It doesn't matter what the agreements between Washington and Tehran will lead to; what we know so far is that American President Donald Trump is reshaping an agreement considered bad by Israel and seeks to present it to regional countries as a historic transformation worthy of Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Lebanon, closing the chapter of conflict and opening one of comprehensive peace with Israel.

For his part, Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei does not view the matter with the rosy outlook implied by the American president. On Tuesday, Khamenei announced to the world that regional states “will no longer be shields” for American bases, and that “the clock cannot be turned back.

While Trump assures regional countries in the Arab and Islamic spheres of the dominance of American peace in the post-Iran war world, Iran, through its Leader, signals to the world that following a war in which Trump declared victory, the United States “not only fails to find a safe spot for carrying out evil and establishing military bases in the region, but is also losing its former status day by day.”

Washington and Tehran appear to be conspiring to craft an imagined post-war future. Leaked details of the agreement indicate that Iran has not relinquished its capability to develop a nuclear bomb, and there is no mention of any clause addressing the future of Iran’s ballistic missile program or its structural and existential ties to the “axis” and the remnants of its dispersed armaments.

It seems that Iran and the United States have opted to either cancel or postpone the conflict, instead focusing discussions on money, assets, sanctions, and restrictions, and to pass whatever can save face for the warring parties.

Iran boasts in its claims of victory and its promise to expel Washington’s bases from the region. Tehran possesses nothing but those empty, formulaic political speeches carried in the text of the new leader, the son of the late leader, which somewhat leak into the latest speech of the sheikh of Hezbollah in Lebanon, itself a copy of the words of the party’s late leader before him.

Iran, logically, economically, and militarily, as well as its confused arms in Iraq, its fractured ones in Lebanon, its devastated ones in Gaza, its silent ones in Yemen, and its defeated ones in Syria, has nothing left but mourning over ruins, stubbornness, and denial.

New balance of power

It can be said that the Iranian war has ended, at least temporarily, in a regional and international scene whose features are becoming clearer day by day. The war has revealed new balances of power in the position of China and Russia, in the positioning of Europe, and in what the leadership of the United States and its surplus power will ultimately become. And although Iran knows nothing but claims of victory, it has nevertheless suffered a disaster that may have far-reaching consequences within the country and within the ranks of its improvised leadership.

And although Israel is escaping the dilemma of its shattered dreams of the United States going to the extreme limits to eliminate the Iranian “challenge,” toward new wars in Lebanon and compensatory measures in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, this is because Israel and its government under Benjamin Netanyahu conclude that the Middle East remains resistant, and not because of Iran alone, to the change that Netanyahu had promised Israelis and threatened the countries of the region with.

The American–Israeli war against Iran has not ended with outcomes that Washington can build on to change this world. The region is now facing questions that go beyond the boundaries of the Islamic, Arab, and Gulf spheres regarding strategic security, which appears threatened and in need of a reconsideration of its internal and shared factors.

And while Washington is arranging a bilateral deal that may not be far from the 2015 agreement when Barack Obama was in the White House, countries of the region face the task of producing their own locally specific agreement, one that, collectively if possible, can master the rules of coexistence with Iran, which cannot change, and which draws from the warnings of the new leader a doctrine of dominance over a neighborhood that may find in the Islamabad deal material for a present it can use to interpret its departing past.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the writers are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Annahar.