GUEST BLOG: Professor Junaid Ahmad – Trump’s ‘Memorandum of Surrender’: An Empire Battered, Bluffing, and Buying Time
“Donald Trump is not negotiating with Iran.”
“He is negotiating with the humiliation of having failed to break it.”
“Iran endured the pressure, preserved its strategic leverage and forced the most powerful empire on earth to negotiate with the country it had promised to bring to its knees.”
“For an empire addicted to command, the inability to compel surrender is defeat.”
“Trump’s response is therefore not to honor the agreement, but to hollow it out. Accept the document. Rewrite its meaning. Violate its logic.
Impose new demands. Then accuse Iran of sabotaging peace.”
“The Strait of Hormuz is where this revisionism becomes geography. The attempt to reroute shipping through Omani waters is not a neutral administrative adjustment. It is an effort to strip Iran of the leverage that forced Washington to negotiate at all.”
“The real demand is that Iran tolerate a hostile military order on its doorstep, surrender its principal strategic pressure point and accept that its sovereignty exists only when it is politically useless.”
“Iran may possess rights, provided it never exercises them.”
“Different countries. Different instruments. The same imperial
objective: reverse the political reality produced by war and reconstruct the appearance of American-Israeli supremacy after its material limits have been exposed.”
“Israel’s role is not secondary. It is central, relentless and poisonous.”
“Its political machinery in Washington treats any durable Iranian power as an intolerable violation of the regional hierarchy. It does not seek security in any reciprocal sense. It seeks permanent superiority: Iran contained, Lebanon vulnerable, Syria fractured and the Gulf militarized without end.”
“Trump is the ideal salesman for this arrangement because his greatest political talent is not victory, but the theatrical conversion of failure into triumph.”
“He needs a camera, a slogan and a captive press corps. If the battlefield will not produce surrender, the press conference must counterfeit it.”
“But Iran has already achieved what Washington was determined to
prevent: it survived, preserved deterrence and forced the empire to confront the limits of its power.”
“That is a strategic victory.”
“Iran did not merely resist an attack. It exposed the distance between imperial spectacle and imperial capacity.”
“It demonstrated that the United States and Israel can devastate, sanction and threaten, but cannot automatically dictate the political outcome.”
“Trump wants Iran to surrender the leverage that defeated his strategy so he can announce that he won.”
“Iran’s task is to deny him the fiction.”
“To preserve its rights, consolidate its gains and make clear that the empire’s declaration is not reality.”
Junaid S. Ahmad
Professor of Law, Religion, and Global Politics
Director, Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID)
Islamabad, Pakistan
Well said Prof Junaid Ahmad. It’s clear as day that Trump is definitely not mentally stable and hasn’t been this term! He is missing a heart, a soul, a working brain and is unable to join even the simplest of dots now. There is no empathy, compassion or understanding and these necessary human ingredients are also fast going missing in Luxon. You can’t run a country in such a cruel, despotic manner and expect to get away with it. He is “finished” as a politician and should be stood down now for the safety of the entire world. While I don’t like Iran’s way of running a country either, they have shown unbelievable patience and have beaten Trump at his own cruel, sick game. Bring in closure for all of us so we can get back to saving our world from the climate catastrophes about to hit us.