Did Trump Just Make Iran Great Again?

The 10-Point Plan Is a Momentous Triumph for the Islamic Republic

I awoke this morning with trepidation. Had Trump tried to follow through with his unhinged threats to “bomb Iran back to the Stone Age” and ensure that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again”—or had he even significantly escalated his terrorist bombings of Iranian infrastructure—things might have gotten seriously crazy, as in “way beyond Cuban Missile Crisis crazy, way beyond drunken Nixon having his nuclear codes taken away crazy, way beyond Great Depression crazy.”

Unlike North Americans, I went to bed here in Morocco before Trump’s 8 pm Eastern deadline expired. 8 pm Eastern is 1 a.m. Morocco time, and I didn’t feel like staying up late just to find out whether the world had ended.

When I awoke, it seemed like a nice Mediterranean spring morning. The birds were singing, celebrating the T-shirt weather and faintly redolent sea breeze. I ascended to the rooftop terrace, turned on the radio, watered the plants, and exercised while listening to مغربيات العالم (Moroccan Women of the World). It celebrates women who, like my wife, have pursued their dreams abroad, often returning to their home country after raising families, earning advanced degrees, or building successful business or professional practices, in Europe, North America, China, Australia, or the Middle East.

The interviewee was a Rabat woman who had moved with family members to Dubai to start a business. Given the lighthearted, optimistic way she was talking about Dubai, it didn’t sound like the Iranian military had just basically scrubbed it from the face of the Earth…which is what would have happened if Trump had mounted his apocalyptic attack on Iran’s infrastructure. (Dubai without desalinization plants is not a place where anybody but a few camel-herders and fishermen could live.)

Given that the world in general, and the Middle East in particular, apparently still existed, I grew guardedly optimistic. After finishing my rounds of push-ups, pull-ups, high-kicks, stretches, and other routines I learned from a Chinese martial arts teacher in San Francisco 40 years ago, I descended the stairs to the kitchen, brewed a pot of green tea, and opened my laptop to find out just what in tarnation had happened to Trump’s apocalyptic 8 pm deadline.

The superficially good news, for Trump, was that Iran had accepted a two-week ceasefire and agreed to open the Strait of Hormuz. The much better news, for Iran, was that Trump only got his ceasefire by accepting Iran’s 10-point plan as the basis of negotiations. What’s more, Iran will retain control of the Strait, in tandem with its tag-team partner Oman, even while “opening” it and charging a toll.

In other words, Trump has for all intents and purposes surrendered. I doubt that any power in history that enjoyed a 100-to-1 military spending advantage over its enemy has ever been this thoroughly humiliated.

Let’s go down the list of Trump’s stated goals for launching his war of aggression, and how he fared.

*Goal #1: Regime change, i.e. overthrowing the Islamic Republic and inserting a US puppet, namely Bignose Baby Shah, on the Peacock Throne in Tehran. That project has failed spectacularly, as everyone who knows anything about Iran always knew it would. Trump has claimed success—he murdered a genial 86-year-old anti-nuclear-weapons-fatwa-issuing cancer patient, whose much harder-line son is the new Supreme Leader. From a ZioAmerican perspective, replacing Khamenei with Khamenei is regime change in the wrong direction.

But it gets worse (for the ZioAmericans) and better (for the Iranians). The real ZioAmerican goal was the destruction of the Islamic Republic. But by waging such a ham-handed, transparently evil war of aggression, Trump incentivized the Iranian people to rally around their fully-sovereign Islamic Republic, which they have done in utterly spectacular fashion. Millions of Iranians have been cheering their leadership and soldiers every night in the streets of Tehran and other cities. Last night they formed gigantic human chains to protect the infrastructure that Trump was threatening to nuke. The upshot of this war, which started with the murder of 160 children at the girls’ school in Minab, is that the Islamic Republic is emerging with its legitimacy, which was never really in question, pumped up on steroids and ready to continue triumphing over whatever challenges come its way for decades if not centuries.

