which were counted as the superpowers of their era.
Yet for them the wheel turned. The wheel always turns. It doesn’t turn inexorably mind you. There is no clock or countdown which measures out that this is how long you will spend rising and then this is how long you will spend in decline. How nations rise and how they fall is entirely in the hands of their people, random events they have no control over and their leaders. And in the case of the United States and Israel right now, especially their leaders…
Just under a year ago, in the wake of the Twelve-Day War between Israel and Iran, I wrote this piece. In it I laid out what had been the expected scenario in the event of an American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities…
…Iran would after all certainly respond with a massive barrage of ballistic missiles to set US bases in the region ablaze and those same bases would be placed under siege by militias loyal to Tehran. Rockets from their powerful proxies in Hezbollah and Hamas would rain down upon Israel, shattering their cities. The Iranian navy would mine the Straits of Hormuz, leading to further economic chaos. The United States and its western allies would be dragged into the quagmire of another Middle Eastern war, and war-weary populations who remembered the blood and treasure that were spilled fruitlessly in Iraq and Afghanistan made it very clear that they regarded such a prospect with horror.
…and I contrasted it with the reality of the response, an aggressive light show over Doha they had warned the Americans in advance was coming.
It seemed hugely anti-climactic. Iran ducked the fight.
I concluded that the result was a clear-cut Israeli victory. Iran had taken massive knocks, they hadn’t really fought back and the path was open to an American-backed Israeli hegemony over the Middle East.
Further events, including the snap-back of punishing sanctions on the Iranian economy in the autumn and the huge protests that erupted against the governing regime at the close of 2025 seemed to validate my conclusion. The protests themselves were rooted in a combination of deep resentment at the government and the fact it had been weakened internally as a result of the war with Israel. The regime survived, but at the cost of murdering tens of thousands of its own citizens. Just as the Iranian regime spilled blood to sustain itself, it also spent legitimacy among its population. Such is the price tyrannies pay when they must resort to grotesque violence to sustain their rule.
At the end of January this year, the government in Tehran had never looked so fragile.
But as I said, the wheel of history doesn’t turn of its own accord. It is driven by multiple factors, and in this case, history turned on the temporarily coinciding interests of two different men.
The loathsome Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent his entire political career selling Israelis on the lie that peace is impossible and that security can only be bought if their enemies are bombed. And when the bombing fails to quell the raging fires of hatred, the response seems to be to bomb them harder.
In the wake of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in the 1990s, Netanyahu set about dismantling the peace process rather than negotiate with the Palestinians. He then found himself at odds with Ariel Sharon, a man whose right-wing credentials in Israel were impeccable and thus the political space to attempt a solution of his own. Whilst Sharon wasn’t going to enter negotiations with the Palestinians, he had decided that a unilateral drawing of borders and a disengagement from the remainder was the only way to save Israel from being forcibly transformed into a bi-national state. Sharon’s stroke stopped him from putting his plan into action.
Netanyahu opposed both because it seems Netanyahu does not want to reach any kind of accommodation with the Palestinians. He wishes to control the land even if he does not wish to treat the people who come with the land as people. In this he was backed by the settler movement and other nationalistic forces within Israel. They have been his staunchest backers these past thirty years.
Rather than the difficult business of peace-making, he has striven to keep the brutal realities of the occupation as far from the minds of Israelis as he possibly can and promised them that if any would seek to do them harm, he would stand in their way with a shield in one hand and squadrons of F-35s in the other.
And there is no greater threat to Israel than the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has the destruction of the Jewish state as a cornerstone of its foreign policy. Ever since it was discovered that Iran had been secretly enriching uranium, Netanyahu has been obsessed with ending the threat Iran poses to his country.
In fairness, the Iranian regime is a brutal rogue state that has murdered tens of thousands of its own citizens as well as funded terrorist groups abroad such as Hamas and Hezbollah.
The very idea of that regime possessing nuclear weapons sends a shiver down my spine and I think most people would agree with Benjamin Netanyahu that Iran shouldn’t have nuclear weapons. Of course, most people would probably agree that Israel shouldn’t have nuclear weapons either but I would wager Netanyahu wouldn’t appreciate the hypocrisy there being highlighted.
To that end, the United States and the European Union worked tirelessly across the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama to reach a solution short of a war with Iran and this resulted in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a deal which promised Iran relief on sanctions that were proving increasingly onerous in exchange for meaningful limits on their nuclear ambitions. Essentially, their right to enrich Uranium was recognised, but they were to be held to a level far below what was needed to weaponise it.
Netanyahu worked tirelessly to undermine this agreement. He even wrangled an invite to address the US Congress behind the Obama administration’s backs where he decried the deal. And then, to what must have seemed to him at the time his enormous good fortune, Obama was succeeded by his temperamental and political opposite in Donald Trump.
Trump is obsessed with Barack Obama and has been since he promoted the fake and racist Birther conspiracy alleging the first African-American President had actually been born in Kenya. Obama’s humiliation of Trump in 2011 at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner has even been cited by some as the origin for Trump’s political ambitions, as a means of avenging the slight.
Trump relentlessly criticised the JCPOA, deriding it as weak, and once he succeeded Obama he withdrew it from and instead imposed a brutal regime of sanctions on Iran as part of his maximum pressure approach. That it undid what was regarded as Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement undoubtedly sweetened the deal.
But once he did that, he was stuck. His own narcissistic ego demanded that the only outcome of his dealings with Iran was a better outcome than what Barack Obama had secured, else it would be judged a failure. And Benjamin Netanyahu saw in Trump someone he could convince to help fulfil his ultimate ambition. A full-scale military onslaught against Iran in which the United States and Israel would smash the Ayatollahs.
