Is this the end of the Iran war?

The US says a deal is close. Iran wants sanctions relief. Israel isn't convinced. So is the Iran war actually ending, or are we just entering a new phase?

This week, Professor Clionadh Raleigh and Bron Mills unpack the latest ceasefire negotiations, why Pakistan has become a key diplomatic player, what reopening the Strait of Hormuz really means, and why peace agreements can be far more fragile than they appear.

They also discuss the latest tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan, why some conflicts never really end, and the World Cup moments everyone is talking about, from Scotland's historic win to the DRC fans stealing the show. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

A peace agreement that includes the actions of several countries that were not included in the peace agreement is not a great agreement.

SPEAKER_01 0:06

What would you say that's like? Is it like saying, okay, yeah, your mother-in-law can come to the wedding if she behaves? She behaves herself. Yeah. Even though she's never behaved herself before.

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Conflicts of interest brought to you by ACLED.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Conflicts of Interest. My name is Clean O'Reilly, and I'm here with the lovely Braun.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Good morning. Morning, or afternoon, where I am. You're still in the States, of course. I'm in cloudy Warwickshire still.

SPEAKER_02 0:39

Not cloudy Florida, but you know, other than like Florida in a bit.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

I can imagine. I can imagine. So loads to catch up on because it's been quite a busy week. Doesn't feel like anything's happened that's going to have that much of a worldwide impact. But certainly things are shifting. So the first thing I want to ask you today is is this the end of the Iran war?

SPEAKER_02 1:04

Ooh, well, it's the end of this phase. I mean, let's take it from again all the perspectives that I think is useful to view it from. From the US, they just want this over with, right? They want to draw a line under this. Trump has gotten tired of the inconsistencies, I would say, in the result. This was what everybody feared, that it would end because he was bored rather than it being final. So I think that's a travesty, right? This deal that is supposedly going to be signed today seems to include everything for everybody, especially on the Iranian and US side, which can't possibly be true. So we'll see exactly what components actually matter as time goes on. But because Fox News is on constantly in this house, I saw JD Vance saying, well, you know, they're not going to get all this money that we promised in the deal. So Iran is not going to get the sanctions relief plus billions upon billions of dollars unless they do these things like open up the strait, demine the strait, then apparently let somebody in to get rid of what they were calling nuclear dust. I was like, a lot of this is kind of wishful thinking on the part of especially the US. To the US, they're happy to just be able to say, look, we've solved this issue. They have not solved it. But to Iran, they're delighted. Again, we've said this on the podcast before, they need money. They need it to be freed up immediately. And they are willing to go along with the bars for as long as necessary to get it. One person was commenting, I think a few weeks ago, that there's not supposed to be any sort of fines to go through or passage costs to go through the strait. But what it might look like is now new environmental fees that will be levied by both Iran and Oman in order to get people through. So that's something to watch, right? Whether or not the passage is in fact free. If you're Israel, this is a bad moment. I would say one of the lowest moments of the entire conflict, starting from last year around this part, when they did that very, very incisive 12-day attack on Iran. It's the lowest point because they really have lost the kind of closeness with both the US administration, Trump himself, the US public. And I think they still have mounting problems around what to do with Iran and what to do with Lebanon, and we'll separate what to do with Gaza. But they certainly need to both build up the argument as to how an emboldened Iran is going to be operating within the Gulf and how to stop that. One option, of course, is to ally much more closely with the Gulf states. People have been very quiet about whether or not this deal signed potentially today is going to actually include the rapprochement or the kind of easing of ties with Israel on the part of the Gulf states. One of the big problems with a lot of these agreements is that they include actions about how other countries need to operate, which those other countries neither have agreed to or have been involved in, right? So a lot of this issue includes how the Gulf states are supposed to act, how Israel's supposed to act, how the other states lining the strait are supposed to act, none of whom have been, let's just say, formally brought into this process. I'd be extremely worried about any of those countries, including Iran, because I wouldn't actually trust the paper that this is written on for anything over the immediate term.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

But again, if they're waiting for that financial bit, and that is the kind of main priority for them, because it's interesting with the lines around reopening the strait and sorting out the nuclear weapons, the claims before we were going into this were that they wiped out the nuclear program the US did in the strikes last summer. And correct me if I'm wrong, but the strait was open before this started.

