By Conrad Black
The anti-Trump view of world affairs, dictated this week by the Iranian mullahs, will hold that U.S. President Donald Trump has surrendered. It is worth remembering that when Hamas invaded Israel and massacred 1,200 people and kidnapped about 250 others on Oct. 7, 2023, Iran was well on its way toward developing nuclear weapons, hoped that the Hamas invasion of Israel would raise a general revolt in the West Bank and that a flying column would threaten Jerusalem, and stood ready to 
activate a powerful Hezbollah that had an estimated 150,000 rockets ready to fire at Israel. Hamas had 20,000 to 30,000 armed and trained terrorists in Gaza to conduct the war that had been unleashed.
By the heroic efforts of the Israeli Defence Forces, and at historically low levels of collateral damage in urban counter-insurrectionist warfare, Hamas has lost more than half of Gaza and many of its trained terrorist personnel, and Hezbollah’s missile stock has been significantly depleted. Both terrorist groups have suffered severe decapitation of leadership cadres. Iran has lost its nuclear program, it’s navy, its air defences, its leadership and has been severely defeated. The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel has been a disaster for Iran and its allies. Israeli losses have been significant but modest compared to those they have inflicted, and the cost to the United States has been 13 servicemen, barely a third of those lost in liberating the hijacked freighter Mayaguez from Cambodians in 1975 under the Ford administration.
Of course, Iran will, as the Islamic Republic always does, cheat and lie from the beginning of the implementation of the peace agreement, and will attempt to recover everything that it will have pledged to give up. The United States has already declared that it will retain heavy forces in the theatre in the near-term, in order to be able to descend on a moment’s notice on Iran in co-operation with local allies, to punish it and enforce the agreement. President Trump has specifically promised to go back to war over violations. Assuming that a nuclear agreement is promptly agreed to and implacably enforced, the peace will have achieved the primary objectives of denying Iran nuclear weapons while completely reopening the Strait of Hormuz. This may be all it achieves, though positive realignments among the Gulf states and a more cautious attitude from Tehran should also occur. But since Iran is bound to violate whatever (if anything) it signs, this may, at the very least, be considered a satisfactory end of Phase 1. If a second phase is needed, it will be at a more convenient time for the Trump administration than the run-up to midterm elections.
There seems not to be a specific promise to cease bankrolling terrorist activity, particularly on the borders of Israel. But reduction of sanctions and release of frozen assets will be performance-based. There is no more reason to believe any promises from Iran than to imagine that Hamas had any intention of disarming, as it pledged to do in the ceasefire in the Gaza conflict. But America retains extensive deterrence against Iranian backsliding.
After the overwhelming defeat of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and his expulsion from Kuwait in the first Gulf War, in the manner of Muslims who have just been defeated by non-Muslim opponents, he claimed to have been victorious because he was still in power, even though his armed forces had been destroyed and large swaths of his country were a no-fly zone to protect the Kurds from his vengeance. These dictators always claim to have been an underdog facing a barbarous horde of infidels. Any version of regime survival, no matter how diminished its circumstances and humiliating the defeat that has just been inflicted upon it, is proclaimed with stentorian apparent conviction to have been a moral victory. This has already begun and has been taken up by all anti-Trumpers, wheresoever they may be
Former U.S. president Barack Obama said on Sunday that a Trump agreement will be similar to his agreement with Iran. This is false. Under his agreement, Iran was deluged with plane-loads of cash without doing anything at all and was supposed to wait 15 years before it could enrich uranium above 3.67 per cent. Even at that, it failed to honour its agreement to permit inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and was speeding towards the completion of nuclear warheads when interrupted by deep-penetration American bombs last summer. If it had not been for Trump’s intervention then, Iran could be a nuclear power by now, able to deliver nuclear warheads on all of the major capitals of western Europe, if not intercepted by anti-missile defences. The future of the State of Israel would be under daily mortal threat. Trump should not be denied credit for deferring that nightmare sine die, even though our government, in its priggish philistinism, questioned the legality of Trump’s actions (as it sends another $100 million, with almost no strings attached, to the peace-loving Palestinian authorities, bringing that recent total to $500 million. Prime Minister Mark Carney has confirmed that the American action against Iran has been “worth it.”).
Removal of the Iranian nuclear threat has already been another demonstration of the new Trump technique of employing American technical military sophistication and superbly trained personnel and expert espionage that shattered the deep-underground Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities last summer and enabled the removal of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from his palace in Caracas to a New York house of correction, both without a single American combat fatality. The U.S inflicted very heavy damage on Iran, with small Israeli and minimal American casualties. The Trump method of achieving extraordinarily ambitious strategic objectives with zero or minimal American combat deaths is intact. The air defence systems Iran had bought from the Russians and Chinese was revealed as completely inadequate and was reduced to Swiss cheese by the U.S. and Israeli air forces. The Kremlin, with its more than a million casualties, tens of thousands of deserters and several hundred thousand draft evaders, as it flails about in its fifth year in a corner of Ukraine, may wish to contemplate the correlation of forces, before President Vladimir Putin’s delusions of being Peter the Great or Stalin recreating a Greater Russia propel him completely over the cliff.
President Trump never explained the dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran adequately to the country and his oscillations between dire threats and imminent peace became tiresome. The claims of U.S. Vice-President J.D. Vance and others of an imminent new dawn of peace in the Middle East do not deserve a great deal of credence, and are, at the least, premature. But any plausible outcome of this war, whether it has to be resumed or not, is likely to be a major strategic victory in denying Iran nuclear weapons, driving a number of Arab states into the arms of a more secure Israel, permanently reopening navigation in the Gulf and curtailing Iran’s ability to generate terrorism, all at minimal cost in American lives.
First published in the National Post