*Goal #2: Eliminate Iran’s nuclear program. This, too, has failed spectacularly. The botched raid on Isfahan was the last straw. Obviously there is no military solution to this issue, or any other issue involving Iran. Trump will have to return to negotiations, and he will have to accept a deal that he could have gotten without the war. In fact, he will probably have to settle for less. Since Iran doesn’t want or need nuclear weapons anyway, assuming other security alternatives exist, whatever “concessions” Iran makes on the nuclear issue will be pure window-dressing. In any case, Iran’s 10-point-plan, now the basis of negotiations, enshrines Iran’s right to nuclear enrichment. Trump will be lucky to walk away with anything as good as Obama got in the original JCPOA.

*Goal #3: Eliminate Iran’s missiles and drones. Here again, Trump’s war backfired outrageously. Rather than eliminating Iran’s missile force, the war proved its efficacy. We now know for certain (as knowledgable observers strongly suspected) that Iran’s offensive missiles can penetrate and outlast US and Israeli defenses. Iran’s ability to win an asymmetric war by exercising escalation dominance, if necessary all the way up to the “nuclear option” of imploding the world economy and rendering the Gulf region (and perhaps Israel) uninhabitable, has been demonstrated and proven. It’s no longer theoretical—it’s a done deal. All those tens of thousands of missiles and drones buried deep beneath Iranian mountains are untouchable and invincible. By forcing Iran to prove its capabilities, Trump inadvertently made Iran a much stronger military power than it was when those capabilities remained somewhat theoretical.

Goal #4: Eliminate all of Iran’s friends and allies in the region, including Hezbollah, Ansarullah (the Houthis), the Palestinian Resistance, and pro-Iran militias in Iraq. Another monumental failure: Every one of those groups is stronger now than it was before Trump’s war. Hezbollah was forced to prove that it is still as strong as ever—and it has, bogging Israel down near Lebanon’s southern border, raining down missiles on Occupied Palestine, and giving the lie to the ridiculous myth that terrorist attacks with explosive consumer electronics can somehow defeat a broadly-based resistance movement. Meanwhile the Houthis are squatting by the Red Sea ready to shut it down at a moment’s notice—another wing of the Axis of Resistance’s “nuclear option”—cementing their power and legitimacy as well as their ties with Iran. And Iraq is moving to finally kick the American occupation army out, more than six years after Iraq’s parliament voted, in January 2020, to expel all US forces. By forcing the Resistance Axis to flex and use its muscles, Trump not only failed to eliminate it, he greatly strengthened it.

Goal #5: Annihilate Iran’s navy and control its waters. Here again, it is difficult to do justice to just how outrageously Trump has not just failed, but moved things in the exact opposite direction from his intended one. Iran’s power to control nearby waters, and the crucially important commercial arteries they host, has gone from theoretical to real, thanks to the war. Prior to the war, Iran faced difficulties moving its oil, which was sanctioned and obstructed by the US, while oil from Iran’s US-occupied Gulf state opponents flowed freely. Trump’s war forced Iran to seize control of the Persian Gulf. That is now a done deal. The Gulf is now and forever an Iranian lake. The US has already been forced to de-sanction Iranian oil. It is the Gulf states’ oil and gas that was blocked, and they will now have to pay a toll.

Iran’s navy, like its missiles, is an asymmetrical force buried deep in tunnels under mountains. It consists of thousands of speedboats capable of laying mines or attacking commercial or military targets. Trump not only failed to destroy it, he barely even scratched it. But more importantly, Trump demonstrated that the US Navy could not take control of the Gulf. Nor can US military power in general provide security to the region and its monumentally important energy infrastructure. This is a US naval defeat of epic proportions. Like the Suez crisis, which proved that Britannia and its friends no longer ruled the waves, Trump’s loss to Iran will go down in history as the death knell of American global naval power.

Goal #6: Destroy Iran for Netanyahu. This was, in fact, the real goal of the war. Nobody who knew anything about Iran or West Asia or geopolitics ever thought any of the first five goals were achievable. Netanyahu, and his acolytes who surround Trump, conjured up visions of impossible victories as an excuse to lure Trump into the Iranian quagmire. Their hope was that they could keep Operation Quagmire going long enough to do exactly what Trump was threatening yesterday: Bomb Iran back to the Stone Age. The Israelis apparently thought that if things got really apocalyptic, with the whole region laid waste and the global economy imploded, “Greater Israel” could accelerate its genocide of Palestine, and its theft of its neighbors’ land, and emerge as a regional hegemon. Blowing up the al-Aqsa mosque to “rebuild” a blood sacrifice temple, leading to the coming of the Jewish Messiah (the Antichrist for the rest of us) would be a nice bonus.