SPEAKER_02 4:56

Yeah, the strait was open and there was zero problems with it. So if anything, this whole conflict has really transitioned Iran into a much stronger position than they had before. They have now the ability to choke the strait in a way that has obviously impacted global economic functioning to a strong degree. They have asserted that they can withstand quite a barrage of attacks. Neither their military program nor their missile program is as degraded as people thought. Their proxies certainly have been degraded. So Hezbollah, Hamas, and of course the Iraqi militias, and to some extent the Houthis. I wouldn't say that they're more degraded now than they were before this conflict started, and they can be resuscitated. Each of them still remains. They've come out great. Yeah, really great, which is an absolute travesty, both for Iranian citizens, the region, and I would say the world, because of the inconsistencies in how this conflict was fought and delivered.

SPEAKER_01 5:58

Yeah. Because if you start something and then I have a response and a reaction, and then in order to stop it, it's the reaction that that I'm saying I'll go back on. The pre-existing situation remains.

SPEAKER_02 6:10

Yeah, it's it certainly remains. It remains, and it's also like I said, in their favor. So one of the things I find really surprising is how much information around missiles. I mean, if you read some sort of uh press on this, if you read some sort of media on this, it will tell you that Iran's military capabilities, and in particular its missile and drone and uh nuclear capabilities, have been slightly affected, not very affected. But for some reason, in fact, I was just speaking to somebody yesterday who said, Oh, well, you know, the US ran out of missiles. And I was like, what absolute nonsense, right? But that's the kind of rhetoric that people are promoting in part because I think the disinformation campaign on both ends was very good. Like the US did not retreat because it ran out of missiles, right? It retreated because it didn't know what to do about the ways in which it was intended to carry on for this conflict. If you remember, many weeks ago we were saying, is there a ground troops situation here? Is there an occupation of some of these islands and the strait? Is there a way in which they're going to be wiping out all of the IRGCs if they can? And none of that happened in part because it required a greater degree of commitment than I think the Trump administration is willing to put into almost any conflict unless it is like that, right? Unless it is snapping fingers, things have changed, he's managed to retain his attention towards this, and so now we can move on.

SPEAKER_01 7:37

Yeah. And at the same time as we were basically brainstorming potential options that he had, we were also saying he was learning hard and fast that this is not Venezuela. And so when he was talking about no forever wars, and lots of people are remembering those statements that they're arguing one in the presidency, which was, you know, we don't want to be in wars with anyone, we're gonna step away from war altogether. The forever war notion is just about the length of it because he has been pretty active overseas since that.

SPEAKER_02 8:06

Yeah. Well, okay, I'll put it this way, right? When you get to the position of ultimate authority, ultimate executive authority over a military power, right? And especially the US, all the decisions you get are difficult ones. They're not like, oh yeah, I can't feel like doing that, so let's do it, right? They're not supposed to be kind of off the cuff versions. And they can be bold, but they have to be backed with the power of the state. And Trump does not make decisions like that. He doesn't like making difficult decisions. He likes making quick, fast, and impactful decisions, which somebody in his position doesn't get to make. All those easy ones have been made up and down the chain, even in an administration that's as centralized as he is. What he also didn't understand, and what I think many people kind of don't understand, is that the list of those conflicts that he claims to have resolved in some way, all of those are conflicts that shape shift according to the political moment, right? So they don't end. You know my take on this, Bron, almost no conflicts end. They just simply evolve to be able to get the parties through the next political moment, and then they will take on the shape that is necessary for them to survive. And Iran, quite literally the exemplar of this type of policy, and they bested him. And I don't think that they would have gotten so far with the states had it not been for Trump and his inconsistent attention span, because of course both Rubio and J.B. Vance were like, this is what happens here. This is what's going to happen if we jump into this conflict. And Trump ignored them. And it's interesting because, of course, many people think that they were ignored because of the influence of Israel, but Israel is literally the best people at dealing with these shape-shifting conflicts. All of the conflicts they deal with are like this, right? Every one of them has never ended but taken on a new or potentially delayed next steps because of the region they're in and also the complicated politics that this involves. So if we want to learn anything from this, it is how Israel has both engaged in this conflict and how they have gotten around these types of conflicts in their relatively short past to learn about how to deal with things in the future.

