By Patrick LAWRENCE
Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su
Trump, in his regime’s serial dishonesty, has reshaped the conventions of American diplomacy in the Israeli fashion. He has turned the U.S. into the same sort of pariah — never to be trusted.
Hiw long did it take for the Israelis to sabotage the five-minutes-to-midnight ceasefire accord the Trump regime reached with the Islamic Republic Tuesday evening?
How long before the Trump regime endorsed the Zionists’ purposeful spoliation of this agreement?
We are counting in hours.
President Donald Trump announced his approval of the two-week agreement on Truth Social, his social-media platform, at 6:32 Tuesday evening U.S. East Coast time.
By the following morning — at the latest — the Zionist regime was carpet-bombing Lebanon.
A little tick-tock here, as we call this in the press. At 10:00 Wednesday morning Trump declared on social media that the ceasefire accord, as brokered by Pakistan, does not cover Lebanon.
At 10:10 a.m. Islamabad, asserting that the agreement indeed includes Lebanon, effectively accused the Trump regime of lying.
We have since been subjected to reporting all over mainstream Western media that the ceasefire agreement — and a hard copy of the actual text would be worth its weight in Iranian Light, but the accord appears to have been verbal — may or may not cover Israel’s savage aggressions in Lebanon.
It is all unknowable, we-said, they-said blur and “confusion” — the favored word in the mainstream press.
Supposedly.
Posing as the voice of reason, J.D. Vance asserted that this reflects “a legitimate misunderstanding” on the part of the Iranians.
Here is Trump’s veep Wednesday, during a visit to Budapest:
“I think the Iranians thought the ceasefire included Lebanon, and it just didn’t. We never made that promise. We never indicated that was going to be the case. If Iran wants to let this negotiation fall apart in a conflict where they were getting hammered over Lebanon… that’s ultimately their choice. We think that would be dumb, but that’s their choice.”
“It just didn’t.” Does it get any flimsier?
Vance on right, at the White House, with, from left, War Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, Aug. 18, 2025. (White House / Daniel Torok)
Iran’s Supreme National Security Council released a statement Wednesday saying the just-agreed pact requires, among much else, “the cessation of war on all fronts, including against the heroic Islamic Resistance in Lebanon.”
Shehbaz Sharif had by then stated the same in clear, un-flimsy language. From a statement the Pakistani prime minister posted on “X” at 1:50 a.m. Wednesday morning:
“With the greatest humility, I am pleased to announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, along with their allies, have agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY….”
Would the statesman who managed these (indirect) negotiations with evident diligence make up something as significant as this? Would the council responsible for the Islamic Republic’s national interests and foreign policy?
Unthinkable. Only Trump and the buffoons serving in his regime, in repeated displays of breathtaking insouciance, make up never-agreed agreements, never-achieved diplomatic victories, never-happened battlefield successes and, in this case, an accord missing a clause it is simply impossible to imagine did not feature in it.
By Wednesday evening all was clearer than the Trump regime seems to have intended it to be. As The New York Times reported, “The White House had already seen and signed off on the [Pakistani] statement before Mr. Sharif posted it, according to a person briefed on the communication…”
By the time the Times reported this, the Trumpster and his adjutants had their pants down well below their knees.
To finish our tick-tock, here is a thread of three brief posts on “X” from Bibi Netanyahu’s official “X” account:
“Prime Minister’s Office: Israel supports President Trump’s decision to suspend strikes against Iran for two weeks subject to Iran immediately opening the straits and stopping all attacks on the US, Israel and countries in the region.
Israel also supports the US effort to ensure that Iran no longer poses a nuclear, missile and terror threat to America, Israel, Iran’s Arab neighbors and the world.
The United States has told Israel that it is committed to achieving these goals, shares [sic] by the US, Israel and Israel’s regional allies, in the upcoming negotiations. The two-weeks ceasefire does not include Lebanon.”
These posts are time-stamped three hours and change after Sharif posted his statement. President Trump — essential not to miss this — denied the agreement covered Lebanon on Truth Social, contradicting his earlier commitment, not quite five hours later.
There is no “confusion” here as to what happened in the hours after Prime Minister Sharif announced the ceasefire accord — no “misunderstanding,” to quote Vance’s term.
We come to one of numerous new realities at this stage of the world-historical mess the Americans and Israelis have made since they began — or renewed, better put — their military aggressions against the Islamic Republic.
US Rendered Null as Diplomatic Partner
Washington’s trustworthiness in affairs of state has been in decline for decades — at least since the Cold War’s end, if not earlier.
Trump, between his incessant lying, serial diplomatic deceptions and his shockingly savage threats to destroy entire peoples, entire nations and lately an entire civilization, has rendered the United States null as a diplomatic partner, interlocutor or negotiator at any of the world’s mahogany tables.
