The UN General Assembly has come…and gone, leaving the world not much wiser as regards outcomes and ways ahead on today’s large and globally painful conflicts, be they Ukraine, or Middle East and Israel’s US-supported wars with Hamas in Gaza, Palestinians in the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon, pro-Iranian militias in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, or Iran itself, or Sudan and/or a host of other countries. Some are blaming the UN itself and its outgoing leader Antonio Guterrez for this lamentable state of affairs, whereas others are maintaining, rather convincingly, that in the absence of minimum cooperativeness on the part of the main actors on the global scene, there are distinctive limits to what UN-led multilateralism can possibly achieve regarding the main, divisive challenges. Regardless, there seems to prevail an international consensus, or majority opinion, that for all the symptoms of powerlessness, and for all the apparent need for reform under various criteria, the UN as a global meeting place and an agency for practical implementation of the world body’s value basis and joint interests remains indispensable.

Nonetheless, as long as our time’s main divisive issues and sources of conflict pertain to clashes of interest within the circle of the UN Security Council permanent members, i.e. the victors of WW2, it is unavoidable that the UN as an institution for global peace and stability is doomed to irrelevance. And in the deeply problematic absence of a relevant UNSC on matters of war and peace, these matters are left at the mercy of the power game between the global scene’s most powerful players, be they national great powers or great-power led alliances. And for there to be sustainable peace, including mechanisms for peaceful settlements of disputes, the main players must be able (and willing) to excel in the art of compromise.

And compromise emerges as indispensable when the two other variants of armed conflict outcome, the total victory of the one side or the other, are seen by the parties and others involved to be convincingly and finally exhausted. The problem, making millions suffer, in our days has proven to be that in the absence in key cases of a functioning nuclear deterrence deterring escalation and the way other countries tend to intervene on behalf of either side as a means to prevent one side’s surrender – and in the absence of effective third-party humanitarian intervention, the prevailing wars tend to be prolonged, making ceasefire arrangements difficult and compromise elusive. There are examples in abundance, starting with Russia’s continued onslaught on neighboring Ukraine in defiance of repeated international efforts to suggest and manage peace and ceasefire proposals, exemplifying also that in some cases even the very definition of (necessary) compromise is a daunting task when negotiating positions and war objectives are tons and tons apart.

But in light of the recent UNGA and deliberations there it can be said to be particularly imperative to return – as this writer has repeatedly done – to the strange US-Israel-Iran bellicose triangle.

On June 17 this summer there was indeed an agreed compromise, the so-called Memorandum of Understanding, signed by the Iranian leadership and by Donald Trump in historical Versailles (!) in conjunction with the G7 summit. The Memorandum, containing a surprising amount of pro-Iranian concessions, some for immediate implementation and others orchestrated for deliberations during a stipulated 60 days period of negotiations, excelled in the art of strategic ambiguity concerning the key issue of Hormuz, exemplifying that sometimes strategic ambiguity is the compromise (to be supposedly sorted out later). Similarly, sometimes a ceasefire arrangement is the compromise, the best possible outcome, for now, even though the parties and all others are well aware of the probability of the arrangement lasting only so long. And as we have seen, the MoU lasted only so long; it took only some days of disagreements over the Hormuz ambiguities for Trump to declare the agreement “over”, and in any case the expiry on August 17 of the 60 days of prescribed (and futile, or actually non-existing) negotiations, the end of the MoU compromise was a fact of life for all to see, leaving it open whether the MoU text might nonetheless be returned to as the basis for new negotiations, should a perceived lack of acceptable alternatives make the mediators and the parties actively and seriously seek an offramp, i.e., a compromise.

The June 17 MoU compromise manifested a tentative assessment on both sides that a return to full-scale war was acutely undesirable, given in the case of Trump the increasingly untenable load of negative consequences of his war of choice, the global implications of the closure of Hormuz, the emerging opposition to the war among congressmen and the general public at home in the perspective of approaching med-term elections, the military costs of depleted missile stores and of maintaining the costly level of armed force presence in the region, the damage done and threatened to Gulf military and civilian assets, etc.

