MbS has shown verve and leadership, and his defiance now resets the game. Join us on Telegram , Twitter , and VK . Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su They say only a fool never changes his mind. But for such a man to do that requires great strength and confidence. The story of the so-called Iran war is complicated and is peppered with lies and half-truths, but recent revelations have shown that Trump’s failure to even start his ‘Operation Freedom’ – a manoeuvre in the Persian Gulf aimed at escorting ships through the Straits of Hormuz – is down to one figure in the Middle East who raised his hand and said, ‘No, enough is enough.’ That man is Mohamed bin Salman, often called MbS, who took the initiative recently and stopped U.S. forces using Saudi Arabia to go ahead with military sorties aimed at hitting Iran. For the Saudi Crown Prince, it was quite a pragmatic move, one which history will remember as a defining moment for a young leader who still has much to learn about geopolitics. But the decision to stop Trump with his Operation Freedom – which GCC countries were not even consulted on – was a smart one and represents great leadership in a region that badly needs it.
That decision alone is a game changer and has forced Trump to move forward with talks with the Iranians. And despite the total claptrap nonsense that Trump comes out with every day in White House press briefings – claiming that the Iranians are desperate for a deal – the truth is that Trump needs it more than Tehran, as the global economy falling off into the abyss will have a hugely detrimental effect on the U.S. in the coming weeks when shortages are replaced by massive job layoffs. Trump not only doesn’t have time, he also has fewer and fewer options following the MbS move to block U.S. airbases being used to bomb Iran.
The recent news of the UAE beefing up its military alliance with Israel might have been a clue as to where Israel wants to take things – escalating to de-escalate, as is the common term among U.S. talk-show pundits – but can Trump really go ahead with a military strategy of any kind now when there is glaring division in the region and the U.S. presence in GCC countries begins to look more and more futile by the day, their role one of impotence and merely one of show? Indeed, the cardboard-cutout presence of U.S. forces in the GCC might present Trump with the off-ramp he needs, as he can use the MbS stunt as a pretext for a falling-out with regional leaders, as a pretext to move out altogether while still telling White House journalists that the U.S. “won”.
For the moment, it’s not a possibility in the short term as the MbS stunt is not widely known or reported on, and few journalists in the U.S. really understand the nuances and minutiae of the region and its leaders’ strategies. But the Iranian position of U.S. forces leaving the region becomes less fanciful each day while social media reports that both sides are close to a deal, while in the same breath we read that they are far from agreeing on anything.
The oil markets know the real story, as the price of Brent Crude dipped below 100 U.S.D for a while after Trump’s announcement that a deal could be hours away, even agreed on Friday the 8th of May, as the Iranians removed one key negotiator from their team who was blocking any such deal. But the reality is that what the Americans have asked for in their list is unrealistic, while what the Iranians want – compensation and the removal of U.S. forces – might be considered more reasonable given that they are the victims of U.S./Israel aggression in the first place. There is still much to negotiate, and the real crux of the problem is that there simply aren’t any smart people on Trump’s side to, if nothing else, stop him making such idiotic and insulting statements about the Iranians themselves, which can’t be helping. On Iran’s side, all officials seem to be PhD academics whose command of the English language is probably more eloquent than Trump’s, Witkoff’s, or Vance’s.
Yet the Saudi move might give us a clue as to how to break the deadlock and arrive at a peace that can be held over a longer period. The GCC needs to unite and not continue to have two opposing fronts in tackling Iran, which is only giving Trump hope that a military move on his side is still an option. As one social-media buff put it, though, “If Trump can’t even secure the correspondents’ White House dinner, then how could he secure the straits?” and the idea that Trump, with or without Israel, has any military options left is folly. The decision by the Saudi Crown Prince to stand up against Trump and put an end to the madness of thinking that the U.S. can keep hitting Iran while the GCC countries continue to be on the receiving end of retaliatory strikes. MbS has shown verve and leadership, and his defiance now resets the game even though it is widely known that at the beginning he supported the Iran war initiative by Trump. He has shown great strength by admitting he was wrong and that common sense needs to prevail now. Can Trump do the same?