Uncertainty Principle
No one knows exactly what's in the new ceasefire agreement, as both sides claim victory. The one sure thing is that Trump is walking away from the war.
If it’s such a great agreement, why is it a secret? I’m reminded of the reason Russian Ambassador offered in response to Dr. Strangelove’s histrionic question about concealing the existence of the Doomsday machine: “You know how the premier likes surprises.”
In this case, it seems that Trump was desperate to have something to announce at his UFC birthday bash, and Iran let him get away with it, even though the actual language of the agreement is still being worked out.
It was a slick move on Iran’s part, since Trump has sold his triumph hard, abandoning his last ally, Israel, in the process. He needs this agreement more than they do, and his impatience is obvious.
It seems likely that the agreement will be more notable for the ways in which issues are deferred and money transfers concealed than for what it achieves in the near-term—that is, if a final agreement is finally signed and made public at all.
That has been promised for Friday in Geneva, with Vance and maybe even Trump doing the honors for the U.S. Stock markets and oil traders are banking on it, and Trump has already told us all what a triumph it is.
“Just signed a HISTORIC peace deal with Iran – something they said could NEVER be done,” Trump texted from the White House account. “For decades, weak leaders FAILED. Today, I delivered.”
In his vainglory, Trump appears to envision this agreement as the first, historic step toward a lasting peace in the Middle East, with Iran finally tamed and forced to play by the rules in a newly resurgent region that has been stabilized by American power. It seems doubtful that’s what Iran has in mind.
Like Trump, Iran too has declared “victory on the battlefield,” and Iranian officials and news outlets seem to have read a different document from the one Trump has been shown, at least when they talk about what’s in it.
Trump himself has tried to shoot down rumors of concessions such as the immediate unfreezing of frozen Iranian assets, or the $300 billion reconstruction fund that Vance has acknowledged would be part of a final deal. Trump called it fake news from the Democrats, but both negotiating sides have indicated that reconstruction at that scale is on the table.
The outlines of the agreement seem clear enough: both Iran and the U.S. back off from shooting and work to get the Strait open again, while talks begin on Iran’s nuclear program. Trump gets to declare the Strait open again, and then everything else is left to Vance, working with Kushner and Witkoff, the team that represents the interests of the Gulf states.
If the deal holds, then the flow of oil and other essential commodities will begin again, and Iran will be allowed to sell its oil freely. It also apparently plans to charge “fees for services” on ships transiting the Strait.
Everything else is uncertain right now, including whether any of the original U.S.-Israeli goals will be met—apart from a return to negotiations over the nuclear program, with Iran holding a great deal more leverage now.
Regime change is clearly out. The new regime seems more hardline and even a temporary re-opening of the Strait buys it time. The war has further entrenched the power of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the Iranian regime will be even more hardline in its dealing with internal dissent, if such a thing were possible.
Nothing has been said about ballistic missiles, and the question of Iran’s projection of power through proxy armies is at best unsettled, but clearly not a U.S. priority. Iran’s warfighting capacity and the military capabilities of its proxies seem largely intact, despite the vast number of missiles fired so far, and the surface devastation of military targets. A lot of Iran’s capacity is underground, with about 70 percent of its armory still intact, according to U.S. intelligence reports.
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These three goals—regime change, elimination of the capacity to strike Israel, and the end of the proxy armies—were central strategic objectives for Israel, and they seem to have been written out of the final agreement.
Trump has gone out of his way to publicly humiliate Netanyahu, yanking on the leash he holds on the Israeli premier, who faces widespread public disapproval of his handling of the war.
Part of the appeal that has kept Netanyahu in power for so long is ability to manage the Americans—a strength that reached its apex when he convinced to go in with him on the war. Trump told the press he had cursed Netanyahu out, and then he did it a second time. Israeli opposition leaders are calling Bibi a “vassal” of the United States.
In general, U.S. support for Israel has never been lower than it is right now, while virulent strains of antisemitism are entrenched within MAGA and on the rise on the far left, as witnessed in the campaign of Maureen Galindo, who remarked on turning a detention center into “a prison for Zionists.”