Trump’s ceasefire, based on Iran’s 10-point plan imposing the terms of its victory, is a huge setback for Netanyahu and his Project Antichrist. That is why, as Caitlin Johnstone observed:

For what it’s worth, Zionist Twitter is in absolute meltdown right now, with notorious Israel apologists like Laura Loomer, Eve Barlow and Eli David rending their garments in outrage that the killing has ended with Iran positioned as it is. I’m as skeptical about this ceasefire as anyone, but the fact that the world’s worst people are in meltdown about it right now does provide a faint glimmer of hope.

It’s actually more than a faint glimmer, Caitlin. Iran is in a very strong position. The agreement to negotiate Iran’s ten-point-plan moves the goal to the Iranian side of the field: The only issue under discussion is not who wins, but how many goals Iran scores. And while it’s always possible that the partisans of Operation Antichrist will find a way to wriggle out of this and resume their attempts to blow up the region and with it the global economy, a two-week pause in the trip up the escalation ladder will make that less likely. Crucially, Trump has completely abandoned his ridiculous demands for what amounted to an Iranian surrender. Instead, he has accepted Iranian demands for a US surrender as the framework for negotiations. Given that this is existential for Iran, but not for the US, the only ways out of this war have always been a simple, binary pair: Apocalypse or Iranian victory. The best terms the US could ever hope to get amounted to a couple of fig leaves to make the inevitable Iranian win less humiliating. Trump has played his cards badly, so isn’t going to be offered many fig leaves.

One crucial though intangible outcome of this war will be its effect on the warring parties’ international prestige, a crucial component of soft power. Here, too, Iran and its friends seem poised for a crushing victory. By launching such a stupid, counterproductive, blatantly illegal war, and compounding his mistake by incessantly blathering like a criminally insane inmate of a lunatic asylum, Trump has taken the USA down several notches in the eyes of the world. Even the Euro-poodles, who normally roll over for anything the US does no matter how stupid, had no interest in buying Captain Trump’s specially-discounted post-iceberg-strike tickets on the Titanic.

Iran’s leadership, by contrast, emerges from the war with enhanced gravitas: They appear serious, reasonable-but-firm, strategically savvy, committed to defending their country, and last but not least, extremely courageous. The contrast with the likes of Trump and Hegseth and Netanyahu could not be starker. In the aftermath of this war between civilization and barbarism, it will be impossible for the world to ignore who are really the adults in the room, and who are the spoiled, stupid children. Given Iran’s high-class leadership and control over Gulf energy, the whole world is going to be wanting to “go to Tehran,” as the Leveretts—America’s most prescient Iran experts—vainly advised US leaders to do more than a decade ago.

Why is Iran’s leadership so spectacularly good, especially compared to the competition? The secular Jewish-born French sociologist Emmanuel Todd doesn’t like Iran’s theocracy, perhaps because he doesn’t really understand it. But Todd does understand that societies are always based on widely-shared religious values, and that much of the world today, starting with the West, is collapsing into nihilism due to the widespread loss of religion. Islamic Iran, which faces the same challenges as other modern nations involving modern lifestyles and technologies undermining religion and reinforcing nihilism, is blessed with sophisticated, religiously-literate leadership committed to warding off nihilism and maintaining the shared values that make social life possible. In this, Iran will likely become a model for other nations, beginning with Muslim-majority ones, and perhaps extending even to Christian polities. Russia, for example, might want to consider becoming a Christian Republic with someone like Tikhon Shevkunov as its supreme religious leader exercising a degree of guardianship over the state apparatus.

So by waging a foolish war on Iran that has blown up in his face, Trump may have “made Iran great again” by re-infusing that blessed nation with the same kind of Islamic Republican energy that erupted in 1979 and was cemented by the Imposed War of the 1980s. And not only has Trump set Iran on a pedestal and highlighted its greatness, he has also positioned it to emerge as a model and inspiration for the whole Islamic world, and beyond.

Trump, and behind him Project Antichrist, plotted against Iran…and failed. As the Qur’an says, “They plot, and God plans, and God is the best of planners.”