Will America Be Expelled from the Middle East?

By
The Unz Review

May 12, 2026

Although bold predictions in the midst of enormous historic events are obviously fraught with great peril, there are some indications that major geopolitical shifts are now on the horizon.

Last week began with the provocative actions, boastful claims, and sharp reversals for which President Donald Trump has become notorious since the beginning of his ill-fated Iran War.

On Sunday, Trump announced that on Monday morning he would launch “Project Freedom” using the American navy to escort out commercial vessels that had been trapped by the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. But when the Pentagon impressed upon him that his warships would probably be sunk, he quickly reversed himself, saying that American forces would merely “guide” those trapped ships to safety, without specifying exactly what that term meant.

By Tuesday, he had further reversed himself and announced that he had “paused” the operation, thereby greatly embarrassing Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who just hours earlier had declared that the effort was America’s top priority. It soon came out that the Saudis and Kuwaitis had been blindsided by the American plan and they refused to allow their bases or airspace to be used, fearful that the result might lead to a dangerous military reescalation of the conflict with Iran.

On the Truth Social website, Trump justified his sudden policy reversal by the face-saving excuse that “great progress” had been made towards a “complete and final agreement” with Iran, presumably on terms that he would find quite congenial.

Trump had said much the same thing on at least eight or ten previous occasions, so I paid no attention to his offhand remarks. These struck me as further confirmation of the negative appraisal of his mental balance that I’d published just a day or two earlier.

But the influential Axios media outlet soon substantiated Trump’s casual words in an article by Barak Ravid, its chief Middle East writer. This exclusive declared that:

The White House believes it’s getting close to an agreement with Iran on a one-page memorandum of understanding to end the war and set a framework for more detailed nuclear negotiations, according to two U.S. officials and two other sources briefed on the issue.

So a peace agreement—including a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz—was allegedly now close at hand, and the Axios report was very widely quoted all across the mainstream media.

Despite the strong response of that echo chamber, I hardly took the story seriously. Over the last couple of months I’d gradually concluded that Axios and Ravid were far from reliable sources, often passing along the sort of misinformation promoted by our own government or that of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Indeed, soon after this latest story ran, famed journalist Glenn Greenwald ridiculed the piece while describing Ravid’s extremely suspicious professional background.

Some of the particular details of Ravid’s latest story seemed especially fishy to me. The supposed agreement in question was merely a one-page memorandum and there had certainly been no face-to-face negotiations between American and Iranian representatives. I found it extraordinarily implausible that the Iranians would consider relaxing their stranglehold over the windpipe of the world economy because Trump or his aides had sent them a one-page proposal unless it represented an offer of total American surrender, and even then they would never have trusted our mercurial president. While Trump may well have lost his mind, I doubted that the same was true of the Iranians.

Col. Daniel Davis was equally dismissive, explaining his extreme skepticism in a short video discussion.

Video Link

A few hours later, he also ridiculed Trump’s subsequent claim that Iran had lost the war and was about to submit:

Video Link

Just a week earlier, Davis had interviewed Prof. John Mearsheimer, and the very distinguished academic had provided an entirely contrary appraisal, declaring that America had lost the Iran War, with that segment viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

Video Link

Ironically enough, Mearsheimer’s verdict on the conflict has now been fully seconded by Robert Kagan, for decades one of our most committed Neocon pro-Israel interventionists:

Indeed, not long after that Axios story ran, top Iranian leaders denied almost all of its particulars. They certainly weren’t talking with the Americans, they hadn’t changed any of their demands, and they hadn’t yet even bothered responding to the peace proposal that the Americans had asked the Pakistanis to pass along to them. The Speaker of the Iranian Parliament even ridiculed the media outlet that had broken the story as the notoriously unreliable “Fauxios.”

And by the end of the week it became totally apparent who had been telling the truth regarding the alleged state of negotiations:

US President Donald Trump had said on Friday that he was expecting Iran’s response to Washington’s latest proposal for a deal to extend a fragile truce and launch peace talks — “supposedly tonight.”

But if Iran did send Pakistani mediators a response, there was no public sign of it, and Tehran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called into question the reliability of the US leadership in a call with his Turkish counterpart.

So based upon all these considerations, I regarded Trump’s statement and the Axios story as totally inconsequential, just more of the same dishonest and boastful Trumpian blather that I’d been seeing since the first days of the war.

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Ron Unz, publisher of The American Conservative, served as chairman of English for the Children, the nationwide campaign to dismantle bilingual education. He is also the founder of RonUnz.org
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