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Like a smashed antique clock – with its elaborate cogs, ratchet wheels and innards splayed out from the casing – so the mechanics of the Middle East lie similarly exposed and broken. All the region is in play – Syria, Lebanon, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt and Iran.

The original Obama strategic blueprint for containing and balancing the potentially violent energies of West Asia was subsequently handed to Team Biden at the end of the Obama term – and it still clearly bore the Obama imprimatur right up until its collapse after 7 Oct 2023.

Netanyahu deliberately smashed its mechanics: In acts of wanton destruction, he destroyed the prevailing status quo, which he saw as an American straitjacket preventing the attainment of a Greater Israel reaching out to its ‘Grand Victory’. Netanyahu resented the American constraints – though by breaking the extant mechanism, paradoxically, instead of liberating Israel, he may have unleashed dynamics that will prove far more threatening (i.e. in Syria).

The cornerstone to the Obama ‘balanced region’ was contained in a secret letter sent to Iran’s Supreme Leader in 2014, in which, as the WSJ relates, Obama proposed to Khamenei joint efforts in Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State (where ISIS controlled territory). This joint action however, was made contingent on Iran reaching a nuclear deal with the U.S.

The letter explicitly acknowledged Iran’s ‘equities’ in Syria: To assuage Iran’s concerns about the future of its close ally, President al-Assad, the letter stated that the U.S.’s military operations inside Syria were not targeted at President Assad or his security forces.

The Obama understanding with Khamanei, it must be noted, thus implicitly extended to Hizbullah who were joined with Iran in fighting ISIS in Syria:

“Among other messages conveyed to Tehran, according to U.S. officials at the time, is that U.S. military operations in Iraq and Syria aren’t aimed at weakening Tehran or its allies”.

Of course, the Obama undertakings to Iran were lies: Obama had already signed in 2012 (or earlier), a secret Presidential Finding (i.e. an instruction) for U.S. intelligence support to Syria’s rebels in their bid to oust President Assad).

Were Iran to participate in a nuclear ‘deal’, the 2014 letter proposed that its regional ‘equities’ would be respected and could extend to Lebanon as a geography of international joint adjudication (as exemplified in U.S. Envoy Hochstein’s mediation of the Lebanese-Syrian Maritime borders).

The purpose to this highly complex blueprint was Obama’s primordial obsession: To arrive at a proto-Palestinian State, albeit as another internationally administered protectorate, supported internationally, rather than as a sovereign nation-state.

Why did Obama insist on a scheme that was such anathema to the Israeli Right and American Israel-Firsters? It seems that he (with good reason) both distrusted Netanyahu and knew well the latter’s determination to prevent any Palestinian State from ever coming to fruition.

Obama’s balance of powers initiative was an attempt indirectly to bind Iran and its allies to Obama’s Palestinian ‘State’ concept – i.e. deliberately planned as an escalating pressure point on Israel to concede a State. Without intense pressure on Israel, it was clear to Obama that a Palestinian State was a dead letter.

Netanyahu had made his intent to see the complete emptying of the Palestinian presence in the West Bank only too evident as far back as the 1970s (this was clear in the interview that he gave to author Max Hastings, who was writing a book on Netanyahu’s brother).

Netanyahu disliked and distrusted Obama – as much as Obama distrusted him.

In the wake of 7 October 2023, with the ‘ring of fire’ (seven ‘wars’) closing in on Israel, Netanyahu determined to break the straitjacket restraints. And he did.

It’s not sure however, whether Obama’s highly elaborated structure would ever have worked. In any case, Netanyahu – by openly defying the White House – decided to override the Obama-Biden ‘restraints’ and to smash the entire Iranian-centred project of Obama.

The logic of the Israeli serial destruction in the Region suggests to Netanyahu, as well as to many Israelis and American Israel-Firsters, that Iran now is “staggeringly vulnerable” (in the words of General Jack Keane), because of the loss of Syria – the ‘central’ node to the Axis of Resistance.

Axios reports:

“Iran’s recent nuclear advances give President-elect Trump a crucial decision to make in his first months in office: to neutralize the [Iranian nuclear] threat through negotiations and [escalating] pressures; or order a military strike. Several Trump advisers privately concede Iran’s program is now so far along that this [early] strategy might no longer be effective. That makes a military option a real possibility”.