“America will never recover its authority: Trump has passed the point of no return” is the headline atop an interesting piece UnHerd published the other day. In it an American scholar named B. Duncan Moench began his case with this punch-in-the-face observation:
“Once your country goes from world policeman to the equivalent of the crazy person at the bar threatening to shoot anyone who looks at him funny, there’s really no going back.”
It is the finality Moench suggests in this passage than lands squarely with me. There is not a single case in contemporary geopolitics, none I can think of, wherein the United States (let’s say “Trump’s United States,” as mainstream media insist on “Putin’s Russia”) does not serve as a spoiler, an agent of chaos or both at once.
All while pretending tiresomely to continue on as the light of the world.
Let’s stay well clear of romanticizing. The Cold War decades are pockmarked with lies told to others who counted on America’s word, stories of deception, one or another kind of betrayal.
But I take the Soviet Union’s demise as the moment the United States began down the road to collapse as a credible, reliable diplomatic power.
Readers will have no trouble recalling the H.W. Bush regime’s betrayal of Mikhail Gorbachev when James Baker, Bush’s secretary of state, promised the Soviet reformist NATO would never advance eastward into the former Warsaw Pact nations.
“But it was never on paper” is the pitiful excuse offered by those forced to acknowledge this disgraceful perfidy but intent on papering over it.
That set the path for the next three decades of treachery in Washington’s dealings with the Russian Federation, all the way up to the Biden regime’s provocations prior to Russia’s military advance into Ukraine in February 2022. I still count this a regrettable, but necessary intervention — necessitated by yet more American duplicity.
Hasbara Mimicry
Trump on Dec. 29, 2025, receives the news he’ll be awarded the Israel Prize from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. (White House /Daniel Torok)
Steve Witkoff, the unmentionable body part serving as Trump’s “special envoy” in the Ukraine and Iran crises, asserted just prior to his second round of talks with the Iranians in February that the Islamic Republic was “probably a week away from having industrial bomb-making material.”
This was mere preview of the nonsense to come.
After the talks in Geneva, Sayyid Badr bin Hamad al–Busaidi, the Omani foreign minister who brokered those negotiations, came away saying on Face the Nation that “a deal is with reach.” Watch the segment: his careful account is perfectly credible.
Witkoff, speaking on Fox News March 3, five days after the U.S.–Israeli assault began, told Sean Hannity:
“I know this: They have 10,000, roughly, kilograms of fissionable material. That’s broken up into roughly 460 kilograms of 60 percent enriched uranium another 1,000 kilograms of 20 percent enriched uranium…. They have an endless supply of it. The 60 percent can be brought to 90 percent, that’s weapons-grade, in roughly one week…. They were proud of it. They were proud they had evaded all sorts of oversight protocols to get to a place where they could deliver 11 nuclear bombs… which told us they had no — no notion of doing anything other than retaining enrichment for the purpose of weaponizing.”
Nothing to do with reality — neither the reality of what was achieved in Geneva nor the reality of Iran’s position or intentions in the matter of nuclear armaments.
It is easy to dismiss Steve Witkoff as a punk because this is what he is. But he is emblematic of something important, a significant turn, in Washington’s decline into a distrusted, all-but-universally detested diplomatic interlocutor.
Read the above-quoted passage again for its larger implications. Witkoff’s gross distortion of a heavily freighted diplomatic negotiation reads straight out of the hasbara Bibi Netanyahu and his terrorist regime has been peddling for decades.
It would be hard to overstate the significance of this mimicry.
Israel’s diplomatic credibility has long been nonexistent for the simple reason the Zionist state has no interest either in the truth or in negotiating anything with anybody — certainly not with any of its West Asian neighbors.
Mendacity and betrayal of others have long been unmistakable features of the Zionists’ way at statecraft: We are liars. It is our way of rendering diplomacy beside the point. You can count on absolutely nothing we say: This is our power over you. Power is our only language.
This has rendered the Zionist regime a diplomatic nullity. The world always awaits the breach that will follow anything to which it commits.
Its just-announced plan to enter talks with the Lebanese government, apparently in response to European protests, is a ready-to-hand case in point: They will come to nothing; whatever is said or agreed, whatever others may insist, the bombing will continue.
And Trump, in his regime’s serial dishonesty these past weeks, has reshaped the conventions of American diplomacy in the Israeli fashion. He has turned the United States into the same sort of pariah — never to be trusted, fundamentally unserious in its dealings with others.
Following the Zionist state over the years, my mind sometimes goes to the old tale of the scorpion and the frog. Readers will know it, surely. After the frog consents warily to take the scorpion across the river, the latter breaks his word and stings the frog. “But you promised not to sting me,” the frog exclaims. And the scorpion gets the punch line: “But you knew it is in my nature to sting.”
This has long been Israel’s story. Now it is America’s. As Duncan Moench put it, there is no turning back from this.
Original article: consortiumnews.com
