Let us call it what it is. The framework agreement on Iran is not a peace deal. It is a capitulation dressed up in diplomatic language, and its most immediate victims are the two countries that have paid the highest price in blood and treasure to confront Iran's aggression: Israel and Lebanon.
Lebanon was not consulted. Lebanon was not represented. Lebanon was traded © Mena Today
Let us call it what it is. The framework agreement on Iran is not a peace deal. It is a capitulation dressed up in diplomatic language, and its most immediate victims are the two countries that have paid the highest price in blood and treasure to confront Iran's aggression: Israel and Lebanon.
Read the framework carefully. Search for the word "Hezbollah." You will not find it. Look for "Hamas." Absent. "Houthis." Not there either.
In a deal supposedly designed to bring peace to the Middle East, the three most destabilising Iranian proxy forces in the region, the militia that has held Lebanon hostage since 1982, the terrorist organisation that massacred 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, and the Yemeni rebels who have paralysed global shipping lanes and launched missiles at Gulf capitals, receive not a single mention. Not a constraint. Not a deadline. Not even an acknowledgement.
This is not an oversight. It is a choice. And it is a catastrophic one.
Iran Keeps Its Weapons of Destruction
The Islamic Republic has spent four decades building a network of armed proxies precisely because direct confrontation with Western powers was too costly. Hezbollah is Iran's forward military base in Lebanon. Hamas is its instrument of permanent war against Israel. The Houthis are its weapon against Gulf stability and global energy markets.
A deal that addresses Iran's nuclear programme while leaving this entire infrastructure of violence intact is not a peace deal. It is a pause, a breathing space that allows Tehran to regroup, rebuild and re-emerge stronger, while the world congratulates itself on a diplomatic achievement that exists largely on paper.
Israel: Abandoned Mid-Battle
Israel went to war against Iran on February 28 alongside the United States. It was a joint operation, built on shared strategic objectives. The stated goal was not merely to degrade Iran's military capabilities, it was to fundamentally alter the Islamic Republic's ability to threaten its neighbours and destabilise the region.
That goal has not been achieved. Hezbollah remains armed. Hamas remains in Gaza. The Houthis continue to fire. And now Washington has signed a framework that effectively tells Jerusalem: we have what we came for, you are on your own.
How does Donald Trump justify this to the families of Israeli soldiers who died fighting a war that has now been settled over their heads? How does he explain to a country that trusted American partnership that the proxies threatening its existence were simply left off the table as a negotiating inconvenience?
Lebanon: Sacrificed Again
Lebanon's story is even more bitter. For the first time in decades, Beirut has a government with the courage and the vision to confront Hezbollah, a president, a prime minister and a cabinet aligned around the goal of restoring full state sovereignty.
Direct negotiations with Israel were underway. The Lebanese army was being strengthened. There was, for the first time in a generation, genuine hope.
That hope has now been undermined by a framework that grants Iran, Hezbollah’s creator, funder and commander, a diplomatic victory without requiring it to loosen its grip on Lebanese soil by a single millimetre.
Lebanon was not consulted. Lebanon was not represented. Lebanon was traded.
The Question Trump Cannot Answer
Donald Trump built his political brand on the art of the deal, on the idea that he alone could extract maximum concessions from adversaries that previous administrations had allowed to walk away too easily.
So here is the question he must answer: how does a deal that leaves Hezbollah intact, Hamas unpressured and the Houthis unconstrained represent maximum pressure on Iran? How does allowing the Islamic Republic to preserve its entire proxy network constitute a win for America, for Israel or for the people of the Middle East?
The answer, of course, is that it does not. What it represents is the oldest failure in diplomacy: the temptation to declare victory before the war is actually won, to accept a headline agreement that looks good in a press release but solves nothing on the ground.
Iran's theocrats are not celebrating a ceasefire. They are celebrating survival. And in the vocabulary of the Islamic Republic, survival is victory.
History will judge this framework harshly. Not because diplomacy with Iran was wrong in principle , engagement, properly conditioned, is always preferable to endless war. But because a deal that leaves the region's most dangerous non-state actors untouched, unreformed and unrestrained is not peace.
It is a postponement. And the bill, when it comes due, will be paid - as it always is - not by the diplomats who signed the agreement, but by the people of Israel, Lebanon and the broader Middle East who were promised something better.
Donald Trump had the leverage to demand more. He chose not to use it. That choice will define his Middle East legacy, and not in the way he intends.
Authorities in southern Lebanon warned people displaced by three months of war between Israel and Hezbollah against rushing home on Monday despite a U.S.-Iran deal to end the wider conflict, as Israel said it would not withdraw troops from the south.
With an agreement on a framework for a peace deal with Iran, U.S. President Donald Trump may have found a way to begin extricating himself from an unpopular war while setting global markets on a path toward easing energy prices that have spiked during the crisis.
The United States and Iran have reached a deal to end their war and will hold an official signing ceremony on Friday in Switzerland, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on social media early on Monday.
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