This isn’t a usual episode of Cut The Clutter; it deals with the very important truce between US and Iran, many aspects of which deserve comment. Here’s the clutter-free perspective on the West Asia thaw, in 10 points as seen from India.
- India wins: The first thing to be said for now about the US-Iran truce—based on a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) —is that it is good for the global economy, and especially for India. Stock indices have moved up significantly, the rupee has strengthened, bond yields have eased, and, most significantly, crude has fallen sharply—all a big positive for India.
- No Pak envy: This is no time to get into a twist over what role Pakistan played in mediating this. It was certainly significant, though US President Donald Trump, in the end, gave the most credit to Qatar, which he says lives in the most dangerous neighbourhood. Its Emir is a very brave man, he’s said, living a second away from Iran. But he’s also been sending dollops of compliments to Field Marshal Asim Munir. It is Qatar that ran the hardest anchor leg of this challenging relay race.
Aside—Smoke and Mirrors: In what the West calls the Middle East, everybody’s fighting each other, and everybody’s also cutting secret deals. Qatar, as a terrific Washington Post scoop tells us, cut a private deal with Iran not to attack its crown jewel, the Ras Laffan gas complex. Nevertheless, the Iranians hit it at least once. Qatar, the Washington Post said, told Iran they’d stop producing gas from Ras Laffan, the world’s most significant field, for a while to exacerbate global shortages, compounding the global crisis, and helping Iran shorten the war.
Qatar’s message to Iran, as quoted by the Washington Post, through its sources, was: “You will achieve your objective without striking us.” In other words, spare us.
This report tells us that the damage to Ras Laffan from the Iranian strike wasn’t significant enough to shut production. But Qatar shut the field down completely, helping Iran increase global pressure for a truce while also saving itself.
- Sharif, or Mr X: The Pakistanis did play a central role, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif tweeted all about it last Friday and Saturday, and then more definitively on Monday, announcing that an MoU was going to be signed. Sharif’s tweets were tagged to the US and Iran presidents, Donald Trump and Masoud Pezeshkian, foreign ministers Abbas Araghchi and Marco Rubio, US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Vice President J.D. Vance.
Monday’s tweet said emphatically that the two sides will meet in Geneva on Friday to sign the peace agreement.
This begins the process of reopening the Strait of Hormuz. The US will also start a 30-day process of lifting its naval blockade of Iran. And Pakistan is well and truly in the game.
- Should India be bothered? Trump’s America is not known for handing out freebies or thank-you notes. It has the sizable challenge of repairing its broken brotherhood with the UAE . The reason we need to detox our minds from the Pakistan factor is that India needed this truce more than any other country. If Pakistan gets some credit for it, so be it.
We needn’t look the gift horse in the mouth just because a person we don’t like helped trot it in. No matter what benefit the Pakistanis get for this going forward, the peace dividend for India will be enormously greater.
- Happy days here again: Look at the facts. The greatest consumers of West Asia’s energy are in Asia: China, India, Japan, and South Korea, in that order.
This truce is the greatest relief India could wish for at this moment. We have been the most vulnerable, given low income levels and relatively smaller strategic petroleum reserves of just about 10 days, besides the 70-75 days that our refineries hold by way of raw stocks of crude, gas and naphtha, etc. The Kharif sowing season is on us; gas, chemical-based fertilisers, diesel, and naphtha are the key inputs in modern farming.
India is more affected than China and Japan, as they also import most of their hydrocarbons, the former getting a bit from Russia through pipelines and ships. China also produces enormous stocks of coal gas, or syngas, something the Modi government has been planning for the past six years, although there is a fresh sense of urgency now.
The Japanese, by law, maintain a strategic petroleum reserve for 200-plus days. Remember, for India, this crisis had come amid the Kharif sowing season, also marked by one of the severest El Niños in history.
- Where the devil is: We can’t declutter the details of the agreement, simply because a text still does not exist, or has not been made public.
Meanwhile, each side can keep claiming total victory. Listen to Trump or Iran Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and believe who you want you. I’d say, just wait till Friday.
All we know from Trump, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi and Sharif is that the two sides have agreed to meet in Geneva this Friday to sign off on at least the first preliminary document. This, as the current understanding goes, will begin another 60 days of truce for further negotiations, including on the fate of Iran’s uranium, enriched to various degrees, and the sanctions that have crippled its economy.
