Fifty Iranian oil tankers loaded with millions of barrels of oil are unable to leave Iranian territorial waters in the Gulf. Dozens of Iranian tankers are lined up on the open sea off the coasts of India and Sri Lanka, finding no port to receive them and unable to return, because of the tightened American blockade. Iranian civil aviation has halted entirely, since it can find no airport willing to provide ground services to its aircraft as a result of the sanctions. And the secondary sanctions imposed by the US Treasury have stopped transfers of Iranian funds through banks and through money transfer companies alike.
The upshot is a rocketing rise in inflation beyond 300 percent, a vertical collapse in the toman's exchange rate, the disappearance of many goods, and mounting destitution- while the Revolutionary Guard's avenues for obtaining products essential to its military industry narrow.
These targeted sanctions have stripped Tehran of what it counted as cards of strength. The oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz is back to what it was before the Iranian thuggery against the strait aimed at pressuring the global economy. And the continuing "Dawn of Yemen" war, to free Yemen from the sin of the Iranian militias, has ended Houthi and Iranian control of the Bab al-Mandab strait once and for all. So what is left to the heads who tyrannize the peoples of Iran and have made the peoples of our region taste calamity? They do not concede defeat, and they count the tragedies they have caused their country and their people as collateral losses set against the survival of their regime and of themselves. Nor do they concede the defeat of their expansionist project between the Caspian and the Mediterranean, and they will not be slow to move- directly or through what remains of the proxies- to try to break the blockade. Their wager is on wide-ranging attacks in the region and beyond, in the illusion of imposing facts that would change the present equation and make it easier to conclude a winning deal with America.
In parallel, deep America cannot accept the freezing of the present situation with Iran, nor the continuation of the thuggery against the straits and the corridors that affect the global economy. Here the US Central Command's call for the highest state of war readiness was striking. The call followed the movement of a third aircraft carrier to the region along with an additional Marine force of twenty thousand, and the deployment of three thousand American troops in Israel. These are accumulating indicators that a settled view has taken hold: either a decisive deal that zeroes out the nuclear file, the ballistic file, and the "arms" in exchange for leaving the regime to its fate with Iranians, or wide-ranging military operations that will not be long in coming. Moscow's mediation may be the most prominent card for concluding such a deal. Failing that, Tehran would do well to read closely the implications of the agreement between the American and Russian presidents, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, to pump millions of barrels of Russian diesel, and its effect on the Iranian regime's wagers on the consequences of rising energy prices.
At the same time, the Israeli hand is on the trigger, whether for effective participation in an expected war on Iran with a high-value target bank, or to "complete the mission" in Lebanon. It is enough here to pause at Israeli signals, adopted by Hezbollah, about the party restoring its position and recovering its capabilities- signals pumped out to provide an advance justification for proceeding with destruction and displacement and for pushing the yellow line hard north of the Litani. These signals are reinforced by wooden speeches from Naim Qassem and his colleagues, among them that the liberation of the south is before our eyes, and that the solution begins with the enemy leaving humiliated- that is, defeated- and with him the American who supports him with all his power.
For all of this, it is not unlikely that Tel Aviv will widen the circle of military operations it is already conducting, among its most prominent justifications being its claim that the Lebanese authorities have not carried out what the trilateral framework agreement obliged them to do by way of moving to disarm the illegitimate weapons.
From all the foregoing, the question is no longer whether wide war will return; what is certain is the impossibility of things remaining as they are. And perhaps the most dangerous thing for Lebanon is that Hezbollah, responsible for stripping bare the built fabric of the occupied south and uprooting its people, who now face open-ended displacement, is indifferent to the catastrophe of the people of the south and gives no weight to the interests of Lebanon and its people. Here is MP Ali Ammar declaring that we will not leave Iran alone, while his colleague Mohammad Raad makes light of the appalling defeat Israel inflicted on Lebanon, seeing the losses as the result of a partial tactical flaw. These are positions that reveal their holders' inability to admit the reality of defeat, and the fact that a renewal of war will bring the country to a wider occupation, more death and destruction, and displacement upon displacement. The proof is what the mouthpieces promote: let Israel occupy a hundred villages, since what matters is that the resistance remains, remains and continues.
There is no use in any attempt to deny the facts or to leap over them. Some twenty months ago Presidents Joseph Aoun and Nawaf Salam came to power with a clear agenda: disarming the illegitimate weapons, and reform (that is a subject for another day). Disarmament was enshrined in the 2024 agreement, when Hezbollah, under the weight of defeat, submitted to the principle of stripping legitimacy from its weapons and disarming them throughout Lebanon, not in the south alone. This is a reality whose elements are not altered by wooden speeches about clinging to illegitimate weapons that failed to protect those who carried them, or about a resistance that brought the occupation back.
Over those twenty months, historic decisions were taken to extend sovereignty, but they were not implemented as they should have been, so that the decision of war and peace remained in the hands of two parties, Israel and Iran. This reality no longer admits of cleverness or sharp practice, or of the marking time that has compounded the losses. The only road that spares Lebanon further calamity, and avoids squandering an opportunity that will not come again to recover the national state, is initiative on the ground, resting on the equation the framework agreement established: land in exchange for weapons.
