The art of not losing
Developments
- The Iranians couldn’t win the war—so how’d they win the terms?
- The drones close in on another Sudanese city—and so far, no one can stop them. … Astronomers pin a radio beacon that flares every 90 minutes on a white dwarf bleeding its neighbor. … & Reading the human genome over 10,000 years, it seems we are still evolving—possibly faster than ever.
Features
- Why do so many people hate the idea of capitalism? Justin Callais on a shifting mood—and the enduring popular support for the reality of the free market.
- How’s the green transition going? Thea Riofrancos on the politics the technology can’t solve.
From the files
- What would it take to build AI that serves human beings? Daron Acemoglu on the hype and reality of a potentially transformative technology.
- How secure is Mexico for the World Cup? Benjamin Smith on the cartels, the state, and the war between them.
- What do drones do to a war? Robert Hamilton on the high-tech transformation of the modern battlefield—and the inevitability of a high-pressure deadlock.
Books
- Could anything knock the U.S. dollar off its perch? Barry Eichengreen, Money Beyond Borders: Global Currencies from Croesus to Crypto.
Music
- What’s Rock Action Records?
- & New tracks from Arab Strap, Daniel Lanois, Tyondai Braxton, Kevin Morby, Memorials, Ed O’Brien, Feeble Little Horse, Speedy J, & Eddy Current Suppression Ring.
+ Weather report
- The rain belt’s moving north, as millions cross their fingers …
Developments
Good faith
On Wednesday, at a small table set up inside the Palace of Versailles, with France’s President Emmanuel Macron looking on, U.S. President Donald Trump signed a 14-point memorandum of understanding to end his country’s war with Iran. The president of the Islamic Republic, Masoud Pezeshkian, held up his own signed copy for the cameras—in Tehran. The document lifts the U.S. naval blockade within 30 days, restores commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz—as more people than ever may now know, the channel for roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil—frees Iran’s frozen funds, clears its oil back onto the market, and sets sanctions to lapse on a schedule. On the nuclear program Washington has emphasized the strikes were meant to dismantle, the memorandum promises only that enrichment and the stockpile will be settled “mutually”—and indeterminately later—with Iran’s program held at “the current status quo.”
Most Western news coverage has focused on Trump—the win he’s claiming, or the thin deal his critics are mocking. Less of it’s reckoned with the outcome: the country this war was meant to strip of its nuclear program emerged with the program intact, the blockade on it gone, its oil flowing globally, and Washington pledging US$300 billion toward putting it back together.
Iran spent 100 days under attack by the most powerful military in human history and got these terms.
How?
- Hormuz set the clock. Iran never really had to win the war; it had to make the war expensive. Its lever was in the Strait of Hormuz—and the first thing the memorandum restores is the traffic through it. Every week the strait stayed shut, the price of oil spoke on Tehran’s behalf. The U.S. Republican senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who opposes the deal, named the mechanism plainly: Iran, he says, had learned it can “leverage threats to the Strait of Hormuz.” The longer the war ran, the more Washington needed it to end. Iran could afford to wait.
- The Gulf wouldn’t host the war. The Arab Gulf states spent the whole time absorbing Iranian strikes on their ports and oil facilities, and concluded a contained Iran beat a cornered one. Now, they’re declining to pay for the reconstruction the memorandum promises. “Major powers negotiate with Iran,” one Gulf security analyst has put it, “but Gulf states live with Iran.” Washington can sign the MoU and move on; Abu Dhabi, Doha, and Riyadh can’t. Iran’s deterrent, in the end, was partly its neighbors’ exhaustion—and ultimate refusal to keep hosting someone else’s war.
- Survival was the victory. The strikes degraded Iran’s nuclear program but didn’t end it: The stockpile is still there, frozen where the war left it. The apparent U.S.-Israeli plan to topple the Iranian leadership failed. And by the MoU’s logic, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—Iran’s elite military force—came out of the fighting with more sway within the Islamic Republic, not less. For a state that began this war as the weaker party, the goal was never equivalent to Washington’s; Tehran only had to survive—in power, armed, enriching its uranium. And it did.
