标签： Asia

As U.S.-Iran ceasefire negotiations progress, Washington’s approach to the talks has come under sharp scrutiny from current and former Western and Arab officials, who argue that President Donald Trump’s decision to link the Abraham Accords peace process to a potential deal is a deliberate distraction from what they call a lopsided negotiating outcome favoring Tehran.

Aaron David Miller, a veteran former U.S. Middle East negotiator now serving as a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Middle East Eye that Trump is well aware the emerging agreement undermines every core war objective he laid out after launching the conflict against Iran in February. To offset this weakness, Miller says the president is seeking to frame the talks as part of a broader, more ambitious regional breakthrough.

“This is a typical Trump ploy,” Miller noted.

The tentative deal currently under discussion would extend the existing fragile 60-day ceasefire between the two countries. Under the proposed terms, Iran would agree to reopen the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz — where the U.S. has imposed a competing naval blockade — in exchange for a temporary waiver on crippling oil export sanctions. Critically, the agreement does not address Iran’s expanding ballistic missile program, which The New York Times reports has already recovered to 70% of its pre-war capacity.

When Trump launched the U.S. offensive against Iran in February, he offered conflicting justifications for the decision. At various points, he framed the war as an effort to block Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, destroy the country’s conventional military infrastructure, or achieve full regime change in the Islamic Republic.

In a recent social media post, Trump stated that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium would either be transferred to the U.S. for destruction or eliminated at an “acceptable location” through a joint process. Many regional analysts interpreted the second option as a significant U.S. concession, opening the door for third parties such as China or Russia to oversee the process.

Despite repeated White House claims that a final deal is within reach, the fragile existing truce showed clear signs of fraying this week. On Tuesday, Iran leveled accusations of “flagrant” ceasefire violations against the U.S. after American forces carried out airstrikes targeting Iranian missile launchers and naval vessels, and Tehran vowed to launch retaliatory action.

A former senior U.S. administration official speaking to Middle East Eye claimed Trump is operating under the incorrect assumption that Gulf Arab states, which were dragged into the conflict and suffered widespread damage from Iranian retaliatory strikes, owe him political concessions in exchange for ending the war.

“Trump’s pitch on the Abraham Accords rests on a mistaken impression that the countries that he ensnared into a war that led to the bombings of their cities and critical infrastructure owe him a favour to conclude the war,” the former official said.

Shortly after holding separate calls with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Pakistan, followed by a separate conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump publicly called on all three countries — which currently lack formal diplomatic relations with Israel — to normalize ties as part of any broader Iran deal.

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has upended long-standing security calculations for Gulf Arab monarchies, which have relied on Washington for decades for their defense. Even before the outbreak of hostilities, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar privately lobbied the U.S. against launching an attack on Iran, but they still bore the full weight of Tehran’s retaliation: thousands of Iranian missiles and drones targeted their urban centers, energy infrastructure, and the U.S. military bases hosted on their territory.

In the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of war, most Gulf states granted the U.S. expanded access to their military bases and permission for overflight of their airspace. According to Reuters, key states including Saudi Arabia and the UAE even directly participated in coalition airstrikes against Iranian targets.

Still, widespread frustration with U.S. policy has emerged across the bloc, even as internal divisions have deepened. Abu Dhabi has at times pushed for a more aggressive military response to Iran, while Riyadh and Doha have prioritized diplomatic mediation to end the conflict.

Regional analysts and former U.S. officials note that the war has sparked urgent, high-level internal debates among Gulf leaders about whether they can continue to rely on long-standing U.S. security guarantees, but Trump has shown little willingness to acknowledge these concerns. At the start of the conflict, Trump made dismissive comments about Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, claiming “didn’t think this was going to happen…he didn’t think he’d be kissing my ass…he thought it’d be just another American president that was a loser…but now he has to be nice to me.”

“The most troubling part of Trump’s approach is that he genuinely thinks these countries owe him if he ends the war,” the former senior U.S. official added.