SPEAKER_01 10:15

And when you say this is why we talk about phases quite a lot, isn't it? That's a word you use quite often because it's like this is the latest phase, but they're not going to be best friends tomorrow. That's not going to be the end of this. I've seen a lot of conversation over the last couple of days about how the Russia-Ukraine situation might be brought to an end because I think it's just past the same length of time as World War I. And so the question is, can that go on forever?

SPEAKER_02 10:37

Well, it's interesting you said that because Putin has kind of missed one of the greatest opportunities for a ceasefire that was available to him in the last weeks, right? And there's all sorts of suggestions that Ukraine has been on a bit of a high note recently in the sense that they're able to really take the fight to Putin. It may be that he doesn't want to negotiate on the back foot, which he currently is on. It's also the summer, so it's a little bit easier, I think, for there to be a seasonal effect that maybe he's hoping will diminish. Maybe he's also hoping that now that Trump has decided to wash his hands of Iran this time, that he can get in there and kind of influence how much support the US is still willing to offer Ukraine. Of course, there was a headline yesterday that the US is going to really lessen it the air support that they offer NATO. So again, there's a lot of variables here that they're hoping will come out in their favor. But I mean, it's the exact same thing we were just saying. This conflict's shape-shifting will continue. Ukraine has shapeshifted much less than the Iranian conflict has with all of its various actors. But it's still active in that way. It still can change and continue.

SPEAKER_01 11:47

So another shapeshifter then for you, with Pakistan and Afghanistan and the border over the last couple of weeks, obviously that the claims around it being a response to some militia activity and so on and so on, and then quite different reports about who was being targeted and why. There's also a conversation about whether that's going to sort of escalate beyond what we're seeing at the moment again.

SPEAKER_02 12:11

I mean, there's no reason to presume that what's happening in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, those regions, is either placated or kind of playing off each other's. I know that Pearl has written in the past some very excellent pieces about what's happening in the region. You know, what the foreign policy of the Taliban is is beyond me, right? Other than let's just try to get along. The story that I saw about the Taliban this week is how they had to give up their phones because too many people were conducting governance over WhatsApp, which, you know, I guess there must be some way for them to communicate with each other. One of the best things I've ever read was from somebody at USIP, really fantastic piece about Afghanistan. And it was about how the members of the Taliban who took control of Kabul and then the country in 2021, the members of that Taliban had no idea how to govern, right? They did no idea about how to make sure the schools ran or the roads were fixed because their experience was solely with insurgency. And so you had these guys who were like sometimes even illiterate, who were now in charge of the, I don't know, the Ministry of Health. And it's not a great way to run the place, right? As we've learned through many insurgencies across, especially the African continent, to put those people into power. But this inconsistency or this kind of roiling conflict is something that they are very familiar with, right? They know exactly how to fight an insurgency. And so the idea that they would not continue that with Pakistan, who has been an, you know, partially their benefactor, partially their enemy, partially their overseer, partially their patron, like that's a relationship that still requires a form. But the region itself is one whereby Pakistan's government also has several agendas, some of which are even contradictory. And their engagement with the Taliban, and particularly, you know, the TTP and others are extremely fluid. We're talking about shapeshifting conflicts in terms of the Middle East. It's really almost nothing compared to the shape-shifting that goes on that particular border region, but also between those countries. And then I bring India in because, of course, Pakistan's main enemy is always the Indian government and the Indian state. And so I would expect that conserge at any time. That's a very, again, fluid situation.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

All the while, Pakistan are also facilitating the talks to get this deal over the line.

SPEAKER_02 14:39

Yeah, that would have been, of course, at Saudi's behest too. So I'm sure this will be seen as a success because it resulted in something being signed. But we've talked before about the kind of inconsistency or the meaninglessness of ceasefires. And I would say, again, I'll just reiterate, a peace agreement that includes the actions of several countries that were not included in the peace agreement is not a great agreement. Because it doesn't have agreement. I think that's mainly it.

SPEAKER_01 15:07

What would you say that's like? Is it like is it like saying, okay, yeah, your mother-in-law can come to the wedding if she behaves?

