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PROFESSOR JUNAID S. AHMAD argues that the United States’ illegal war on Iran exposed the limits of American power, with subsequent diplomacy serving to reframe strategic setbacks as political victories.
Donald Trump is not negotiating with Iran.
He is negotiating with the humiliation of having failed to break it.
Beneath the ceasefires, memoranda, podium theatrics and sanctimonious appeals to ‘stability’ lies a fact Washington cannot admit: the United States entered this confrontation expecting submission and emerged confronting its own limits.
It wanted Iran isolated, disarmed and politically obedient. It wanted its deterrence shattered, its regional influence dismantled and its sovereignty reduced to a flag, an anthem and nothing more.
It failed.
Iran endured the pressure, preserved its strategic leverage and forced the most powerful empire on earth to negotiate with the country it had promised to bring to its knees.
That is not an American victory.
It is the management of an American defeat.
Real diplomacy begins when both sides recognise that the other possesses interests, rights, red lines and power. Trump’s version begins from imperial theology: Washington has interests; Israel has rights; everyone else has obligations.
American coercion is called deterrence. Israeli aggression is called self-defence. Iranian resistance is called escalation.
Sovereignty is sacred when invoked by an American client and intolerable when asserted by an American enemy.
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This is the fraud now being sold as peace in the Gulf: a ceasefire presented as capitulation, an interim agreement marketed as surrender and a renewed campaign of pressure repackaged as de-escalation.
Trump did not win the confrontation. He failed to produce the result he promised. Iran was not bombed into obedience. Its government did not collapse. Its strategic position was not erased. Its enemies discovered, once again, that destruction is not control and military superiority is not political mastery.
For an empire addicted to command, the inability to compel surrender is defeat.
Trump’s response is therefore not to honour the agreement, but to hollow it out. Accept the document. Rewrite its meaning. Violate its logic. Impose new demands. Then accuse Iran of sabotaging peace.
It is diplomacy by battering ram.
The Strait of Hormuz is where this revisionism becomes geography. The attempt to reroute shipping through Omani waters is not a neutral administrative adjustment. It is an effort to strip Iran of the leverage that forced Washington to negotiate at all.
‘Freedom of navigation’ is merely the varnish.
The real demand is that Iran tolerate a hostile military order on its doorstep, surrender its principal strategic pressure point and accept that its sovereignty exists only when it is politically useless.
Iran may possess rights, provided it never exercises them.
It may retain leverage, provided Washington decides when it may be used.
It may remain sovereign, provided it behaves as a subordinate.
This is not peace. It is coercion translated into diplomatic jargon.
The method is familiar: provoke, retaliate, moralise, escalate. Strangle the adversary economically. Threaten it militarily. Exhaust it politically. Then present concessions extracted under duress as the triumph of moderation.
Washington calls this ‘managed escalation’.
The phrase is obscene.
There is nothing managed about pushing an entire region towards catastrophe and congratulating oneself for controlling the speed.
Nor does the strategy stop at Hormuz.
In Lebanon, the American-Israeli project is to transform Israeli security doctrine into Lebanese national destiny: isolate Iran, constrain Hezbollah and call the resulting submission ‘sovereignty’.
In Syria, fragmentation remains useful because a sovereign, territorially coherent state would obstruct the endless manufacture of pressure points. A wounded country is easier to penetrate, divide and punish.
The region is never allowed to heal because its wounds remain profitable.
Different countries. Different instruments. The same imperial objective: reverse the political reality produced by war and reconstruct the appearance of American-Israeli supremacy after its material limits have been exposed.
Israel’s role is not secondary. It is central, relentless and poisonous. Its political machinery in Washington treats any durable Iranian power as an intolerable violation of the regional hierarchy. It does not seek security in any reciprocal sense. It seeks permanent superiority: Iran contained, Lebanon vulnerable, Syria fractured and the Gulf militarised without end.
Restraint may occasionally serve American interests.
Permanent confrontation serves the Israeli project.
Trump is the ideal salesman for this arrangement because his greatest political talent is not victory, but the theatrical conversion of failure into triumph.
He needs a camera, a slogan and a captive press corps. If the battlefield will not produce surrender, the press conference must counterfeit it.
A document is signed.
Trump declares victory.
The media repeats the phrase.
The coercion resumes.
The performance becomes the policy.
But Iran has already achieved what Washington was determined to prevent: it survived, preserved deterrence and forced the empire to confront the limits of its power.
That is a strategic victory.
Not because Iran escaped damage. Not because the confrontation was costless. But because the central American objective – submission – was denied.
Iran did not merely resist an attack. It exposed the distance between imperial spectacle and imperial capacity.
It demonstrated that the United States and Israel can devastate, sanction and threaten, but cannot automatically dictate the political outcome.
That is the defeat Trump is trying to disguise.
Tehran must therefore treat any agreement not as a gift from Washington, but as a battlefield whose terms remain contested. An agreement that binds only Iran while leaving the United States free to reinterpret, pressure and punish is not diplomacy.
It is an ultimatum disguised as diplomacy.
Restraint without reciprocity is not prudence.
It is permission.
Permission to rewrite the terms.
Permission to escalate without cost.
Permission to demand surrender after promising peace.
The central question is not whether Trump can stage another ceremony. It is whether the United States can tear up every agreement that fails to produce obedience.
Peace cannot be built on coerced submission and renamed stability. Victory cannot be manufactured at a podium while the balance of power says otherwise.
Trump wants Iran to surrender the leverage that defeated his strategy so he can announce that he won.
Iran’s task is to deny him the fiction.
To preserve its rights, consolidate its gains and make clear that the empire’s declaration is not reality.
It is merely an empire issuing orders to history – and discovering, once again, that history does not obey.
Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID – https://csidpk.org), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org/), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com/), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE – https://www.theshapeproject.com/).