One senior Arab diplomat based in the region told Middle East Eye that Trump’s push to tie the Abraham Accords to the Iran talks is also aimed at appeasing Netanyahu, who analysts broadly oppose any end to the war against Iran. With Israel set to hold national elections this fall, framing a ceasefire as a breakthrough expansion of the Abraham Accords could help Netanyahu’s bloc politically at the ballot box, the diplomat explained. The move is also designed to shore up support from pro-Israel Republican hardliners in the U.S. Congress, who have openly pushed back against any peace deal.

“If it is perceived in the region that a deal with Iran allows the regime to survive and become more powerful over time, we will have poured gasoline on the conflicts in Lebanon and Iraq,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham wrote on the social platform X after Trump announced a deal was close. Fellow GOP hardliner Senator Ted Cruz has already labeled any prospective peace deal a “disastrous mistake.”

The original Abraham Accords, brokered by Trump during his first term in 2020, saw the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco normalize formal diplomatic relations with Israel, and the president has repeatedly held up the agreement as his signature foreign policy achievement.

Netanyahu has also sought to lean on the Abraham Accords to improve Israel’s global image at a time when the country faces growing international isolation over its war efforts. Earlier this month, his office publicly claimed that the Israeli prime minister had made a wartime visit to the UAE, forcing Abu Dhabi to issue an awkward public denial of the claim.

The Iran war has deepened existing splits among Gulf states over relations with Israel and how to approach Iran. The UAE has moved significantly closer to Israel over the course of the conflict, seeking to build out a new security partnership with the Jewish state. During the war, Israel deployed Iron Dome air defense systems and Israeli military personnel to operate the batteries in the UAE, and Middle East Eye has previously revealed that the two countries have established a joint fund to develop and purchase new advanced weapons systems.

Conversely, Saudi Arabia — which Trump has lobbied unsuccessfully to normalize ties with Israel since his first term — has grown even more skeptical of Israel as a result of the war. Long locked in a subtle regional rivalry with the UAE, Riyadh has recently pivoted to deepen its own defense partnerships with Turkey, Pakistan and Egypt.

“The rivalry between the UAE and Saudi means Saudi Arabia is not going to join the Abraham Accords now. If they do normalise, it’s going to be under a different name,” Miller said. “The UAE has already doubled down [on Israel]. But why would any Gulf state tether itself to the most extreme, right-wing government in Israeli history that is in the process of annexing the West Bank and occupying Lebanon,” he added.

A sudden policy shift from the Trump administration that threatened to upend decades of U.S. immigration procedure has been partially walked back by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), following widespread outrage from legal experts and immigrant advocacy groups.

Last week, the administration issued a new policy guidance memorandum that would have barred most visa holders currently residing in the United States — including international students, temporary skilled workers, refugees, and immigrants married to U.S. citizens — from adjusting their immigration status to permanent resident (green card) without first leaving the country to apply through a U.S. embassy abroad. Under the new rule, many applicants would have faced years-long waiting periods for consular processing, a timeline that would force people to leave their jobs, separate from their families, and abandon hard-won opportunities in the U.S.

The sudden change sparked immediate condemnation across the immigration sector, with critics pointing out that the in-country adjustment of status process has been upheld by federal courts and used by every presidential administration for decades. Just days after the policy was announced, however, USCIS spokesperson Zach Kahler issued a clarification to CBS News, walking back the full scope of the restrictive rule. Kahler noted that applicants whose immigration applications are deemed to provide economic benefit to the U.S. or serve the national interest will still be allowed to complete their green card processing while remaining in the country, while other applicants may be required to pursue consular processing based on their individual circumstances. Kahler had previously referenced exceptions for “extraordinary circumstances” but offered no additional details on what would qualify.

