The 2nd Renaissance

Life is about defying conventions

[The 2nd Renaissance @2ndRenny]

The new Silk Road

[Clash Report @clashreport]

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian:

If we did not have our missiles, which are for our self-defense, Israel and America would have plowed through Iran the way Gaza was plowed through, and they would have shown no mercy to the old or the young.

They speak of human rights. It is a great lie.

If we could not defend ourselves, they certainly would not have shown mercy to our country and would have destroyed our power.

Therefore, we will never, under any circumstances, negotiate with anyone over our defensive capabilities.

[Acyn @Acyn]

CNN doing a side by side of Vance and Obama talking about nuclear inspections

[Democratic Wins Media @DemocraticWins]

BREAKING: In a humiliating moment, the leader of Qatar’s negotiating team just completely ignored JD Vance. These negotiations are going horribly and once again the Trump Administration is making the US the laughing stock of the world.

[Amjad Taha أمجد طه @amjadt25]

This was humiliation. No one in modern history has made America wait and beg for negotiations. This was the moment JD Vance should have returned to Washington. The Islamic regime did this on purpose. Trump, if you don't understand politics, you should at least understand protocol.

The visuals from Switzerland:

• The U.S. delegation entered well before the Iranians. In diplomacy, the side with leverage doesn't wait in the room. You claim to be leading and winning, yet you arrived first. First mistake.

• Ghalibaf did not enter while the press was inside. JD Vance did. Another mistake. It looked as though you didn't just abandon allies, including Israel, you also diminished America's image by ignoring basic diplomatic protocol.

• The Iranian foreign minister entered last and refused to shake hands. We didn't need photographs to tell us who looked confident and who looked desperate, but these images made it easy for the world to draw its own conclusions.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

👇
https://t.co/PJiJEiQ5wu

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Yet another absolutely perfect example of how Western leaders don't understand China at all, and how that's ultimately detrimental... to them.

The "Plaza Accord" is pretty much universally seen in China as the textbook case of Western economic imperialism - the moment America weaponized currency policy to kneecap Japan. And, case in point, it's widely seen as the trigger for Japan's so-called "lost decades."

Plus there's of course the profound idiocy of telling the Chinese you want to treat them like the Japanese...

Explicitly saying that's your objective is just about the single best thing you can say to rally all of China against whatever it is you're proposing.

Src for article: https://t.co/1wwF2aZ3s4

[Furkan Gözükara @FurkanGozukara]

🚨 BREAKING: CNN confirms the Trump administration has completely drained the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve to its lowest level since 1983!

Washington's disastrous Iran war has left America entirely defenseless.

Cushing's massive pipelines are literally running dry!

[Ryan Rozbiani @RyanRozbiani]

This Clip Will Go Down in History

"We are waiting for them!"

[Clash Report @clashreport]

Trump on April 1: We're now totally independent of the Middle East. We don't need their oil.

Trump on June 17: If I didn't agree to the MOU, we would run out of reserves in about 4 weeks.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Back in March I wrote 👇 that Iran was winning, and not only strategically but tactically too, but I genuinely didn't expect it would eventually lead - 3 months later - to a complete US surrender.

Because, make no mistake, this is what the "deal" that was just signed is: a complete US surrender, the likes of which it has never signed in its entire history.

Let's compare it with the 2 other most famous US capitulation agreements: the Paris Peace Accords with Vietnam in 1973 and the Doha Agreement with Afghanistan in 2020.

The most significant difference is that both the Vietnam and Afghanistan deals, despite being documents in which the US effectively conceded defeat, contained at least some face-saving provisions for the US.

For instance, in the Vietnam deal, North Vietnam accepted the continued existence of the South Vietnamese government, promised peaceful reunification, agreed to maintain the 17th parallel as a dividing line, and accepted international supervision. These were real (if ultimately unenforceable and unenforced) concessions.

Same thing with the Taliban: they guaranteed Afghan soil would never again be used to attack America, and agreed to negotiate a political settlement with the then Kabul government. The latter commitment was never seriously pursued - but both existed and gave the US a narrative: at least it could claim its post-9/11 objective had been secured on paper.

The deal with Iran is completely different: it doesn't contain a single meaningful concession from Iran. The reopening of the Strait of Hormuz is merely the reversal of a wartime measure they took in response to the US-Israeli attack. And the "reaffirmation" that Iran won't build nuclear weapons is just this: a reaffirmation of a position Tehran has had for decades.

As a reminder, there is a 2003 fatwa by Khamenei that forbids the production and use of any form of weapon of mass destruction, so "reaffirming" it costs Iran exactly nothing.

Meanwhile, the list of concessions and costs on the US side is staggering:
- Permanent end to the war on all fronts, including Lebanon
- A US pledge to respect Iran's sovereignty and not interfere in its internal affairs
- Full lifting of the naval blockade
- Withdrawal of all US forces from the region within 30 days after the final agreement
- A $300 billion reconstruction and development fund for Iran
- Termination of all sanctions: UN, IAEA, and every unilateral US sanction, primary and secondary
- Immediate Treasury waivers for Iranian oil exports and all related banking, insurance, and shipping services
- Full release of all frozen Iranian funds and assets, to be spent however Iran's central bank sees fit

So very concretely this is the US agreeing to 1) end the war and withdraw its forces, 2) end all hostile measures towards Iran that were in place before the war (the sanctions, the frozen funds, the interference in internal affairs, etc.), and 3) send hundreds of billions of dollars in what are, effectively, war reparations.

