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Jane, Kenan Mont is a Middle East specialist chief executive of the UN Association UK
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Jane, thanks so much for joining us this morning. Where are we now? Because this has obviously been going on for some time
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I think a lot of people, perhaps for understandable reasons, have sort of tuned out now the ceasefire is in place
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although it's not in place all the time for reasons we might discuss
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Where are we now on the crisis? Well, as you say, there's a lot of mixed messages and it's difficult really to read too much into every new statement that comes out
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because there's been a long history of claims that haven't then led to something. But if we
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take a step back and say, essentially, where are we? Well, the US knows that they need to get the
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Strait of Hormuz open again. They need to deal with the economic effects that this war has had
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particularly on gas prices, which obviously matter to American consumers, not to mention the turmoil
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for the rest of the world economy. And even though the war is not continuing, that economic
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disruption is still a problem that is going to have knock-on effects for quite some time
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At the same time, obviously, Donald Trump does not want to appear to have made a major strategic
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loss for the US. One of the things that I think is really striking about this war is that so many
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people in the West, including inside the US, believe that America has lost. And it seems
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that the Iranian leadership believes that they have won, although they also have had
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military losses and importantly they find themselves very very isolated within their region because of the fighting that been happening with them primarily attacking Gulf states So there is this sort of standoff really between two very different countries
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but countries where there's a lot at stake for leaders who want to prove that they are winning in a war that ultimately has no winners
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and is costing the whole of the world a great deal of uncertainty and disruption
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It feels as if the status quo could potentially go on for some time
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We've obviously got this sort of potential extension of the ceasefire. We've already had that happen a few times
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It's sort of they attack each other occasionally, but broadly speaking, the ceasefire remains in place
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Trump appears less interested now than he was before. He's moving on to other things domestically
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So it feels as if this very weird stasis could potentially continue for a while
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I think that's right. I think they're stuck somewhere between war and peace
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And, you know, this is applying to the rest of the Middle East as well. We are seeing Lebanon and Gaza both officially have ceasefires, and yet killing is continuing, you know, violence is continuing in both places on a daily basis
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So the meaning of ceasefires being stretched almost beyond all recognition. And it's more about trying to manage violence at a lower level rather than really making peace
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I think that at the end of the day, you know, the US and Iran, they have been in conflict since the
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Islamic Revolution of 1979. There have been serious problems between them going back that far
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And that has resulted in multiple US administrations trying to pressurise Iran predominantly through sanctions but sometimes through proxy wars And of course Iran trying to pressurize the US Iran long goal is to get
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the US out of the Middle East. And Trump made a major miscalculation. He thought that all previous
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presidents had failed to defeat Iran because they hadn't been strong enough. And therefore
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that he became persuaded, not least by Netanyahu from Israel and other Iran hawks within his own
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administration, that if he was strong and used military action, which previous weak presidents
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had been loath to do, that would be decisive, that would be conclusive, it would either bring
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Iran to its knees or it would force the outright toppling of the Islamic Republic. Obviously
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that has not happened. So now what's left? Only repeating lots of different things that have been
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tried in the past, but with an Islamic Republic that has also changed and has become even more
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hardline. Obviously, it was already hardline. You now have a younger generation of leaders who have
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been forged in this war and who have sort of had a huge ideological boost. This is a revolutionary
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anti-Western system, which has been running out of legitimacy among the younger generation of its
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population who are sick of its mismanagement of the country, corruption, etc. Now, in a way
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the leadership is saying we're validated. We are the only ones resisting the imperialist US
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etc., etc. So we have a major problem. And all of the tools have been used before without
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coming to a conclusive end. At the same time no one else is really capably stepping in to try to manage this conflict because the US is really too big to mediate with So we haven seen much of a role for the UN which I would like to see beyond the role of the International Atomic Energy Agency and some efforts to get trade
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going again for humanitarian reasons. The rest of the world is basically standing around unsure
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what to do. And very, very briefly, Jane, how much oil, if any, and other resources are going
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through the straitner? Well, this is very messy. I mean, there are loads of ships that are trapped
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there. There is some oil coming out, particularly to China. One suspects that the US is reluctant to
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interfere too greatly with that. But also, you know, because Iran has for decades been under
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US sanctions, it has got a lot of ways to evade them. So we are going to have continuing
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knock-on effect in terms of oil prices that will obviously affect all of the listeners. People are
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thinking about it already with the summer holidays, but obviously it weighs on everything that oil
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prices affect, which includes food prices. You're also seeing difficulty of getting fertiliser out
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of this part of the world where a lot of fertiliser is produced. So a lot of the world's hungry are
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going to suffer the most at a time, obviously, when aid has been cut massively. The deputy director
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of the World Food Programme has just said that his staff are now in the invidious position
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of having to take food away from the hungry to feed the starving because rich governments
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are not willing even to pay what they used to pay to feed the hungriest people in the world
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So, you know, there's a growing... Jane Kinnamong there. Jane Kinnamong, Middle East Specialist, Chief Executive of the UN Association UK