Half a century ago, the political scientist Andrew Mack asked why big nations ever lose small wars; his answer was that the greater power always has more to lose—and less stamina for the fight; so the weaker side can prevail, just by refusing to break. The United States saw it in Vietnam, then Afghanistan. On the bomb, Iran has done what North Korea did before it: It maintained just enough of an unfinished weapons program—and just enough of the threat of finishing it—to win sanctions relief, a return to the oil market, and time. The hard questions—how much enriched uranium Iran keeps, who inspects it, etc.—dissolve into “further talks” that may or may not ever happen.
The palace where Trump signed the MoU this week is the same venue where the victors of the First World War imposed reparations on a defeated Germany in 1919—terms historians have ever since blamed for what came after. This time, Iran stands to collect.
None of which means Iran is strong. Its economy is wrecked, its proxies thinned, its cities hit; its nuclear program set back—if conspicuously not-ended. But it also appears to be benefiting from $300 billion (billion) in reparations. That wouldn’t be defeat in any ordinary sense. And it’s almost certainly the most defining ambiguity of the situation: Its MoU with the United States seems based on an American wager that the fund it’s (somehow) setting up will buy restraint—that an Iran with something to lose will stop reaching for the things that prompt the U.S. and Israel to attack it in the first place.
The Gulf states, which the Americans, rightly or not, seem to expect will largely foot the $300 billion bill, suspect that it’s going to buy the opposite—that cash freed up elsewhere is going to rearm the militias in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen. And Israel, which appears uninterested in the American memorandum, says it’s going to keep striking these militias—and stop the Iranian bomb regardless of what the Americans do.
Meanwhile
- A deadlier phase. In El Obeid, the central Sudanese city where drones have been hitting water plants and clinics, they haven’t let up. The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, an atrocity monitor, recorded strikes from June 10 that killed at least 30 people in and around the city, one strike landing on a funeral. The Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group that’s at war with Sudan’s army, are massing to encircle El Obeid—the hub linking the capital Khartoum to the Darfur region—before the rains slow a ground assault. (See the weather report, below.) On June 15, the United Nations human-rights office determined that drones had killed more than 1,000 civilians in Sudan this year. Outside suppliers keep arming both sides—and any governments that could stop them, haven’t. … See “Safe distance.”
- A dead star, keeping time. Astronomers have spent years stuck on “long-period radio transients”—bursts of radio waves that repeat over minutes or hours, far too slowly for the spinning neutron stars usually behind them. On June 2, a team led by the University of Sydney in Australia, with confirmation from a telescope in the Chilean Andes, traced one to its source: a binary called ASKAP J1745−5051, where a dead white dwarf and a small red dwarf are whipping around each other in, believe it or not, about an hour and a half—and the first is tearing matter off the second. Where their magnetic fields collide, the radio pulse is firing. Our researchers call the system a Rosetta Stone: Crack one of these signals, and the rest are going to start making sense.
- The unfinished species. Biologists have long assumed that human evolution pretty much halted with human civilization—that is, with culture taking over from natural selection. Well, a Nature study from April—drawing on the DNA of nearly 16,000 people who lived across West Eurasia, today’s Europe and the Middle East—over the past 10,000 years, says otherwise. Since the Ice Age, the geneticist David Reich and his colleagues have found, hundreds of genes kept changing—and the pace kept increasing especially after people took up farming. With a life of grain, dairy, and livestock bringing new diets and new diseases, it seems, our bodies adapted. The best-known case in the study is the gene that lets human adults digest milk—which swept across Europe in just a few thousand years. On an evolutionary clock, that’s yesterday—and apparently, the clock is still running.
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Features
By any other name
Why do so many people hate the idea of capitalism? Justin Callais on a shifting mood—and the enduring popular support for the reality of the free market.
