Conrad Black: Don’t believe the haters — Trump is on his way to a strategic victory in Iran

U.S. President Donald Trump, second from right, gestures at the end of a press conference at the G7 summit alongside U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, right, in Evian, France, on Wednesday. Photo by Mandel NGAN/AFP

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The anti-Trump view of world affairs, dictated this week by the Iranian mullahs, will hold that U.S. President Donald Trump has surrendered. It is worth remembering that when Hamas invaded Israel and massacred 1,200 people and kidnapped about 250 others on Oct. 7, 2023, Iran was well on its way toward developing nuclear weapons, hoped that the Hamas invasion of Israel would raise a general revolt in the West Bank and that a flying column would threaten Jerusalem, and stood ready to activate a powerful Hezbollah that had an estimated 150,000 rockets ready to fire at Israel. Hamas had 20,000 to 30,000 armed and trained terrorists in Gaza to conduct the war that had been unleashed.

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By the heroic efforts of the Israeli Defence Forces, and at historically low levels of collateral damage in urban counter-insurrectionist warfare, Hamas has lost more than half of Gaza and many of its trained terrorist personnel, and Hezbollah’s missile stock has been significantly depleted. Both terrorist groups have suffered severe decapitation of leadership cadres. Iran has lost its nuclear program, it’s navy, its air defences, its leadership and has been severely defeated. The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel has been a disaster for Iran and its allies. Israeli losses have been significant but modest compared to those they have inflicted, and the cost to the United States has been 13 servicemen, barely a third of those lost in liberating the hijacked freighter Mayaguez from Cambodians in 1975 under the Ford administration.

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Of course, Iran will, as the Islamic Republic always does, cheat and lie from the beginning of the implementation of the peace agreement, and will attempt to recover everything that it will have pledged to give up. The United States has already declared that it will retain heavy forces in the theatre in the near-term, in order to be able to descend on a moment’s notice on Iran in co-operation with local allies, to punish it and enforce the agreement. President Trump has specifically promised to go back to war over violations. Assuming that a nuclear agreement is promptly agreed to and implacably enforced, the peace will have achieved the primary objectives of denying Iran nuclear weapons while completely reopening the Strait of Hormuz. This may be all it achieves, though positive realignments among the Gulf states and a more cautious attitude from Tehran should also occur. But since Iran is bound to violate whatever (if anything) it signs, this may, at the very least, be considered a satisfactory end of Phase 1. If a second phase is needed, it will be at a more convenient time for the Trump administration than the run-up to midterm elections.

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There seems not to be a specific promise to cease bankrolling terrorist activity, particularly on the borders of Israel. But reduction of sanctions and release of frozen assets will be performance-based. There is no more reason to believe any promises from Iran than to imagine that Hamas had any intention of disarming, as it pledged to do in the ceasefire in the Gaza conflict. But America retains extensive deterrence against Iranian backsliding.

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After the overwhelming defeat of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and his expulsion from Kuwait in the first Gulf War, in the manner of Muslims who have just been defeated by non-Muslim opponents, he claimed to have been victorious because he was still in power, even though his armed forces had been destroyed and large swaths of his country were a no-fly zone to protect the Kurds from his vengeance. These dictators always claim to have been an underdog facing a barbarous horde of infidels. Any version of regime survival, no matter how diminished its circumstances and humiliating the defeat that has just been inflicted upon it, is proclaimed with stentorian apparent conviction to have been a moral victory. This has already begun and has been taken up by all anti-Trumpers, wheresoever they may be.