US-Iran deal may get oil flowing again, but region’s root problems are unsolved
Few analysts believe final settlement can be reached in 60 days – and even if it is, war and instability could soon return
In much of the Middle East, news that the US and Iran had come to a fragile agreement was greeted with relief tempered with doubt that any deal would resolve the turbulent region’s deep problems or even prevent a future return to war.
In Kuwait, a frequent target of Iranian drone strikes during the 15-week conflict, Iyad Joumma, a 37-year-old Jordanian engineer, spoke for many.
While the agreement may allow the region to catch its breath, he said, its success “will depend on the ability of the parties involved to address the root causes of the tensions”.
Of a dozen analysts and experts consulted by the Guardian since the news of a potential end to hostilities broke at the weekend, not one suggested the interim deal to be signed on Friday by representatives of Iran and the US would be any more than a temporary solution.
“It’s just a big Band-Aid and future conflict is like to come at some point,” said Neil Quilliam, a Middle East expert at London’s Chatham House.
The memorandum of understanding provides for a 60-day cessation of hostilities during which the two sides will address some of the most contentious issues – Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile and nuclear programme, sanctions and the release of billions of dollars of frozen Iranian assets – in the hope that a final settlement can be reached.
Few analysts believe this is likely within such a short timescale – if at all.
They point to the painstaking 18-month process that led to the 2015 agreement with Iran, which traded economic benefits for restrictions of its nuclear programme, and which Donald Trump tore up during his first term in office.
The interim deal now agreed does little more than commit both sides to further talks, while obliging Washington to lift its naval blockade of Iran and making Tehran allow free passage to all shipping in the strait of Hormuz, which usually carries a fifth of the world’s oil and liquid gas supplies but was blocked by Iran early in the war.
To the great displeasure of Israel, a ceasefire has been imposed once again in Lebanon as part of the interim deal and appears for the moment to be holding.
But such ceasefires count for little these days, said several experts, pointing to Gaza as an example, where almost 1,000 Palestinians have been killed since Donald Trump brokered an end to the war there last year. Israel has occupied more than 60% of the territory, Hamas has not given up its weapons, and there has been almost no progress towards a projected second phase of the deal, let alone the third, which was to have brought a massive reconstruction effort.
“Gaza is a case in point. The deal there didn’t contend with the past: the war crimes that had been committed. Nor the present: how to disarm Hamas. Nor the future: a pathway to a viable Palestinian state and a resolution of the conflict,” said Alia Brahimi at the Atlantic Council in Washington. “It’s almost as if … you can use the cover of a ceasefire to continue to achieve your aims, including military ones.”
But this was not possible in the Gulf, Brahimi said, because the strategic geography was different.
“The strait of Hormuz is of integral importance to the global economy, as the Iranians have demonstrated. They’ve shown us what we always knew in theory: that they can impose cascading stress globally by throwing a few projectiles towards a tanker or two.”
Mkhaimar Abusada, a political science professor at al-Azhar University in Gaza and now in Cairo, agreed.
“The ceasefire in Gaza is holding because Hamas knows that if they fire it will give a pretext for another full-scale Israeli ground invasion but the situation in Gaza is disastrous,” he said.
In Israel there is dismay and disappointment at a deal that does not appear to address Iran’s ballistic missile armoury nor funding of its so-called Axis of Resistance, a loose coalition of militant Islamist movements including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen and a series of militia in Iraq.
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