This is a review of Trump’s deal leaves Iran in the driver’s seat by Laura Tingle, ABC 7.30 25 May 26
Firstly, we should not conceive of what is happening in the Middle East as a matter of winners and losers. This is not a game of strategy or prestige. People are dying. They are being bombed and starved by the United States and Israel. The US war against Iran is not a zero-sum game where one party’s success is the others loss. A war is not a poker game where one player wins $100 (say) and the other players lose $100. It is the people of Lebanon, Gaza, and Iran that are being bombed, starved and murdered by our governments, all complicit in the genocide. This is a word that Laura Tingle’s bosses in the ABC refuse to acknowledge. They have made their journalists stenographers of the genocide. I do not mean to single out Laura Tingle because this is a problem of legacy media everywhere especially in the western world.
Starvation. Only this morning the World Food Programme warned that around 45 million additional people could be pushed into acute hunger in 2026 if the UScontinues its war against Iran and the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked by the US. Who benefits and who starves – well it’s the people in Palestine Africa and parts of Asia that are going without food because of the energy crisis produced by the US attack.
Laura Tingle is the new to geopolitics and global affairs. ABC bosses have made her job description to report on geopolitical events and to write in-depth articles about so-called Middle East where she is now based. Her article follows the line of Why Any Plausible Iran Deal Is a Humiliation for Trump | The New Yorker which in return relies on analysis by the like of Professor John Mearsheimer and ther so-caled realists.
Tingle’s article is along the lines of current pundits barracking for better foreign policy to advanced the interests of US. Nor does Tingle challenge Australia’s Alliance with the United States and Israel, clearly a rogue and terrorist alliance.
Tingle’s central argument is that the United States war on Iran has shifted the balance of power in the region. Instead of weakening Iran decisively, the United States has left Iran with increased influence—especially around the Strait of Hormuz—while Israel appears more exposed and politically isolated.
I repeat, there are no winners or losers, people are being murdered on a mass scale particularity in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. This genocide has been going on since 7 October 2023.
I’m not convinced that the United States and Israel have been weakened. Far from it, US imperialism has benefited from the war against Gaza Lebanon Iran and Iraq. Israel still possesses nuclear weapons, and that remains a real threat hanging over Iran, Gaza, and Lebanon. There are members of Israel’s Knesset who advocate using nuclear weapons. Iran may have gained some political ground for now, but the United States still holds significant military power and keeps supplying weapons of mass destruction to Israel, its attack dog in the region.
Any analysis needs to take that into account the unfettered bombing campaigns by the US/Israel.
For one thing, the United States has never been able to keep Israel to heel. The genocidal destruction of Lebanon is further proof of that. Washington does not try to stop and does not exercise decisive control over Israel, which this analysis suggests.
The main problem with this kind of analysis is that it is framed almost entirely from a Western perspective. It treats diplomacy, state power and strategic outcomes as though they are the central questions, while overlooking how these wars are experienced by ordinary people in Palestine, Lebanon and across the region.
What seems increasingly clear is that democracy, at least in the way it presently operates, has failed people across the board.
United States and Israeli governments claiming democratic legitimacy continue to oversee war, genocide, dispossession and deepening inequality while offering no meaningful avenues for change.
Yet no political alternative has emerged with enough strength or clarity to seriously challenge either capitalism or the democratic institutions that sustain it.
That is the contradiction of the present moment: widespread failure of the existing order, but no alternative yet capable of replacing it.
Tingle also says Trump’s priority is no longer victory but finding an exit: reopening shipping through Hormuz, calming global energy markets, and avoiding further U.S. military involvement.
This is simply not true the United States have a track record of bombing. The US Imperial interests are bound up in its military power. It’s companies make a lot of money out of war and government expenditure on the military is at an all-time high.
Tingle claims Gulf states such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE now have greater influence over the diplomatic process, while Israel has less ability to shape the outcome than before.
This is not a serious argument. Qatar has around 350,000 citizens. It is hard to see how a country of that size could be said to wield political influence over the United States in any real sense. Ok, Qatar may have wealth, diplomatic access and Al Jazeera, but that is not the same as power over U.S. policy. Similarly with UAE, it has only about 1.3 million citizens. 90% of people living in the UAE and other gulf countries are not citizens. They are migrant workers, professionals and business owners, family members from South Asia, the Philippines, the wider Arab world, Europe and elsewhere.
“And if the Americans could bomb a hospital in Serbia or a civilian housing estate in Baghdad, who were the hypocritical West to object when the Israeli army slaughtered the innocents of Lebanon and Gaza in identical ways?
This, then, is another theme of this book; the ‘normalisation’ of this latest warfare, which deletes the protection of civilians enshrined in international law in favour of a new and cruel morality.” ― Robert Fisk, Night of Power: The Betrayal of the Middle East
Ian Curr, 27 May 2026
References
The Great War for Civilisation — The Conquest of the Middle East.
The Night of Power
Both books are by Robert Fisk.
Why Any Plausible Iran Deal Is a Humiliation for Trump | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-any-plausible-iran-deal-is-a-humiliation-for-trump
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