Alastair Crooke – The Unz Review June 22, 2026
Trump’s Iran deal shatters Israel’s 40-year dream of regime change.
The Iran-U.S. de-escalation framework has been signed. As always, getting a framework agreed is one thing, but preserving it from disruptive actors or malicious distortion of the text is quite another. Who knows how long it will survive intact? The MoU nonetheless constitutes an important phase – albeit one leg – in a long journey ahead for Iran. The Agreement however, may also prompt wider geo-economic ‘plate’ shifts.
Iran has succeeded in pushing a reluctant Trump to cross the Rubicon. Danny Citrinowicz, a former senior Israeli Iran military intelligence analyst, says that for Trump,
“achieving a deal with Iran and ending the current cycle of escalation is not merely an option but a clear strategic goal … He now envisions a broader vision of U.S.–Iran relations”.
An unquestioned dogma has bitten the dust:
“The long-standing expectation in parts of Jerusalem and Washington has been that sustained pressure could lead to regime change in Tehran … [However] the announced agreement suggests a [new] fundamental reality: The campaign that many hoped would weaken or even destabilise the Islamic Republic will instead conclude with the regime intact, strengthened, and formally engaged by the U.S. … [This] amounts to the collapse of a broader strategic assumption: that coordinated American and Israeli pressure could generate conditions conducive to fundamental political change inside Iran. Instead, the likely outcome is the opposite … [it is] an outcome likely to reinforce confidence amongst [Iran’s] ruling elite rather than weaken it …”.
This moment represents a major strategic achievement for Iran: A heroic image is surging across the globe – whereas Israel’s isolation on the Iran issue, even amongst its Gulf allies, has spiked. On the personal level, Netanyahu’s standing in Israel has plunged catastrophically.
Of course, the ‘Understanding’ may quickly unravel – Trump is prone to sudden changes of mind, and the full force of the U.S. Zionist billionaire class is being unleashed against Trump, compelling him to change course (perhaps through the former working to mobilise opposition in Congress and the Senate).
Both are possible, but the reality of Trump having actually come to agreement – however tentative – with Iran underlines a growing divergence between Trump and Israel. And Netanyahu’s attempt to sever the linkage between the MoU and any ceasefire in Lebanon (by mounting an attack in Dahhiya in Beirut on Sunday) paradoxically achieved the opposite – Trump promptly improved the terms of the MoU for Iran.
And if the Agreement does unravel, Iran has the option simply to close the Hormuz Strait – and potentially the Bab el Mandeb passage too. And what can Trump do? The closer that the U.S. moves towards the ‘economic cliff’ and to the mid-term elections, the less the appeal will be for him to restart the war. In any case, Iran is fully expecting and preparing for a resumption of military strikes.
Aside from the local impacts of Trump prioritising the understanding with Iran over that of Israel’s interest to keep the war in Lebanon burning, the Accord may portend wider geo-political consequences –
Iran, for four decades, has been enveloped in the ever tightening boa-constrictor coils of sanctions, energy strangleholds and dollar exclusion, reflecting the non-stop efforts by Jewish-Israeli supremacists in Israel and America to maintain U.S. dominance over the Middle East.
The U.S. has waged forty years of maximum pressure to break Iran, yet conversely, through its animus, has forged that very adversary (Iran) to now exercise its leverage to gradually prise off the snake’s enveloping coils so that it can begin to breathe more easily.
Iran’s resistance has caught the imagination of much of the world – precisely because it is seen as a moral fight to reassert an Iranian vision for their own future.
In fact, the Iran example rather, has opened eyes around the world to the U.S. project to forcibly coerce states to acquiesce to the U.S. demands that they align with the U.S. imposition of Zionist hegemony across the Middle East.
Already states seeing the extent of the chokehold imposed on Iran, are seeking ways to protect themselves from a similar U.S. weaponisation of foreign trade in food, oil, fertiliser – and in just about anything that the U.S. can create a choke point for – to be deployed against them.
Will the signing of the MoU then indeed be something of an inflection point? It is too early to say, but one initial question must be: Has Trump’s volte face dealt an irreversible blow to Israel?
Lazar Berman, military correspondent of the Times of Israel, observes that “total victory” and its illusions are over –
“The post-October 7 wars, which came with expectations and promises of “total victory,” are over – as are their illusions. Palestinians are not going to leave Gaza. Hamas won’t disarm, nor will Hezbollah. Trump is not going to return to war in Iran, which can now threaten to withdraw from a deal to get Trump to stop any major Israeli operation against Hamas or Hezbollah …The Middle East has certainly changed”.