Since then, and since the August 17 formal expiry of the MoU, and onwards to the UNGA, there has been a strange no-peace-no-war kind of unstable status quo, with incidents of limited acts of aggression interrupted by rhetorical talk of “returning to the table”, the “table” remaining utterly vaguely defined – even if during the UNGA the Iranian president responded to Trump’s threats of “annihilation” as the alternative to the “table” by mixing a defiant tone with a peace proposal in the shape of a condensed and sped-up version of the June 17 MoU – later (expectedly) rejected by Trump.

So what about now, in late September, with the mid-term elections being only a month away and with the potentially catastrophic global consequences of a continued closure of Hormuz (and the added Houthi threat to the Bab al-Mandab strait into the Red Sea) now, again, permeating concerned international analyses and the political and popular opposition to the war steadily growing? Can there be compromise, or must there be a resumption of full-scale war, with or without the company of Netanyahu’s Israel facing its (or his) existentially challenging elections on October 27? Or can – for want of tolerable alternatives – the current no-peace-no-war stalemate be sustained, and if so for how long, even beyond the mid-terms?

As for the latter, current expert analyses (e.g. Richard Haas and Carolyn Kissane, “The Stalemate with Iran is not sustainable”, Foreign Affairs, September 23) rule a no, the current stalemate is not sustainable, given the clear differences between now and last spring when earlier disaster prophecies were proved wrong due to a surprising degree of market adaptability to the Hormuz closure, China’s strong oil reserve and other factors. With all the then exploited forces and mechanisms of resilience and adaptability now being close to exhaustion, the emerging consensus is that the global catastrophe predictions of last spring are now about to be the grim reality, thus limiting the politically available options for the US president in defense of his (and Israel’s) war of choice.

So can there, in this situation, in spite of everything, be compromise. Or will Trump opt for the enormous risks connected with resuming full-scale war, if so hoping that a massive surprise attack, with or without the company of a hard-pressed Netanyahu, will force a final surrender by the Iranian leadership and perhaps thereby the regime change prominently mentioned around February 28 as a or the justification of the war? And, if so, making possible and credible a vote-winning claim to a historic victory?

Trump is, both during and after the UNGA, sending mixed signals, as he has done throughout this war, expressing both tactical maneuvering and genuine personal ambivalence. Before the UNGA audience he both threatened “annihilation” and projected a promising future for Iran should it surrender, or “come to the table”, saying that this concerns a “big decision” that “I” (!) have to make, as if he is offering Iran only two options, annihilation or surrender (whatever surrender is supposed to mean). And he has rejected the Iranian “compromise” proposal.

Some experts are now saying that full-scale war is, has become, inevitable, in view of the factors mentioned here, and in spite of the enormous risks involved, notably for the aging US president. The only means to mitigate these risks, domestically before the mid-terms and globally as regards energy supply disruptions and related economic destabilization, would thus seem to be chancing that a major or even massive surprise air attack would be sufficient to expedite Iranian quick regime surrender and perhaps regime change, bearing in mind that a ground invasion – normally seen to be indispensable for total victory and regime change – apparently remains unthinkable as an option in view of politically unacceptable own losses.

But even a massive air campaign, as massive as can be given currently available military resources in the region, runs the risk of leaving the Iranian regime “standing”, in defiance, if so rendering the chanced campaign politically meaningless, as well as the risk of highly problematic international reactions to this display of Trump-American adventurism, to the detriment of Western support of Ukraine.

With only a month to go before the mid-term elections, Trump then has very little time left, for both remaining options, a high-risk war (with or without Israel) or a painstaking negotiating process based on painful compromise, one that is hard to spin and sell as vote-winning VICTORY.

So we had better buckle up for these big decisions, any time soon.

Michael Sahlin