A lot of Americans blame Israel for the war, and Trump seems to be feeling that way himself. If one trusts the New York Times reporting, Bibi talked Trump into the war with a spiel that Rubio called “bullshit,” so perhaps it is natural for Trump now to turn on the man he blames for all the problems the war has caused. That would account for the personal edge to the way Trump is selling Israel out.
It’s not clear that any peace can hold if Iran sees that Trump can’t control Israel, but the agreement itself has no gains for Israel at all, and a mountain of potential losses. Whether that means that Israel will slip the leash and continue its war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, and how Iran will react if it does, leave the whole business entirely tenuous.
Apart from reopening the Strait on unspecified terms, the agreement clearly leaves Iran’s nuclear program unresolved and deferred for further negotiations, which is where the whole story started months ago. When the war started Iran had just made a breakthrough concession that Witkoff evidently did not understand, because it was technical. It didn’t matter, because Trump had already decided to take out the Ayatollah the next day.
If there are different versions of the agreement now floating around, and the final language is still unsettled, it probably lies mainly in how the focus of further talks is framed in terms of various commitments and benchmarks, along with parameters around what a final agreement might include.
There are similarly thorny questions around control of the Strait and how that will work, and what happens to the proxy wars, but the nuclear program is the main thing, and it will be very hard for Trump to sell this extended ceasefire without some language that looks like an Iranian concession on nuclear, as Trump calls it.
According to press reports, Trump has already been warned by Ratcliffe and Rubio that intelligence suggests that Iran isn’t planning any concessions, and that there is a split in the White House between Rubio, Hegseth and Ratcliffe on one side, and Vance, Kushner and Witkoff on the other, with the latter being given the go ahead.
None of this answers the question of what is in the agreement that ostensibly had already been signed electronically, and that is meant to be signed in face to face meeting of principals in Geneva on Friday.
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If you read about the war a lot, you’ll often find references to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle through its popular expression in the notion of “Schrodinger’s Cat,” the cat in the box that is neither living nor dead until the observer opens the box to see. I’ve seen “Schrodinger’s War,” and “Schrodinger’s Ayatollah,” “Schrodinger’s Peace” and “Schrodinger’s Agreement”—you get the idea.
It’s an apt notion, this idea of an agreement that looks different to each observer. When Trump opens the box, he sees an historic victory. When Iran opens it, they see American defeat and a clear path for their ambition of regional dominance.
A lot of us aren’t clear at all on what we are seeing. The box seems shut right now. We’re told it contains something like a “peace agreement,” and we know what the things are that would have to be agreed on in some way, and Vance has told us that the whole thing is short, just a page and a half, presumably with bullets, so we know that.
We don’t know much more, except that it seems clear that if there is actually just one version of the agreement it is being interpreted in radically different ways. The alternative is that there still is more than one version, and that the two sides are still talking about different pieces of paper.
What was signed on Sunday? And why is it still a secret? The two sides seem to agree that something had been achieved, but what was it?
Maybe the challenge right now is simply rhetorical, with each side quibbling over language, hoping to gain an edge in the internal propaganda war that will follow publication of the accord, assuming there is an actual signing on Friday.
The problem with the Schrodinger’s cat metaphor in the case of this war and peace is that we’re not outside the box and the box won’t open—there’s no clarity or certainty ahead, no matter what the agreement winds up saying.
Whatever happens on the surface of events over the next few months, the war has exposed or defined a new dynamic of power in the Middle East, in which Iran has demonstrated the limits of U.S. military strength, vast as it is, and the nations surrounding it have discovered how vulnerable they are.
Trump seems to want simply to walk away from the war, using whatever fig leaves his negotiators can eke out as a cover for false claims of victory. He wants to put the war “in the rear-view mirror.” One would expect no less from someone who made the art of bankruptcy the core of his business strategy.
Maybe the mistake, in this game of Schrodinger’s cat, is thinking that there’s a cat in the box. Maybe there’s nothing in the box at all. I guess we’ll find out in a couple of days.