Trump’s goal, it now seems, is to reach an agreement with Iran – he apparently believes too, that the move will also serve Israel’s interests. This may, or may not, be realistic. For, as Aluf Benn writes in Haaretz,
“the idea that Israel and Iran are capable of reconciliation after decades of hostility, which culminated in bombings and missile attacks last year, was never even discussed in Israel”.
It was this lacuna that gave rise to hubris and wishful thinking in the Israeli Establishment.
As leading Israeli commentator Nahum Barnea amplifies, it never even occurred to Israel that Iran might survive a U.S.-led onslaught –
“There probably wasn’t anyone from Military Intelligence, the National Security Council or the Mossad who raised at the meetings the possibility that the Iranian regime might survive and emerge stronger. Even if there were a few sceptics in the room, they held their tongue”.
In Israel, the sense of defeat is palpable.
What Trump now is likely angling for is more room for manoeuvre for his vision of peace in the Middle East. His kite-flying about Iran joining the Abraham Accords; that he would like to talk with Hizbullah, and his (even more absurd) comments to the effect that Jolani and Syria should ‘take care’ of Hizbullah in Lebanon, however, do lend support to Citrinowicz’s contention that for now, Trump entertains some (possibly implausible) broader vision of where U.S.-Iran relations might lead.
In this reconfigured Israeli strategic landscape, perhaps even the pusillanimous Europeans might begin some corrective action by insisting on a return to ancient understandings of war – in which de-capitation strikes and multi-assassination campaigns of women and children lie outside of all civilised norms of war, let alone of human morality. Iranian negotiators insisted in the negotiations that any assassinations or killings would kill relations with the U.S. stone-dead.
The other key issue that flows from these events is the question – what will be the effect of the signing of the MoU on the complexion of U.S. polity? Will this prove to be a separate and strategic point of inflection? Will America as a whole start to detach from Israel?
There is a clear segmentation in the U.S. electorate. The demographic layer of the over 55-year olds is broadly sympathetic to Israel; but the young have shifted radically. Even amongst American Jews, 61% have concluded that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza, and 39% regard Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocide.
Of course, the Israel-Firsters will not change their stance and will insist that Congress toes their line.
But a recent WSJ’s opinion piece – Netanyahu has Lost Middle America – concludes:
“As Israel approaches elections this Fall, I am confident that: If its voters choose to continue the current government despite the deadly mistakes it has made, many Americans will conclude that the Israel they have supported for decades no longer exists”.
—
when the jewbankers inflixted the great depression on the people
adolf hitler put the rothschilds in prison
and shared out the recovered money with his people
he offered to help britian to also be free of the jewish yolk,
but the british stupidly went to help stalin and the jews
many brits after the war deeply regreted this
israeli terrorism must stop
https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2026/06/19/770719/EU-parliamentarians-demand-sanctions-on-Israel
Maybe there is no need for regime change, the Ayatollah is Dom Perignon anyway. Its just for keeping on keeping on, it looks like.
“many Americans will conclude that the Israel they have supported for decades no longer exists”. It never did. The American herd like most western countries, never research anything their governments support, relying fatally on the myth of “Democracy”.
The Jewish tribe which started the war and their nation, Israel, have not agreed to any MOU. It appears they have no intention to vacate Lebanon or abandon their Greater Israel plans, and to destroy Iran in the process. It also appears more and more that from their point of view their main objective in starting the war in the first place was simply to have the US deal with Iran while they pushed the bulk of their IDF military efforts into Lebanon with the plan of extending their borders north into conquered Syria.
Like their American concubines they have broken every deal they ever made with Iran. They still claim to own and run the US and on top of the announcement of merging US military and intelligence forces with those of the IDF and the Mossad, there is absolutely no basis for any “good faith” in the US negotiations with Iran at this time. With any continued Greater-Israel intentions, Iran will always be on the USrael chopping block. That is what most rational people call a FACT.
If follows that Iran once again will have to be very selective as to what ships can use the Straight. Otherwise, with the prospects of a Greater Israel, no deal by or with the US alone will be worth the paper it is written on. It will always be subject to repeated Israeli bombings, bribes, assassinations, terrorism, infiltrations, and insurrections of that same money power to destroy and fragment their nation in the same way they have done to any other nation in the region they have attacked and destroyed.