As of the latest update, the agency has not released clear, public criteria to define what qualifies as an economic or national interest benefit, leaving applicants and legal representatives in a state of uncertainty. The policy memo itself frames in-country adjustment of status as a discretionary administrative privilege, rather than a right, that is not intended to replace standard consular immigrant visa processing. The guidance is issued as an internal instruction for USCIS officers tasked with reviewing adjustment of status applications.

Immigration legal experts warn that the policy shift, even with its partial exceptions, carries severe immediate harm for many prospective green card holders. The most immediate risks include prolonged family separation and the permanent loss of career and educational opportunities for people who have already built their lives in the U.S.

Steven Brown, an immigration attorney based in Houston, Texas, criticized the Trump administration’s approach to policy change, describing it as a “fire, ready, aim” strategy that prioritizes headline-making restrictions over thoughtful implementation. “They’ll put something out, get all the headlines, realise ‘we kind of screwed up’, and then work it back a little bit till it’s more of a tenable solution to what’s going on,” Brown explained in an interview with Middle East Eye.

Brown emphasized that the rewrite of the long-standing adjustment of status rule marks a fundamental, historic shift in U.S. immigration policy, but added that the entire change could be reversed by a future administration that takes office in 2029. He also noted that U.S. embassies and consulates abroad lack the institutional resources and on-the-ground documentation capabilities that USCIS, a Department of Homeland Security agency, has built up to conduct thorough national security vetting of applicants. “If we just take the idea of national security and vetting, I think USCIS is better positioned to do that vetting in terms of resources, in terms of what documentation they have, and how they know to interpret that information…USCIS would have the institutional knowledge,” Brown said.

The American Immigration Lawyers Association echoed these criticisms in a post on X last week, noting that both Democratic and Republican administrations have used the in-country adjustment process for decades, and that courts have repeatedly upheld its legality. The organization called the reversal of long-settled policy via internal memo “legally questionable and needlessly chaotic.” Legal challenges to the new policy are expected to be filed in the coming weeks.

In a move that escalates regional military tensions on the Korean Peninsula, North Korea officially announced Wednesday that its latest round of projectile launches carried out Tuesday involved a suite of advanced weapon systems — including a nuclear-capable cruise missile powered by artificial intelligence navigation, which leader Kim Jong Un has ordered deployed to front-line units positioned opposite South Korea. The disclosure comes amid Pyongyang’s sustained push to expand and modernize its nuclear and conventional military capabilities, a years-long effort that has shifted into higher gear in recent years.

The confirmation from North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) followed a Tuesday statement from South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, which first announced it had detected multiple projectiles launched into the peninsula’s western waters, including at least one short-range ballistic missile that traveled approximately 80 kilometers. South Korean officials did not initially identify other weapons tested in the exercise, and did not issue an immediate response to North Korea’s full disclosure of the test components.

According to KCNA’s detailed account, Kim Jong Un personally oversaw Tuesday’s test activities, which featured three distinct types of armaments: ballistic missiles fitted with new warheads engineered for battlefield nuclear deployment, the AI-guided nuclear-capable cruise missiles, and 240-millimeter rocket artillery outfitted with cutting-edge “ultra-precision” navigation systems. The outlet added that Kim expressed full satisfaction with the test results, particularly the performance of the new cruise missile systems, which are earmarked for assignment to front-line long-range artillery units stationed along the inter-Korean border.

Kim further ordered accelerated work to modernize and bolster North Korea’s artillery corps, with the goal of building a force that “no one can match,” KCNA reported.

The latest tests align with a well-documented pattern of escalating military development from Pyongyang that began after 2019, when nuclear diplomacy between Kim and then-U.S. President Donald Trump collapsed without reaching a disarmament agreement. In the years since, Kim has adopted an increasingly hard-line stance toward Seoul, officially branding South Korea North Korea’s “most hostile enemy” and moving to sever decades-old established diplomatic and communication ties between the two nations. Just one week before the latest tests, during a meeting with senior military commanders, Kim outlined plans to strengthen border front-line units as part of a state objective to transform the entire inter-Korean frontier into “an impregnable fortress,” per prior KCNA reports.

