The Iranian revolution was born out of the conflict with the “Great Satan.” Imam Khomeini’s approval of taking the American hostages at their country’s embassy in Tehran was akin to blowing up the bridges. The actual first shot of the war was the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983.
Iranian fingerprints were found again, sometimes obscure and sometimes unmistakable, in embassy bombings and hostage-taking. America responded by preventing Iran from defeating Iraq in the bitter war between the two countries, and the American response then escalated when Donald Trump ordered the killing of Quds Force Commander General Qassem Soleimani near Baghdad airport.
Iran has harassed America, but avoided direct war with it, for decades. Trump changed the rules of the game when his aircraft bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities and then returned, alongside Israel, to punish Iran for dragging the negotiations out with obfuscation and quibbles.
Observers recalled all of that yesterday as they watched the men who had flocked to take the Swiss test. They also remembered that Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf is a product of the very machinery that had clashed with America and unsettled the neighbors in the Middle East. Ghalibaf is a former commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ (IRGC) Air Force who made his way through several posts before assuming the speakership of parliament. Abbas Araghchi also volunteered to join the IRGC, during the Iran-Iraq War, before rising through the corridors of diplomacy.
Observers also thought of how JD Vance was born a year after the bombing of the Marine barracks. Jared Kushner was born two years after the birth of Khomeini’s revolution, and Witkoff was a real-estate lawyer when Khomeini returned to Tehran. The negotiations will certainly be thorny, especially if Trump continues to bombard the talks with tweets and threats, and they will be in great need of Pakistani and Qatari mediators.
The files of the Middle East being opened at the Bürgenstock resort does not mean that Swiss winds will blow over those managing the files. Switzerland does not resemble the contemporary Middle East that sleeps on a heavy inheritance of conflicts and hatreds. Switzerland chose neutrality as a path, and reaped the fruits even when the old continent sank into two devastating world wars. Moreover, Switzerland’s model is first and foremost a deep decision to coexist among races, languages, and dialects.
The Switzerland of today was built on accepting the right to difference under the ceiling of the law. Erasure is not permitted, and coups are out of the question. The Swiss Confederation does not produce inspiring presidents who impose their will on the constitution. Nor does its system allow for the birth of factions and militias. The cantons do not tamper with the borders drawn for them, and the final word always belongs to the ballot boxes.
The Middle East is different: crises of existence and borders; maps that sometimes overflow onto their neighbors; a struggle of interests and a struggle of identities; old appetites disguised in new clothes.
The people of the Middle East watch the Swiss meeting from afar. They wondered what made the meeting possible and persuaded the warring parties to sit under a single roof and address one another through proposals instead of drones, and through clauses instead of mines.
Naturally, the question arises: Is it America that changed, or Iran? Or have the two countries discovered the peril of continuing down the path of war? Has the US administration discovered that Iran’s strongest weapon is the capacity for absorbing losses that it built through its long experience with sanctions? Has Washington concluded that toppling the Iranian regime is impossible without a ground war whose losses would be difficult to predict, and that Israel miscalculated when it wagered on the regime’s collapse?
Conversely, did Tehran benefit from Trump's lack of patience, especially after the global economy was hit by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, not to mention the specter of the midterm elections? Did Tehran conclude that the dream of expelling American forces from the Middle East - a dream that has haunted it since the early days of the revolution - is unattainable? The scenario of the “great blow,” which Yahya al-Sinwar drew upon in the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation, did not break Israel’s back; rather, has the conclusion become that the blow has made it twice as aggressive and savage?
Iran probably sensed Trump’s desire not to return to war. It has sought to capitalize on the returns from closing the Strait of Hormuz and so placed a ceasefire on all fronts, including Lebanon, at the top of the memorandum of understanding’s agenda.
Iran’s keenness to begin with the “Lebanese clause” is highly significant. First, it is a message of support to Hezbollah, which launched a war of support for Iran that left mass destruction in the villages of southern Lebanon. The message is that Iran, having lost its “borders” with Israel through Syria, is not about to accept losing its “border” through southern Lebanon. Iran was quick to show how it could use the ceasefire in southern Lebanon as an obligatory passageway for discussing the other clauses, going so far as to announce that it would close the Strait of Hormuz pending the imposition of a ceasefire there.
Netanyahu received the “Lebanese clause” with a degree of astonishment, while avoiding any explicit expression of anger, aware of how difficult it is to control Trump’s reactions. There is nothing surprising in this. Boarding the Trump train is, from the outset, conditional upon accepting his commands grounded in “America First” and “Trump First.”
Partnership in war does not mean partnership in the settlement. When you fight with another’s weapons and ammunition, it is difficult to control when he presses the brakes and to prevent him from ending the journey before reaching the station you had hoped for.
Netanyahu had hoped to break Hezbollah’s back and make its disarmament a binding clause of any settlement, but he found himself facing different American calculations. He bowed before the pressure of the occupant of the White House, perhaps because he was convinced that many other mines would emerge in the negotiations of the coming weeks: mines related to the future “management” of Hormuz, the highly enriched uranium, and frozen Iranian funds. Moreover, the memorandum of understanding did not address Iran’s missile arsenal and its limits, let alone Tehran’s relations with the proxies it has spread across the region, from Lebanon to Yemen, passing through Iraq.
The journey of the Supreme Leader’s and Trump’s representatives will not be easy. The war was long; blood was shed, and billions of dollars were frozen. It is also a battle of image: the image of Iran and the image of the “Great Satan.”
