In the file meant to end the war opened against Iran on 28 February 2026, there are two phrases that use the same words and say the opposite of one another.

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The first is Iranian. Tehran insists that the memorandum of understanding must end the war on every front, Lebanon included.

The second is American. The President of the United States assured the Israeli Prime Minister of his support for Israel’s wish to retain “freedom of action against threats on all fronts, including Lebanon” — remarks attributed last week to an Israeli official and reported by CNN on 29 May.

The same phrase — all fronts — means, in one mouth, the silencing of weapons; in the other, an unlimited licence to fire. Everything else in the file is contained in that gap. And the gap is not a slip of the pen. It is the architecture.

The Arsonist

We are told that Washington is a mediator. The word is false from the outset. This war did not erupt between Iran and some third party that the United States then stepped in to separate. It began, on 28 February 2026, with a joint American-Israeli assault on Iran. The author of the “peace memorandum” is one of the two authors of the aggression.

No neutrality is conceivable for a co-belligerent. Fanon settled the matter once and for all: the colonizer cannot arbitrate the dispute he himself created, because he is the dispute. The man who lit the fire and then offers to set the price of water is not a firefighter. He is an extortionist. The vocabulary of “mediation” serves here to launder one party into the judge of its own cause.

It will be objected that Iran is no lamb: that it closed the Strait of Hormuz, that it struck Kuwait. True — and it changes nothing. Closing a strait and striking back are the acts of a belligerent attacked first, not the opening aggression, which carries a date — 28 February — and two signatures, Washington and Tel Aviv. Above all, the question was never Tehran’s innocence; it is the arbiter’s neutrality. Grant, for argument’s sake, that Iran is guilty of everything laid at its door: that still does not turn its enemy into an impartial judge. It turns him into an adversary drafting the verdict in his own trial.

The Wish-List

Read the schedule of demands Washington has placed on Tehran: a halt to uranium enrichment, a ceiling on the ballistic programme, an end to support for the region’s “armed groups” (Gulf News). This trinity is not a non-proliferation doctrine. It is, point for point, the strategic wish-list of the State of Israel, transposed unaltered into an American diplomatic envelope.

One disarms one’s ally’s adversary and calls it a roadmap. The damning detail is the one passed over in silence: the IAEA, the international authority on the matter, has never confirmed the existence of an Iranian weapons programme, which Tehran has consistently denied. The war was therefore waged — and then “settled” — in the name of a threat the competent international body never established. The pretext was never found; the concessions, however, are demanded in cash.

The Ledger

Weigh the balance of obligations, line by line.

Image: Strait of Hormuz (Public Domain)

To Iran, the column of surrenders: reopen the Strait of Hormuz, relinquish its control of the waterway, hand over its highly enriched uranium — Trump went so far as to announce that it would be unearthed and destroyed in a joint operation, an assertion at once repudiated by Iranian state media. And sanctions? They will be lifted, a U.S. official told CNN, only once the strait is reopened and fully functioning. The unfreezing of seized assets obeys the same condition. Iran must pay in advance; the empire will collect afterward.

To Israel, the column of permissions: a “freedom of action” that nothing in the text caps. The proof did not stay theoretical. At the very moment the truce took effect, the Israeli air force launched its heaviest strikes yet on Lebanon (The Independent). A ceasefire was signed with one hand while the other bombed. That is what “all fronts” means when Tel Aviv is the one who says it.

A mediation that extracts everything from one camp and demands nothing of the other is not a mediation. It is advocacy under arms.

The Dictation

Listen to the register of the “negotiators.” The Secretary of Defense proclaimed a capital-letter military victory, ordered the troops to stay ready, and threatened to seize Iran’s uranium by force (The Independent). The President, for his part, declared that Iran was “negotiating on fumes” (PBS/AP), after demanding, weeks earlier, its unconditional surrender.

These are not the words of an arbiter. They are the words of a victor dictating terms. The diplomacy invoked is merely the continuation of war by signature — Clausewitz turned inside out.

Allegiance

It will be said that Washington was constrained, that economic necessity dragged it back to the table. This is true, and it deepens the verdict. The blockade of Hormuz drove American inflation to its highest level in years (CNBC); reserves of crude, gasoline and diesel are draining fast (CBS); the World Bank, the IMF and the IEA issued a joint statement of alarm over global energy security (CBS).

Ibn Khaldun had a name for this moment: the one in which the expenditure of empire devours the asabiyya that carried it. But here is what that necessity reveals. A bias is measured by what one is willing to pay to keep it. So long as it serves an interest, it is a calculation — and a calculation bends before loss. But when a state maintains its tilt at the cost of its own bleeding — reserves emptied, inflation at its peak, financial allies sounding the alarm — it reveals that the tilt is no longer a means in the service of its interest: it has become an end in itself. What one keeps at a loss is no longer a strategy. It is an allegiance.

The Last Front

There remains the last front, and the most durable. Trump narrates a triumphant unearthing of the uranium; Tehran denies it. Iran’s Fars agency holds that the strait will remain under Iranian management; the spokesman Baghaei maintains that any mechanism is a matter for Iran, Oman and the littoral states — and that the United States “has nothing to do with it” (CNN). Two powers may sign the same paper while telling two irreconcilable endings.

For whoever narrates the end of a war owns its meaning. The monopoly this war shattered is not only military; it is narrative. And that is precisely what the staging of American “mediation” is trying to win back — the right to tell the world what has just taken place.

Coda

I come from a land, Laghouat, where we have known since 1852 what an arbiter is worth when he is also the invader, and what is meant by “pacification” when it is the cannon that pronounces it. Achille Mbembe gave a name to this administration of lives deemed disposable: necropolitics. The word “front” is not an abstraction on a staff officer’s map. It is a human geography — Beirut, Bandar Abbas, Gaza already — where it is decided from a distance who may go on living.

True peace never begins when the strongest imposes his will. It begins when the weakest recovers the right to refuse.

From the plains of Mesopotamia to the shores of the Mediterranean, from the mountains of Lebanon to the coasts of the Gulf, history teaches one stubborn lesson: no domination is eternal, no empire is immortal, no official narrative survives the facts indefinitely.

Cannons sometimes write the first chapters. They never write the last.

Those who speak today in the name of peace while handing out permissions for war may believe they are drafting the future order of the Middle East. They forget that peoples possess a memory longer than mandates, coalitions, presidencies and armies.

I come from Laghouat, a town that learned in its own flesh that the victors of one day often become the embarrassed witnesses of the next. In December 1852, it was already called a “pacification.” The archives kept the word; the dead kept the truth.

This is why the true stake of this memorandum is perhaps neither the uranium, nor Hormuz, nor even the invisible borders of regional power.

The true stake is simpler and older: whether the world will go on accepting that power alone defines the meaning of words.

For when a war becomes a peace by decree, when a disarmament becomes security by convenience, when a submission becomes a compromise by rhetoric, then it is no longer only peoples that are under attack.

It is language itself that goes to war.

And when an empire begins to lose control of language, it has often already begun to lose the rest.

History, for its part, has never signed a ceasefire. 

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Laala Bechetoula is an independent Algerian historian, journalist, and geopolitical analyst. He has been writing on Trump, American hegemony, and the collapse of the international order since 2025. His work appears in Countercurrents, Global Research, Réseau International, Le Quotidien d’Oran, Sri Lanka Guardian, and other international platforms. This article integrates and crowns a corpus of analytical work produced between November 2025 and April 13, 2026.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

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