SPEAKER_02 15:14

She behaves herself.

SPEAKER_01 15:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:15

Even though she's never behaved herself before. Actually, I'm not saying that about my own mother-in-law, who's in fact being very kind at the moment and taking care of the children. So there's two levels. One is there's the surface level of if you're a Gulf state and you have good relationships with the states at the moment, but that relationship is contingent upon looking like you are willing to play bowl outside, like the facade of it, then you're like, obviously, this isn't done. This is not our first rodeo. We know exactly what's going to happen here, which is that there'll be another round of conflict, which may or may not include the US, right? That's maybe the most important thing, which is that if you're Israel, you obviously cannot let this situation stand. You may be able to let it rest at the moment while you focus on Lebanon, but you cannot let this situation stand. So that's one thing. But you're also on the back foot because of this very obvious public perception that you've misread the situation or that you went too far. If you're the Gulf states, you're hoping to resuscitate any sort of economic prowess that you had previous to the conflict. And so the straight opening up is certainly a positive version of that, but it's a low bar, right? You are more insecure now than you've ever been. And Iran is now stronger than it's ever been in your region. So you've got new problems and they are significant. So, in terms of like we'll act like this is fine for now, but it's really caused us more problems than anything else. I would imagine everybody is upset about this.

SPEAKER_01 16:40

Yeah. And again, the one bit that I'm not going to be able to get over is nobody can say, what a relief. The deal includes reopening the strait when the strait was open before.

SPEAKER_02 16:50

Yeah, yeah. Relief is not the primary emotion that I would imagine everybody's feeling.

SPEAKER_01 16:56

No. I wanted to end on a happy note because have you seen, and if not, I will send you the footage of the DRC fans at the World Cup.

SPEAKER_02 17:06

No, in fact, I've not watched the World Cup at all. That is Ezra's and Sam's area, right? So, but Ezra has been giving me blow-by-blow interpretations of what's going on, especially the South African Mexico match, which I heard was quite the red card fiasco.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

Yeah, it seemed he was just it was pretty trigger happy with the red card from what I read. But again, with any event like this, the football isn't my thing. I'm well, it's rugby or nothing, thank you. But the stuff that's going on beyond it, like opening ceremony, Shakira, I'm in. All right, good. Then Scotland won their first game that they've ever won in a world competition. My grand. So but it was against Haiti, which feels mean because they haven't been able to host a home game in I don't even know how long. Yeah, good point. Then, yeah, there was the red card fiasco with the Mexico thing, but it's the DRC fans that are selling it for me. Very good. It's beyond the football is is where I'm happy.

SPEAKER_02 18:03

I remember the Vizula, is that what they were called? Those awful sounds. Those, those like is it a VUV, yeah, yeah. Vuv Vizela. Oh, they were the worst. And they were from the South African World Cup, right? So I'm always up for an engaging kind of spectacle, right? And so I'll check out the DRC fans, I'll watch some matches. We always try to watch the African matches, but I bring up the uh the horn thing because it made it impossible sometimes to watch the South Africans because I was like a bloody sound. But I think I may have told you this before, but when Ezra was young and a little bit more impressionable than now, he'd be like, Well, where's Ireland? And I said, They're too good. It's so embarrassing for the other teams to be playing Ireland that sometimes they don't make it into the World Cup or the Euros because, you know, the competition's over as soon as they start playing. And he was like, right. And I was like, yeah, we're just too great of a team. I love that. I love I never got that song about Wales. Yeah, I mean, I just openly lie to him about Ireland's prospects in all international competitions.

SPEAKER_01 19:04

Probably for the best.

SPEAKER_02 19:05

He's on to me though, at this point. I'm glad to hear it out. He was like, he was like, Daddy, did Daddy said that wasn't true. Well, it was uh it was a delight, a meandering chat, no doubt, but a a delight to speak with you, as always.

SPEAKER_01 19:17

Yeah, you too. Same again next week. Yes, I'll see you next week. Bye bye bye.

SPEAKER_00 19:22

You've been listening to Conflicts of Interest with Professor Cleaner Raleigh, brought to you by ACLE, the world's leading source of political violence and protest data. Subscribe so you never miss an episode, and follow us on socials for updates in the meantime.