If so ... good luck with that.
The good news: The US team has finally pushed back against the Iranian regime's Tehran Two-Step. The IRGC keeps demanding a ceasefire in Lebanon as a condition for compliance with the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), but Hezbollah keeps firing missiles into Israel and the IDF. The White House kept pressuring Israel to refrain from responding, but Benjamin Netanyahu absolutely refused to absorb attacks during the negotiations. Donald Trump made it clear yesterday that he'd had enough of Iran's proxy attempting to disrupt his attempts at peace:
Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble. If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!! President DONALD J. TRUMP
J.D. Vance reportedly made it clear in Switzerland that Iran's trash talk would not go unnoticed or unanswered, and that the US will hold Iran responsible for Hezbollah's actions in Lebanon. The Iranians, who had briefly walked away from the table, returned to negotiate somewhat more seriously. Vance later declared that the Iranians had agreed to allow IAEA inspectors to return to Iran and to make a full assessment of their nuclear development sites:
Vice President JD Vance said Iranian officials had agreed to allow nuclear inspectors from the United Nations back into their country, possibly as early as this week, signaling progress on an issue key to bringing the war to a permanent end.
The vice president said Iran’s invite to inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency was a “major milestone” and the first step in “permanently ending a nuclear weapons program in Iran.” He suggested some conversations with inspectors could happen as soon as Monday but he didn’t detail how much access they would have or crucially whether they would be able to visit sites attacked by the U.S. and Israel last year.
As David wrote earlier, the Iranians backed away from that position. Trump then responded again:
Everybody is fully aware that Iran will agree to have Major Weapons Inspections in order to ensure “Nuclear Honesty” long into the future. President DONALD J. TRUMP
If this holds, it is a substantive concession by the Iranians. Just how substantive it would be remains to be seen. The IAEA took part in the JCPOA too, and its involvement didn't prevent the Iranian regime from covertly continuing its push toward a nuclear weapon. The mullahs and the IRGC prevented inspectors from accessing suspected development sites, for instance, and even when evidence of violations emerged, the IAEA's inspection reports resulted in very little effective intervention by an international community unwilling to take steps to enforce terms.
Trump has at least been willing to act. That lends some weight to his threat yesterday, which is likely why the Iranians went back to the table.
That also makes another reported development less understandable. The response to the warning over Hezbollah has been to create a new "deconfliction mechanism" in Lebanon, the WSJ goes on to report, but the November 2024 ceasefire to which Hezbollah agreed already had such a mechanism to prevent violations by all sides:
Negotiators, he said, had agreed to a mechanism to avoid a new escalation in Lebanon, where fighting between Israel and Hezbollah flared up in recent days, threatening to derail the nascent truce between Iran and the U.S. The first clause of the document to end the fighting and open the strait insists on an end to the fighting in Lebanon as a precondition.
The vice president said a so-called deconfliction system brokered by Pakistan and Qatar was designed to ensure Hezbollah no longer attacks Israel—strikes to which he said Israel had felt compelled to respond—by ensuring all sides were engaging with each other. He said he had told Iran to curb its militant proxy but had also been in constant contact with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Emirati and Saudi leaderships.
The Times of Israel notices something strange about the new deconfliction mechanism, at least based on Channel 12's sources:
A new deconfliction mechanism for Lebanon established as part of the weekend negotiations between the US and Iran in Switzerland would exclude Israel and limit Israeli military action to only responding to “imminent threats,” rather than to the broader category of “emerging threats,” Channel 12 reports, without citing sources. ...
According to Channel 12, the new arrangement would mark a significant departure from that earlier framework. While the original monitoring mechanism included representatives from Israel, Lebanon, the United States, the United Nations and France, the network claims that the new oversight body includes the US, Iran, Lebanon, Qatar and Pakistan — but not Israel.
That would appear to contradict Vance’s own public statements that Israel would be part of the conversation, and the IDF would almost certainly have to be looped in regardless.
Additionally, while the 2024 mechanism effectively gave Israel broad freedom to act in Lebanon against military threats, including what were defined as “emerging threats,” the new framework reportedly only allows for responses to “imminent threats.”
The White House has been pressuring Israel to at least scale back its responses to Hezbollah. They clearly do not want attacks in Beirut, and probably want Israel to limit its attacks to the sub-Litani region, where Hezbollah is already excluded by a 2006 UN Security Council resolution (1701). Netanyahu wants to fight Hezbollah on a full-scale level as long as the Iranian proxies continue to fire missiles into northern Israel, including the command assets in Beirut.
Netanyahu contradicted this report:
Shortly after the report is aired, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issues a Hebrew-language statement stressing that Israeli troops in southern Lebanon have “full freedom of action” against “direct or emerging threats” against them.
“The directive that the defense minister and I have given the IDF is clear and has not changed: Our forces in southern Lebanon have full freedom of action to thwart any direct or emerging threat against them or against residents of northern Israel. The IDF faces no restrictions in this regard,” Netanyahu says.
That does seem to hint that the IDF will not conduct any operations in Beirut. Hezbollah can't directly threaten Israel from that city; the strikes conducted by the IDF have targeted command and financing assets.
It also offers good reason to be skeptical about the existence of an agreement on "deconfliction" that cuts Israel out of the loop. First, the point of deconfliction is to coordinate between the hostile parties to avoid potential clashes. That necessarily has to involve Israel. Second, why would Israel cooperate in a deconfliction mechanism to which it has not agreed and to which it wasn't even a party in constructing? There's no better way to ensure failure in this instance than to dictate terms to Israel while Iran's main terror proxy launches missiles at its civilian population centers. This MOU has many issues already. There is no point in adding more potential failure points to it.
And that's likely the bottom line in all of this. We can wring our hands forever on the terms of the MOU, but the likeliest outcome by far is that the MOU will collapse under its own contradictions. The White House seems to be coming to that conclusion already, which is why Trump got much more pugnacious in messaging to the Iranians and explicitly held the regime responsible for Hezbollah's actions. This may just be a sixty-day exercise in demonstrable futility for our partners in the Persian Gulf, at the end of which we will have to return to enforcement via kinetic military action again. The Iranian regime knows how to stall, but Trump at least has a deadline that he can enforce if he chooses.
Editor's Note: For decades, former presidents have been all talk and no action. Now, Donald Trump is eliminating the threat from Iran once and for all.
Help us report the truth about the Trump administration's decisive actions to keep Americans safe and bring peace to the world. Join HotAir VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your VIP membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member