- Is everybody in? No, everybody is not happy. At least one most important nation, a key participant in the war — Israel — is most unhappy. Seething at being arm-twisted in public by Trump into stopping strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon, Netanyahu has not commented on the truce.
See what Barak Ravid of Axios has put out, the exact quote in a conversation with Trump. After Netanyahu carried out fresh bombing raids on south Beirut, Trump said to Barak Ravid, “He has no effing judgement.”
Well, that’s not exactly what Trump said; he went full F-word, including the ‘-ing’. Netanyahu is understandably furious. His forever rebellious and hardline minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has rejected the agreement, saying that while Israel is grateful for American support and appreciates Trump, they (the US) cannot decide issues most critical to Israel, and therefore they are not formal signatories to any agreement or party to any truth.
The truce is a big setback to Israel and Netanyahu. It is now evident that while Trump joined the fight, his objectives and Netanyahu’s did diverge at some point. As an important American observer said, they converged to about 80 percent and then Trump had to deal with a war increasingly unpopular with his base, rising gas prices with mid-term elections coming up, and the Gulf Arabs who were petrified of resumed hostilities. It’s not that they are incapable of defending themselves, but that they just do not want to be in the fight.
All of this made it impossible for Trump to return to the battlefield, especially as he could easily declare mission accomplished. In his formulation, he had won as long as he could convince his base that he had got a lot more out of Iran than Obama did with his Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in July 2015. Netanyahu never wanted the war to end. It suited him politically and he wanted regime change in Iran.
- What now for Bibi? Netanyahu, with nearly 19 years in all as Prime Minister, faces a backlash at home with elections coming up and abysmally low ratings. The Opposition is chasing him, hatchet in hand.
Leader of the Opposition since January 2023 and centrist challenger, Yair Lapid, also a former journalist and TV anchor, accuses Netanyahu of many miscalculations, including hoping that Trump would help unleash a Kurdish revolt without understanding the influence Erdogan had in the White House. Kurds are seen as a common threat by Iran, Turkey, Iraq and Syria. Israel and its forces won the battle, he says, but Netanyahu lost the war. Netanyahu also has to run a gauntlet of cases where he seeks a pardon from the courts.
October 7, 2023, was the day of the Hamas attack, the day we learned that Netanyahu can no longer protect Israel, says Lapid, blaming him for changing key security leaders in the middle of the war and for not having enough competent people around. “He continues to tell everyone, we changed the Middle East. The problem is that due to negligence, arrogance and absence of a suitable professional team and judgement influenced by other things, as in extraneous factors, he changed it for the worse,” Lapid has said.
- Arab Winter: The Gulf Arabs sit deflated and, in multiple ways, defeated. They have all spent top dollar over the decades, in fact, over more than half a century, and built themselves fancy, shiny, ultra-modern armed forces with the best equipment. This war has shown that they have it all except the will to fight, and are therefore paper tigers. Tiny UAE does stand out as the only exception. This will have three implications going ahead.
One, their dependence on America will become even. Trump will play with them, and his people will keep collecting and enriching themselves. Two, Iran will come closer to achieving its dream of pre-eminence not just in the Gulf but in the entire Islamic world as the one power that fought America to a standstill. The Iranians will in time claim that they defeated America, and did it all for the cause of the Palestinians. And third, somewhat marginally in the big picture, but more important for India, the Gulf Arabs may just rediscover their somewhat lost fascination for the Pakistanis.
- What about us? Where does India go from here? The first thing India must not do is become complacent. The crisis has underlined not only some strengths, but also our many dependencies that limit our global power. These range from energy to armaments, and from trade to capital.
All of those need to be addressed. Everything that the Prime Minister is now doing for the economy should continue in crisis mode, because it’s not over for us. Next, it will be a changed West Asia, scared Arabs, a weakened Israel, and a reinvigorated Pakistan.
Most importantly, this will leave a far weaker America, as much of the world would see this as an American defeat, like it or not. That Trump was keener on a truce than Iran has been read by everybody as a lack of willingness to fight.
The old Afghanistan story, what the Mujahideen used to say, is worth remembering: “You may have the watch, but we have the time.” Vietnam timed America out in the 1960s, Afghanistan earlier this century, and now Iran has played from the same script, the same playbook.
The one thing that can surely be said is that this will leave a weaker, withdrawn America. It follows that China is now much stronger, and that without having to bat an eyelid, at least not in public.
(Edited by Nardeep Singh Dahiya)