Martin Jay
Israel is running the show, and Trump is the mall security guard pretending he has authority before the cops arrive.
Lebanon continues to play a central, if not key, role in the peace of the Middle East which Donald Trump badly needs if he is to pull off the ultimate bluff - that he, and only he alone, has mastered a unique new deal with Iran which makes the U.S. a winner in the war and that it was Trump himself as the peace broker who made it happen.
When the Lebanese president Joseph Aoun meets with Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House, it will be a truly historic meeting. And yes, Trump can say that he made it happen. The problem, though, is the layers of complexity in the whole arrangement which Trump himself doesn't really understand. Firstly, the president of Lebanon is, at best, an envoy or a messenger to the main power in Lebanon which is at the heart of the problem: Hezbollah. Lebanon has a state within a state whereby Hezbollah is more powerful than the puppet government which gives its citizens the impression of having the auspices of a functioning state. Even though after the fall of Assad in Syria Hezbollah was weakened when its leaders were killed, the Lebanese group still has plenty of fight left, and in many ways the occupation of the south of the country is what its leaders have always hoped for, as it gives its own fighters a fairer chance of winning against Israel's IDF infantry which is second rate, at best. And so any deal struck between Aoun and Netanyahu is provisional, to say the least, as it will be Hezbollah which will decide if it sticks or not. The second big problem with striking a peace deal between Israel and Lebanon is that it will place Netanyahu in a very difficult spot which will force him to go back to bombing Iran. If peace can be sought in Lebanon, then he has no war to use as a pretext for avoiding corruption charges which many believe will remove him from public office. Just like many leaders before him, he is using the war in Lebanon entirely for political capital for his own purposes, and if that particular theatre has to be shut down, he will have no option but to resume bombing Iran, which is really the true story behind the absurd peace talks in Islamabad where the U.S. was never remotely serious about striking a deal.
Of course, Israel played the most important role and decided its fate, although it may have seemed as though J.D. Vance was merely a communications officer relaying the talking points back to Trump. The reality is that there is a nefarious game being played by Israel and the U.S., as neither genuinely wants a permanent ceasefire.
Analysts have underestimated Trump in that he has totally abandoned his own political base, which he promised would never get America into "forever" wars around the world. He has also shown little consideration for the Republican party and probably isn't seeking a third term. He seems to have given up on even pretending that he understands the economy and has the answers to fix it, while his own pitiful ideas about tariffs, for example, have pulled Americans down deeper into a new reality of tougher times, with America losing both its respect and influence around the world.
The only issue with peace talks with Iran is Trump's image. He is desperately looking for a way out of the Iran war whereby he can hawk the exit to a gullible American public as a victory, which is hard given that it is such an egregious defeat on so many levels that even stupid Americans can see that, like Vietnam, Korea and more recently Afghanistan and Iraq, their intervention has blown up in their faces.
CNN claims that Trump was forced to "order" Israel to halt its bombing of Hezbollah just to get Iran to the negotiating table. This may well be true, as it's hard to imagine Iran accepting talks while the Lebanese are being bombed. The Trump administration is relying entirely on Pakistani generals, it claims, "to save their disastrous diplomatic collapse. Total humiliation for Washington."
But CNN, typically, has missed the point. Pakistani generals can arrange the conference hall and the security and even the water bottles, but they can't broker a peace deal which actually no one wants, which is why it is inevitable that bombing Iran will recommence at a certain point, even if Lebanon can be halted, or perhaps despite a peace deal being agreed by its political elite. The blinded dogma of Trump to see the reality of how vulnerable and weak America is in the region is stunning, though. Even battleships being sent to the region are sailing around the southern tip of Africa rather than taking the shorter route through the Suez Canal and Red Sea for fear of the Houthis striking them. It is no longer a fatuous, throwaway line from poor commentators that Trump is probably losing his mind. In recent days he has attacked the Pope, posted pictures of himself on social media as Jesus, and is starting to rant considerably more than normal. Viktor Orbán losing his power in Hungary has certainly rattled him, but now all levels of U.S. society are wondering about his mental state.
The meeting he has set up with leaders of Lebanon and Israel will be presented to journalists as yet another extraordinary victory by Trump. Much emphasis will be placed on Hezbollah's weapons, which is a sign that few if any understand the real problem, which is that Hezbollah is an ideology which the West cannot break. America, let alone the Sunnis, Druze and Christians, doesn't have an endless number of young men who want to die on a battlefield preserving their existential beliefs, which means over the longer period, Israel will be defeated there and have to pull out. It's a pattern which keeps repeating itself, which those so-called journalists whom Trump selects to be in the room with him can't possibly understand. Ideologies and cults need enemies to exist, just as the U.S. arms business needs wars around the world to stay afloat. Hezbollah needs Israel and vice versa for political survival. And Israel always has needed an enemy and set off in the '70s and '80s to find one to serve its hegemonic goals. Originally it found Iraq, but after 1979 latched onto Iran and presented Tehran and its leaders as a tailored hate figure to justify its barbarism and regional objectives and keep people like Bibi in power. It's unlikely that Trump "ordered" Bibi to stop his campaign in Lebanon so that peace talks in Islamabad could go ahead; rather, he pleaded. If you want to try and understand what happened in Islamabad or in Lebanon - or even the meeting in Washington between Bibi and Aoun - stop focusing on Trump. Israel is running the show, and Trump is the mall security guard pretending he has authority before the cops arrive.