Westerns have to wake up and realize that this exclusive tribe and nation does not have any kind of Christian conscience, nor do they share in any real recognition of universal personal or sovereignty rights, or anything which stand in the way of what they want. They also claim to run the US and that is mainly why it also has become such a nation without any real moral limits when dealing with outsiders.
Any deal with this monster will simply be one more set up to destroy Iran. That is their overall intention, regardless what a handful of Americans actually believe or even want to the contrary. The sole objective of the US right now is to control the Straight of Hormuz in order to get the rest of the world off of their back. Quite rightly both the US and Israel started to war to take over and destroy Iran and they left Iran no other alternative to defend their nation and their people – all of whom happen to be hated by the ever-usurping Israelis.
The principal objective in starting the war has more to do with the feverish efforts of Israel to march through Lebanon to join up with the conquered, divided and totally-controlled lands of Syria – a nation which Israel, the US and the rest of the Rothschild-controlled West systematically infiltrated and destroyed mainly through murder and terrorism. Also, the long-range plans of USrael are to do the same to Iran as they did to Syria and Iraq. Every nation they have conquered in their unjust wars they have destroyed. Apart from the millions they murder they displace millions and millions more – and without the slightest degree of remorse or accountability.
No, if it comes to a world war to put an end the domination of this Satanic monster then let it be. It would also mean insurrections and revolutions in the rest of the West because that appears to be the only thing left to wake the people up to the lying filth running things. Every single ruling class in the West and our governments they control either supported the USrael genocides and land grabs, or they turned a blind eye to all of their heinous crimes. Our problem is the reliance on Russia and China to make things right because all indications is that they are controlled by exactly the same money-power forces which control the West. Therefore, the only option will be a Islamic unification of nations with some Muslim nation giving Iran the bomb, with intercontinental delivery systems, while escalating the war in Iran to drive USrael either back to their den of iniquity in Palestine or right clean out of the Middle East.
Christian influence is being systematically destroyed by the same ruling money power running the West who happen to want to irradicate anything to do with Christ from the planet. Christians have to wake up and see that despite all of the hostilities between Islam and Christianity, which in any case are largely manipulated and fueled by the same money power, that they in fact have much more in common in the way of peace and letting their people thrive and live together, than in continuing to support and serve that evil money power. Christians have to wake up to the fact that the enemy is not the Muslim hoards herded across their borders, but the very people attacking and destroying their faith from within their own nations, and who are totally responsible for displacing those hoards of Muslims in the first place, and obviously with the intention of causing as mush culture shock as possible, and igniting deep divisions between Muslims and Christians.
Our nations are run mainly by anti-Christian potentates whether they came with a globalist brand or the Israel-First one. They all are aiding and abetting the money-power crimes in the Middle East, and are parties to all of the massive border-crashing operations while forcing absurd DEI measures on the people, creating even more hostilities especially between Islamic people and Christians. To preserve and advance Christian beliefs and values there is more scope for Christians to ally with Muslims than with the ruling and very corrupt money power with track records and persistent objectives to destroy both faiths.
Not to worry ((( Chosenites ))).
Moloch ..err Beelzebub…..err Lucifer…..err Satan…Oy yeah … ” G*D ” is on your side !!!
Soon the vast seas will be parted and you can escape to NYC and/or Florida !!!
“Christians have to wake up to the fact that the enemy is not the Muslim hoards” – good luck with that!
Here is the thing! If anyone (and surely everyone will, at least once in their lifetime before it ends) “stand” before the face of God what does he/she/it (lol) stand on? Legs? Try to wiggle “your” toes then! Sorry possums! There are no legs. Not even a “body” made of flesh or an INDOCTRINATED Jewish/Christian or whatever MIND. Then, at that very moment there are also no Jews, or Christians, no Muslims, no Hindus …. or any atheists. There is only God and his “son” and that’s all there is. And of course God is simply everything and those “without legs” are thrilled to finally after a long and disturbing journey to become ONE again. The home coming – so to say.
So what is all that religious stuff about if it is not Israel and the order of the coin that spins it! So what has Israel to do with God? Just ask your favourite rabies, your local priests or some righteous Western lesbian atheists and they surely tell you!
So, don’t forget “to wiggle your toes” if it should still matter in that very moment without time that will last for all eternity!