In recent years, Kim has also reshaped North Korea’s foreign policy orientation, leaning heavily into closer alignment with Moscow. Multiple open-source and Western intelligence reports confirm that North Korea has supplied thousands of troops and massive shipments of conventional weapons to Russia to support its ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Pyongyang has also sought to deepen its longstanding economic and strategic partnership with China, its primary ally and main economic lifeline, while framing itself as a core member of a growing global counter-Washington bloc.

Despite former President Trump’s repeated public calls to restart bilateral diplomacy with Kim, Pyongyang has rejected all such overtures to date, maintaining that Washington must first drop its requirement that North Korea commit to nuclear disarmament as a precondition for any renewed negotiations.

There is a distinctive hush that settles over policy circles and media airwaves after the first thunder of a new war fades. It is the quiet of think tank analyses being pulled from public view, of confident cable news predictions scrubbed from on-screen banners, of bold promises that “this conflict will be different” crashing headlong into the unyielding truth that, more often than not, it never is. Three months into the open war with Iran, that silence now rings louder than the steady thud of bombing raids across the region.

It is critical that we revisit the core promises made by the war’s champions before the first strike, because we owe it to ourselves to hold to account the assumptions that brought us to this moment. Proponents of the conflict laid out a clear, optimistic roadmap: the offensive would be surgically precise, they argued, and Iran’s already weakened regime would shatter under pressure. Years of crippling sanctions, the decimation of Hezbollah’s deterrent capabilities, and the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Damascus had left Tehran isolated and fragile, they claimed, and it would fold quickly under concentrated military force.

Worse still, war backers insisted that the February 28 assassination of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei would spark political upheaval — if not an immediate democratic “Persian Spring”, then at minimum a cowed, compliant new leadership willing to bend to Western demands. They promised that American military resolve would keep the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most critical energy chokepoint, open for global shipping. Gulf Arab monarchies, despite public ambivalence, would quietly back the campaign, they claimed, and a single well-timed push would spark mass uprising on the Iranian street that would finish the job of regime change for Washington.

Today, every one of these core assumptions lies in ruins, undone by a single shared structural flaw: the dangerous conflation of a regime’s fragility with willingness to comply. These two traits are not interchangeable. A wounded nation is not a docile one. When a regime loses its founding, unifying charismatic leader, it does not automatically liberalize — as Iran’s new Interim Leadership Council has shown, it can instead harden its position, decentralize decision-making, and become far less predictable and open to negotiation than the old order ever was. War hawks mistakenly confused the absence of one single decision-maker with the total absence of cohesive decision-making, a mistake that has upended every subsequent military and political calculation.

The second catastrophic miscalculation was the theory that Iran would limit its retaliation to preserve its own survival. War planners argued that Tehran would calibrate its response to avoid total annihilation, absorbing heavy blows while only lashing out symbolically before returning to negotiations on terms favorable to Washington and Jerusalem.

This was always a baffling assumption to make about an adversary that spent 20 years building an entire strategic doctrine centered on proxies, long-range missiles, and maritime harassment specifically designed to make limited war impossible. This fact was included in every U.S. Central Command briefing for two decades, but when the time came to launch the offensive, planners insisted Iran would behave according to a Western definition of “rational” action, not the framework shaped by Tehran’s own ideological and strategic priorities.

The results are impossible to ignore. Iran has now launched strikes on American military bases across Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, and Iraq. Yemen’s Houthi movement has closed the Bab el-Mandeb, another critical global shipping lane connecting the Mediterranean and Red Sea to the Indian Ocean. The Strait of Hormuz only operates intermittently, at Iran’s unilateral sufferance. This outcome was never a surprise; it was widely predicted by critics before the war ever began.

