is once again finding out that trying to bring peace to the Middle East is a little like herding cats or refereeing a bar fight where everyone has missiles and a theological grudge dating back 3,000 years.
On Sunday, Trump publicly warned Israel and Iran not to torpedo what he insists is an almost-finished peace agreement after Israel lit up
, because apparently nobody in that region can go 48 consecutive hours without setting something on fire or blowing something up.
“We are very close to a Deal that will bring peace to the region,” Trump posted on social media, before adding the kind of thing every exhausted parent has yelled from the front seat during a family road trip: “Let’s not blow it!”
Please let us not pretend that any so called peace deal will last very long when Islamic scripture [in this case, the Hadith] demands the killing of Jews:
Smoke rose over Beirut after Israeli strikes reportedly hit Hezbollah infrastructure in the southern suburbs.
Lebanon’s Civil Defense said workers pulled three bodies and six wounded people from the rubble, which is generally not the visual diplomats hope for while trying to finalize a peace agreement.
Naturally, Iran responded with threats, because Tehran treats military retaliation the way normal countries treat strongly worded press releases.
The emerging deal has reportedly left Israel less than thrilled.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has been largely sidelined while
Pakistan and other regional players helped move negotiations forward, which probably feels to the Israelis like being forced to watch strangers remodel your house while assuring you they definitely know where the load-bearing walls are.
Trump, who previously suggested the agreement could be signed Sunday, has reportedly been leaning hard on Netanyahu to cool things down in Lebanon while negotiations continue. Netanyahu, being Netanyahu, appears to have treated that advice the same way most people treat the “terms and conditions” page on a software update.
Following the Beirut strike, Trump spoke with Netanyahu and made it clear he was not exactly delighted with the timing and it made him look bad.
According to
Axios and
Fox News interviews, Trump directly questioned the Israeli prime minister about the operation after Israel said it struck Hezbollah targets in response to
drone launches aimed at northern Israel.
The Israeli military claimed Hezbollah launched three projectiles and released footage showing smoke rising after impacts. Hezbollah, meanwhile, maintained its long-standing media strategy of saying absolutely nothing until everybody else has already spent twelve hours arguing online.
“It shook it up,” Trump said of the strike’s effect on negotiations, adding that the agreement’s signing was delayed several hours but remained on track.
That sentence pretty much sums up Middle East diplomacy in 2026: everyone agrees peace is close right before somebody launches explosives into a neighboring country.
Israel defended the strikes as necessary retaliation. “Israel will not tolerate firing into its territory,” Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a statement.
Fair enough. That is generally how sovereign nations operate.
Meanwhile, civilians in Beirut’s southern suburbs were once again seen fleeing damaged neighborhoods after briefly enjoying what passed for “calm” in the region, which usually means only a few rockets a week instead of dozens.
The current conflict spiraled after Hezbollah fired missiles into Israel on March 2, shortly after the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran. Since then, Israeli forces have pushed deeper into Lebanon than at any point in more than twenty-five years, which is the sort of escalation diplomats politely call “concerning” while privately stress-eating antacids.
Iranian officials reacted exactly the way you’d expect Iranian officials to react.
Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf warned on X that “if you lack the will and ability to fulfill your commitments, speaking of continuing the path is not possible.”
Translation: everybody keeps threatening peace while simultaneously threatening each other.
Gen. Mohammad Jafar Asadi added, “Without a doubt, these crimes will not go unanswered,” proving once again that no Middle Eastern conflict is complete without at least one official statement that sounds like it was generated by an angry action movie trailer narrator.
Qatari mediators reportedly traveled to Tehran Sunday to help finalize the agreement. Regional officials cautiously suggested the U.S. and Iran might actually be approaching a framework capable of halting hostilities and reopening the
Strait of Hormuz, which global markets would appreciate very much because investors tend to dislike shipping lanes turning into active war zones.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said the agreement could be signed Sunday, while Iranian officials suggested it may happen within days. Trump said the Strait of Hormuz would reopen immediately after signing.
The deal itself appears less like a grand peace treaty and more like the diplomatic equivalent of duct tape holding together a leaking garden hose. It reportedly creates a sixty-day framework for further discussions on
Iran’s nuclear program, missile capabilities, frozen assets, and regional proxy activity, which means the hardest issues are essentially being postponed until later.
Under the current framework, the U.S. and Israel appear to have fallen well short of their original objectives of dismantling Iran’s nuclear and missile programs entirely. Critics have noticed this small detail.
Trump attempted to reassure skeptics Saturday by posting that once things calm down, the U.S. would “downblend and destroy” Iran’s enriched uranium either inside Iran or in the United States.
That may prove more complicated than posting it on social media.
According to the
International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran possesses roughly 440.9 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60% purity, which is alarmingly close to
weapons-grade material. Iran continues insisting its nuclear program is peaceful, which ranks somewhere alongside “the stripper really likes me” on the list of claims that should probably invite further scrutiny.
Republican critics of the deal have already started circling. Some argue the agreement barely improves on the 2015
Obama-era nuclear deal that Trump himself withdrew from during his first term because he repeatedly called it “bad.”
Now Trump finds himself in the awkward position every president eventually reaches in foreign policy: discovering that campaign slogans are much easier than negotiating with regimes that sponsor armed militias while enriching uranium underground.
Still, if Trump somehow manages to keep Israel, Iran, Hezbollah, Pakistan, Qatar, global oil markets, and congressional Republicans from simultaneously detonating this agreement before the ink dries, it may qualify as the first genuine miracle the Middle East has seen in decades.
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