If that's not a complete surrender, I genuinely don't know what is.

And, cherry on the cake, in an absolutely perfect touch of historical irony, Trump literally signed this surrender agreement in Versailles (I'm not kidding: https://t.co/VLSduQtRJW).

History rhymes, but rarely this loudly, all the more because the historical 1919 Versailles Treaty was also signed in June!

Of course, it's fair - very fair, even - to suspect that Trump will not honor this deal. If he's proven anything in his political career, it's that he is agreement-incapable. Plus there's the Israel dimension: the document does say that the war should "end on all fronts, including Lebanon," but Israel has already made clear it considers itself unbound by the agreement.

As such, what I suspect will happen - as I wrote the day the MOU was announced (https://t.co/Hbh669Gvta) - is that the deal will split in two. The immediate concessions - blockade lifted, oil flowing, funds unfrozen - will happen (some already have) and probably stick, because reversing them would mean restarting the very war the US humiliatingly lost.

The deferred provisions - the negotiations on nuclear, the sanctions schedule, the reconstruction fund - will probably enter permanent limbo because, as I wrote then, the US won't get better terms on nuclear after showing they couldn't get them on the battlefield. And given sanctions relief and the $300 billion are tied to a final deal that requires resolving the nuclear question, and the nuclear question requires leverage the US no longer has, the whole structure is circular and never-ending.

On the Israel-Lebanon question, things are trickier. Israel, in some way, finds itself in a South Vietnam situation with its patron having negotiated a surrender over its head. The difference is that Thieu was too weak to sabotage the Paris Accords, whereas Netanyahu isn't: his ability to escalate in Lebanon gives him a de facto veto over the deal's most fragile provision.

Realistically speaking though, it's hard to imagine the US willing to restart the war, which is its own form of deterrence: if Israel keeps striking Lebanon in violation of the ceasefire, Iran can now retaliate with far greater confidence that the US won't come to the rescue - which ought to give Israel pause.

In effect, the end result is that the US security umbrella over Israel just got a lot thinner. Which means that, for the first time in a long time, Israel has to calculate the cost of provoking Iran without assuming the US will absorb the consequences. This points towards restraint, at least for any rational actor. But then again, the same government that dragged the US into this war in the first place has not exactly been a model of strategic rationality...

In any case, it's undeniable that Iran has just achieved something no other country has managed, ever: it withstood the full force of the US and Israeli military machines, and extracted a surrender agreement that makes the Paris Peace Accords look like a US victory by comparison.

To refer back to the title of my article below 👇: this was the first multipolar war, and Iran has definitely earned its place as one of the poles.

[The Hormuz Letter @HormuzLetter]

BREAKING: Iran's Parliament Speaker Ghalibaf declared Iran has "sovereign rights in the Strait" of Hormuz, "will charge fees for services provided," and the strait "will never return to pre-war conditions under any circumstances," confirming Iran's permanent control following the just-signed MOU, per Tasnim.

[Financelot @FinanceLancelot]

President Trump admits he's manipulating the stock market with fake news... Incredible

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Trump on Iran: "The unfreezing -- we have taken a lot of their money. It's not our money. At a certain point in time, I guess we're gonna have to give it back."

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🇺🇸🇮🇷 Trump admits why he had no choice but to end the war:

"We would have run out of [oil] reserves in about 4 weeks."

Writer: Mhedi

[Robert A. Pape @ProfessorPape]

Trump admits he buckled to the pressure of a global economic collapse

This is another way saying Iran has all the leverage —and will going forward

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

Australian World Cup fans were caught chanting:

“Aussie boys are on a bender, Donald Trump is a sex offender.”

The tournament is barely underway and the chants are already in midseason form. 💀

[Acyn @Acyn]

CNN montage of Trump bashing the JCPOA and releasing any money to Iran:

I would have never given him back the money. I would have said, the money is off the table. Let's start negotiating. And you know what? I would have won that negotiation

[Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump]

Iran was on its last legs and ready to collapse until the U.S. came along and gave it a life-line in the form of the Iran Deal: $150 billion

[Iran Observer @IranObserver0]

⚡️BREAKING: JD Vance says Trump never wanted Reza Pahlavi

"President Trump never said that his goal was to install Reza Pahlavi to become leader of Iran"

[Global War Desk @GlobalNewsHQI]

🚨 THIS MAY HAVE BEEN THE MOST EMBARRASSING MOMENT FOR THE US NARRATIVE YET 😭🔥

🇺🇸 Pete Hegseth: “We’ve controlled the Strait this whole time.”

🇺🇸 Journalist Margaret: “Then why the hell has Trump spent 102 days begging Iran to reopen it?” 👀⚠️

And just like that…

Pete completely froze. 😭

No answer. No explanation. Just awkward silence and word salad. 🍿🔥

The clip is now exploding online because it exposed the contradiction in seconds:

“If America already controlled everything… why was Washington negotiating with Tehran nonstop?” 🤨

Absolute destruction on live television.