Hizballah has already threatened the Lebanese government not to go to these talks in Washington, but apparently there’s enough intestinal fortitude in Beirut to support two ambassadors sitting at a table in Washington. The Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs is trailing more Iran discussions. What’s the difference? One set of negotiations is being run the old fashioned way, and one is being run the New York real estate way.

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The Iranians asked for JD Vance to negotiate with Qalibaf and Aragchi, and President Trump appears to have been happy to send him. We all know that Kushner and Witkoff have failed to extricate America from this phase of the Iran War, but somehow we'll blame the war’s lightweight America-first opponent.

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It’s odd that we know what the Iranians think the ceasefire terms are, the Pakistani mediators know, but the American version of the terms are unclear. We recall that at some point Hamas is going to voluntarily disarm and self-exile from Gaza. Today the Iranians say they won’t even, unless the Israelis leave Hizballah alone as the Americans maybe agreed or maybe didn’t.

The Iranians are going to keep building missiles. Does this mean the Israelis are going to do this all over again in the summer?Did Henry Kissinger put up with nonsense like this?!

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I should start calling this the Ludendorff Effect: failing to achieve war aims and continuing to fight in hopes of finding a path to some kind of victory.

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Notwithstanding the Secretary of War’s allergy to post-conflict reconstruction, why does he want partners for a bit of rebuilding and a bit of demining? Could it be because the Chinese-instigated Pakistani-brokered ceasefire is basically flimflam, to enable the Iranians to carry on as before, America to extricate and regional partners to deal with a still-extreme Iranian theocracy? Does he want someone else to be left holding the bag?Are these all rhetorical questions?

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The dogged insistence by one of my Israeli national security professional friends that the war aim really was regime change? It’s a bit more understandable now. It’s what Netanyahu briefed to POTUS, and in spite of Ratcliff of the CIA now saying it had been ‘farcical’ and Rubio of Foggy Bottom saying it was ‘b******t’, POTUS went for it.

If we’ve avoided a global economic downturn by freezing the war with a bit of a ceasefire, perhaps it will be worth the price of losing the Strait of Hormuz as an international waterway and letting the Iranians charge $2M a bottom to let ships through.

The winners in the short term are Israel, who have got a much weaker regional rival. In the medium term, the present Iranian regime appears to be solidly in control even if the IRGC is comparatively more powerful and the Supreme Leader appears to be a bit of a figurehead.

Of course the big winners in this are the Reliable Superpower: China. They didn’t start this war, but they appear to have dodged significant economic damage, and will increase their influence in the region at America’s expense. Russia hasn’t done badly, though the sudden popularity of the Ukrainians in the Middle East has got to be a little unsettling to the Kremlin.

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… and economy appear more a tragic failure of diplomacy and less the callous destruction of a rogue country of 93 million?My concept of metastability was articulated in a futures paper I collaborated on for an energy-sector client shortly after returning from my tour on Op TELIC (a tour spent very much in the rear with the gear). In it, I talked about an Iraq on the edge of state failure, in which the state as such no longer existed, and only local economies and security structures supported local life. This is a walk-and-talk in my sports kit, which includes my pretending not to have walked through nettles with bare ankles. Anyone listening to this as a podcast might wonder why I went from speaking to my phone in a confidential tone to shouting over the sound of a waterfall. It’s because I walked over to a waterfall while filming outdoors. Please feel free to feed back whether this sort of film works better / as well as / worse than the pieces to camera I record in my study.

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I wrote this article years ago during a different Gaza war. I wrote it because I thought we leaned far too hard on the idea that war crimes were the problem in war, not that war itself is the problem. This is comparable to the more recent construction that a revised-down definition of genocide made genocide the problem in war, not war itself. Saying that an American attack against Iranian critical national infrastructure is by nature a war crime, isn’t entirely true under the International Law of Armed Conflict as it is currently understood, even in democracies apart from the US. Also, American government behaviour redefines legitimacy in a way that people are rightfully reluctant to accept. Just as the requirement in American constitutional law for Congress to approve war appears now to be all but a dead letter, an understanding that war crimes are crimes appears now to be all but a dead letter.

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I'm not seeking to dispense soft soap; not seeking to alarm; just talking about some support but around decisions on nuclear release.

Note: in this video I refer to the Israeli ‘war cabinet’, when I should have said ‘national security cabinet’, an informal name for the Israeli cabinet’s National Security Committee.

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Iran learned the power of the Strait of Hormuz in a Tanker War, and the resilience of its people to aerial attack in the War of the Cities. They also learned from their counter-invasion of Iraq (when Saddam Hussein tried to cut his losses and end the Iran-Iraq War) that they could keep punishing an enemy who didn't want to fight anymore. All three of these are relevant as President Trump offers to escalate the Iran War if the Iranians don't open the Strait of Hormuz.

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