On: With oil markets nearing the danger zone, a US-Iran deal can’t come soon enough

The sea, again. The great powers turn their eyes to the Persian Gulf, believing they can plow it into a stable field of commerce and quiet politics. They speak of deals, of tipping points, of the rational management of chaos. I see only the coalition that will dissolve at the moment of victory.

A US-Iran agreement? What is its shared project? To lower the price of oil, to calm the markets. It is a project of convenience, a temporary alignment against the specter of inflation and recession. And when the price falls, when the immediate danger recedes, what then? The coalition will discover it was never a coalition. Iran’s interests and America’s interests are not the same; they are merely, for a season, not violently opposed. The document they will sign will be a constitution for a peace that the ground cannot sustain. It will be written in a language of diplomacy that neither society truly speaks.

They believe they are building an institution - a framework, a détente. But it is an institution designed to prevent a catastrophe that each side defines differently. For one, it is economic turmoil; for the other, it is existential encirclement. The justification for the pact will be invisible to the people who must live under its terms. And so it will fail. Not because of betrayal, but because the soil was never ready for this seed.

I see the caudillo inevitability in this, too. When the pact strains, each side will retreat to its strongman, to the familiar posture of threat and defiance. The liberator - in this case, the diplomat - will become the only point of contact, the only institution with enough legitimacy to hold the line. And that line will become a wall. They will win the agreement. It will not be enough. The enemy had been the high price of oil. Without it, there will be nothing but the vast, ungovernable distance between their worlds. They are writing a constitution for a nation that does not, and cannot, exist.