The third miscalculation centered on the supposed regional coalition backing the campaign. The war’s architects genuinely believed the Abraham Accords had created more than a temporary, transactional set of relationships between Israel and Gulf Arab states. They assumed that the Gulf’s quiet long-standing animosity toward Tehran would translate into open, active participation in an American-led war. It has not.

Saudi Arabia allowed the U.S. to use its airspace for strike operations, but within 48 hours, Riyadh was on the phone with Beijing seeking diplomatic mediation. Pakistan, bound by a long-standing defense pact with Saudi Arabia, has spent the past 10 weeks caught between competing interests, attempting to mediate a ceasefire it has no power to enforce while trying to protect irreconcilable strategic equities on both sides. Turkey has opted for strategic hedging, refusing to commit fully to either camp. Even the UAE, which intercepted Iranian missiles aimed at its territory, has simultaneously expanded trade corridors with Tehran’s key commercial partners. This is not a functioning coalition. It is a region scrambling desperately to avoid being dragged into a catastrophic conflict by its own American security guarantor.

The fourth miscalculation — and the one that will be hardest for war defenders to confront — is that no one ever clearly defined what “victory” would actually look like. Tracing the official justifications for the war reveals shifting goalposts that change by the week: first, it was to degrade Iran’s nuclear program; then to restore Western deterrence in the region; then to force regime change; now it is to reassert American global primacy. These are not just different objectives — they are often incompatible with one another. When a war’s stated purposes multiply as its human and economic costs mount, it is clear that its architects had no clear idea of what they wanted to achieve before they ordered the first strike.

This is not a minor quibble. It is the core failure of the entire enterprise. Carl von Clausewitz, the foundational theorist of modern war, wrote extensively about the danger of launching military campaigns without a clear, achievable political objective — and every word of his warning has proven correct here.

The fifth and final miscalculation concerned American public opinion. War supporters assured themselves and the public that the absence of a large-scale U.S. ground troop commitment would keep the conflict politically manageable at home. They are now learning what U.S. policymakers learned in 1965 in Vietnam, in 1991 and again in 2003 in Iraq: wars that begin with airstrikes never end with airstrikes. They end with returning troop coffins, crippling naval blockades, global energy price shocks, and a public that eventually begins to ask the fundamental question: who even authorized this war in the first place?

The ongoing naval blockade of Iran, the collapsed ceasefire talks in Islamabad, the growing risk of escalation across the Lebanese front: none of these outcomes were mentioned to the American public when they were sold this conflict. The current reality is nothing like the clean, quick war voters were promised.

This commentary takes no pleasure in being proven right by disaster. The realist foreign policy tradition does not celebrate vindication that comes at the cost of regional chaos and rising human suffering. It would far prefer to have been ignored quietly, proven correct only in an unread footnote of policy analysis.

Yet it has become a repeated pattern of Washington’s foreign policy establishment to mistake the absence of immediate cost for the total absence of cost. They confuse the quiet that precedes consequences for the absence of consequences entirely. Iran’s deliberate restraint in 2024 and 2025 was read in Washington as a sign of weakness. It should have been recognized for what it was: strategic patience.

In time, the war’s defenders will fall back on the same excuses they always produce after failed campaigns: the core plan was sound, only the execution was flawed; the Iranians refused to behave as they were supposed to; regional allies were unreliable; the White House held back from committing enough force; the American public lacked sufficient resolve. From these excuses, they will draw the same wrong lesson: that next time, the U.S. must be more committed, more unified, and more willing to do whatever it takes to win.

But these are the lessons you draw when you refuse to learn the actual, harder lesson that has been available to policymakers for generations: the Middle East is not a problem to be solved by outside military force. Iran is a sovereign nation with its own history, politics, and ideology, not just a target set for American bombs. The gap between what American military power can destroy and what it can build remains the central, unhealed flaw of U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War era.

We were warned about these mistakes before the first strike. Today, those warnings are history. The only question that matters now is what we will do with the warnings that are still to come.