“After Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer met Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November, Dermer came away thinking there was a high likelihood Trump would either support an Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities — something the Israelis are seriously considering — or even order a U.S. strike. Some top advisers to President Biden have privately argued in recent weeks for striking Iran’s nuclear sites before Trump takes office, with Iran and its proxies so badly weakened”.

Yet this may prove to be wishful thinking. Trump reposted on 7 Jan 2025, a video on the Truth Social platform featuring Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs, in which he discussed the CIA’s covert efforts to destabilise Syria’s government and to overthrow Assad; the influence of Netanyahu; the Israeli lobby’s role in pushing the U.S. into the Iraq War; and Netanyahu’s continued attempts to involve the U.S. in a potential conflict with Iran. Sachs explained that the wars in Iraq and Syria were manufactured by Netanyahu, and had nothing to do with “democracy”.

“Netanyahu is still trying to get us to fight Iran to this day. He is a deep dark son of a bitch because he’s gotten us into endless wars”, Professor Sachs said in the re-posted interview.

However, as Barak Ravid notes, “Others close to Trump expect that he’ll seek a deal before considering a strike”. When asked about the possibility of war with Iran in November, Trump replied, “Anything can happen, It’s a very volatile situation”.

What then does this mean for Iran?

Essentially, Iran has two options: Firstly to signal to the U.S. its readiness to enter into some sort of a new nuclear deal with the Trump team (a signal its Foreign Minister already has given), and then to wait on a subsequent successful Trump–Putin meeting to re-set the global post-war security architecture. From that ‘big picture’ global deal, Tehran might hope to negotiate its own separate ‘big picture’ accord with the U.S.

Of course, this would be optimal.

However, Ambassador Chas Freeman has said that although a sustainable peace between the U.S. and Russia (theoretically) is possible, it will be “very difficult” to achieve. To which Ray McGovern has added repeatedly that Trump is ‘plenty smart enough’ to know that he holds a weak hand with regard to Russia in the Eurasian space, and that Trump, the realist, has “bigger fish to fry”.

Is this why Trump and Musk are stirring the geo-political ‘pot’ so blatantly: On the one hand, Canada, Greenland and Panama as part of the U.S.? These may be Trumpian ‘talking points’, but Greenland and Canada together could change the leverage calculus with Russia: Is Trump planning to use added leverage via the Arctic to threaten control over Russia’s northern borders? (It is the shortest flight time for missiles targeted at Russia).

And on the other hand, Musk, in parallel, has started a firestorm in Europe with his Tweets – and his invitation to a livestream with Alice Weidel of AfD. Germany is the heart of NATO and the EU. Were Germany to ‘flip’ away from war with Russia – in company with other European ‘flips’ already in the works – then Trump plausibly could end a major economic burden (troop deployment in the EU) weighing on the U.S. economy. As Col. Doug Macgregor says, how many times do we have to tell people: “Americans don’t live in Europe – we live in the Western hemisphere!”.

Musk effectively has lobbed a (free speech) grenade into the European media hegemony that both tightly controls discourse across the continent, and is in the pay of the Anglo Deep State.

Will this bring the settlement with Russia and the Asian Heartland that Trump seeks? We must see.

The alternative option for Iran is higher risk (and is contingent on the Iranian Intelligence assessment of the likelihood of Israel attempting a pre-emptive strike on Iran): i.e. Iran has the option of a further ‘Operation True Promise’. No longer meant to deter (unlike in earlier versions of True Promise), but rather, as Shivan Mahendrarajah explains, through exposing the ‘improbability of victory’ and demonstrating the ‘unacceptable cost’ of conflict, to dismantle Israel’s illusory narrative of perpetual ‘victory’.

In 2003, as Mahendrarajah has noted, Iran proposed the U.S. a ‘grand bargain’. It was rejected by the Bush Administration. Can it be revived – not through nuclear talks, in which Iran has the weaker hand – but by the calibrated use of force. It would be an audacious, and big, bet.

(This is the second part of the piece ‘Can Trump Save America From Itself?’. Part 1 can be read here).