No other President had ever considered that level of military action against Tehran as they judged the consequences of such an act as too terrible for it to be contemplated. Instead, they adopted a posture of strategic patience.
Isolate Iran, enfeeble it with sanctions, limit it and wait for the internal contradictions within the theocratic system to cause it to collapse or for the system itself to seek a rapprochement with the US led international order (if there is anything western powers have proven it is that they’ll happily let you go about killing your own people so long as you don’t rock the boat outside your borders). This was the logic behind the JCPOA. An agreement narrowly focused on a single aspect, the threat of nuclear weapons held by Iran, and provided a mechanism to deal with them.
Containment would win the day in the end. Just as it had with the Soviet Union and its satellites. This approach became something of a sacred cow in American foreign policy and one that received new currency given the debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Fortunately for Netanyahu and unfortunately for everyone else, Trump delights in butchering sacred cows. He never seems to believe that something is not done for reasons of prudence or hard-won experience, but because others simply didn’t dare to do them. Doing what others didn’t dare has become a means for him to flaunt his bravado and virility.
Trump was thus primed to fall into the Netanyahu trap as the Israeli Prime Minister finally achieved his dream to launch a full-scale aerial assault on Iran. Except this time, Iran didn’t duck the fight. Iran started firing back, on Israel, on US bases and on the American allies in the region who hosted those US bases. Iran’s trump card was in closing the Straits of Hormuz, placing a stranglehold on the global economy. Trump spent the war engaged in increasingly bizarre performative displays of regularly and seemingly ritually declaring victory as well as making grandiose pronouncements declaring the straits open only for Iran to correct those pronouncements, sometimes with accompanying potshots at any vessels who had deigned to take the US President seriously.
Three months of war and on-off again ceasefires and negotiations followed and it all culminated in the signing of a fourteen-point memorandum of understanding that achieved none of the goals Trump set out at the start of the war.
Iran did not abandon its determination to retain the right to enrich uranium (which many suspect is cover for a process to obtain the expertise to build a bomb). Did not promise to stop supporting its proxy networks. Did not rein in its missile forces. And did not re-open the Straits of Hormuz to toll-free passage, quite the contrary, it is preparing to levy a ‘service-charge’ for straits passage which is a toll in all but name.
Trump has therefore failed in his aim of securing a better deal than Barack Obama did, and while he successfully destroyed that hallmark of Obama’s legacy (which I am fairly certain was one of the main reasons he did it) his own failed approach has retrospectively burnished his predecessor’s legacy who achieved more with patience and poise than Trump did with bombs and bullets and who didn’t end up getting thousands of people killed in the process (including the 150 or so who died at the girl’s primary school in Minab). That will gnaw at Trump if he accepts that truth, but in public he is likely to declare victory. He may even believe it.
Netanyahu seems to have been too clever by half. Trump’s caprice and contempt for norms allowed Netanyahu to manipulate him into launching this catastrophic war of choice, and it has also allowed Trump to end the war on terms that constitute nothing less than a stunning defeat for Israel.
Far from crippling Iran permanently, Israel has instead empowered its adversary in ways it had never thought possible. The deal promises sanction relief and hundreds of billions of investment, much of which will doubtless be used to renovate the dilapidated Iranian economy and thus ease the domestic pressure the regime has been under but much which will go into the weapons systems Iran used to such great effect in this conflict.
Netanyahu will likely pay the price personally for his monumental blunder later this year when Israel goes to the polls. If there is even the faintest of silver linings to this catastrophic war of choice, it is in the possibility that his time in power will soon come to an end and he will be removed from the global stage. If so, good riddance.
It is important to remember that the future is not set. A year ago it seemed that Israeli hegemony had been secured for a generation, only for Trump and Netanyahu to fritter it away in their hubris-driven overreach. Now it seems Iran is once again on the forward foot, but the theocratic system was badly mauled during the war with numerous top clerics and commanders killed. Power in Iran has shifted from the Ayatollahs to the commanders of the Revolutionary Guards, all of whom are reported to be more hardline and open to direct responses to provocations than their predecessors. And we have to factor in the legacy of those bloody protests and the silent rage a large section of the Iranian population now carries with them as they mourn lost loved ones. That may yet erupt again in the future even in spite of the potential improvements coming down the line.
And Netanyahu has every reason to try and play the spoiler. Even now he has declared he is not bound by the deal in respects to Lebanon, and Israeli forces continue to pummel that country.
The deal is fragile and could collapse at any time. But the fact it exists all it in the format it does is a shocking indictment of Trump’s ‘leadership’. For now, Iran has done what I thought was impossible. It has prevailed in this conflict. I don’t celebrate that of course given I hold the regime in contempt, but they have achieved a far better outcome for themselves than I imagined possible.
When compared to the JCPOA, the memorandum demonstrates the sheer magnitude of Trump’s folly and represents something even his hardcore supporters may struggle to swallow. He has led America into its biggest strategic defeat in fifty years.
My mistake was underestimating the incompetence of the Donald Trump, which I have to own. I regard Trump as manifestly unfit for the office he holds. The combination of alleged corruption, making a virtue of pig-ignorance, his indulgence of vice-signalling and all the performative cruelty would be bad enough on its own but when you couple that with the fact he is just terrible at the role it is surely enough to cement him in place as the worst ever American President.
The big birthday celebrations now have to take place in the shadow of this once in a generation reversal.
I’m a firm believer in Irish unity and I live in the border regions of Tyrone.
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