El presidente de Estados Unidos, Donald Trump, y la presidenta de la Comisión Europea, Ursula von der Leyen, han irrumpido en la negociación comercial entre los dos lados del Atlántico en las últimas horas. Este domingo, después de una semana intensa de contactos entre los diversos negociadores responsables, ambos líderes han mantenido una conversación telefónica en el marco del objetivo marcado de “conseguir algo antes del 9 de julio”, según Bruselas.

Sobre la conversación no ha habido ningún comunicado oficial, tampoco en las redes sociales a las que suele recurrir Von der Leyen para informar de este tipo de llamadas. Un portavoz comunitario se ha limitado a decir que fue un “buen intercambio” y que se enmarca en los constantes contactos que mantiene Von der Leyen también con los líderes europeos. “Se está trabajando al más alto nivel político y en los niveles técnicos”, remacha la Comisión, muy reacia a dar detalles de unas negociaciones plagadas de incertidumbres, a pesar de que la fecha límite se cuenta ya en horas.

“Nosotros seguimos trabajando con el plazo del 9 de julio, con la intención de lograr para entonces, como mínimo, un principio de acuerdo con Estados Unidos”, ha insistido el portavoz comercial, Olof Gill, según el cual, sobre todo en la última semana, con la visita a Washington del comisario de Comercio, Maros Sefcovic, se han logrado “avances sustanciales hacia un principio de acuerdo”. El objetivo final, ha agregado, sigue siendo el mismo que cuando estalló la amenaza comercial y se comenzó a negociar: “Lograr un buen acuerdo para las empresas europeas, los consumidores y la economía global”.

Pero no es la UE el único frente que tiene abierto Washington en su guerra comercial: Japón, Tailandia o Corea del Sur son algunos de los socios comerciales estadounidenses con los que siguen abiertas las negociaciones. Y varios de ellos empezarán a saber más cosas a partir de este lunes. El propio presidente estadounidense anunció, a través de su red Truth Social, que este lunes empezarían a llegar las cartas sobre “tarifas y/o acuerdos” a partir de las 18.00, hora europea, a la contraparte negociadora.

En esas cartas, en teoría, la Administración de Estados Unidos anunciará a sus contrapartes los aranceles que les impondrá a partir del 1 de agosto, tras la ronda negociadora, según explicó este domingo el secretario del Tesoro, Scott Bessent. Bruselas se ha negado a hacer comentarios sobre este punto argumentando que ni siquiera ha recibido aún la supuesta misiva y ha indicado que lo que quiere decir con ello Washington es una pregunta que se debe dirigir, precisamente, al Gobierno estadounidense que juega a los equívocos.

Fuentes europeas se mostraban optimistas este lunes acerca de la posibilidad de que en estas 48 horas se alcance un acuerdo. Casi todos los Estados miembros desean un pacto sobre aranceles que acabe con la incertidumbre que pesa sobre la mayor relación comercial del mundo: cada día, con datos de 2024, cruzan el Atlántico en un sentido o en otro, productos por valor de 2.400 millones de euros. En total, 870.000 millones de euros el año pasado, con un déficit del lado estadounidense cercano a los 200.000 millones.

La duda instalada en las capitales y también en Bruselas es qué precio habrá que pagar para lograr ese pacto y si será aceptable para todos. Los negociadores europeos explicaron el pasado viernes a los representantes diplomáticos de los Estados miembros la marcha de las negociaciones y entre ellos cundió cierta “decepción”. Encima de la mesa están los aranceles del 17% que Estados Unidos oferta para los productos agrícolas que importe de la UE, como contó EL PAÍS. Esa cifra se sumaría, en caso de acuerdo, a las demás impuestas desde que Trump abrió las hostilidades con el resto del mundo: el 25% para automóviles y sus componentes, el 50% para el acero y el aluminio, y el 10% general a una gran cantidad de productos, salvo algunas excepciones, de las que se benefician el sector de la aeronáutica y de las bebidas espirituosas.

Los BRICS, el bloque del Sur Global que exige más poder en las instituciones internacionales, han arropado este domingo a uno de sus socios, Irán, en la cumbre que celebran en Río de Janeiro (Brasil). “Condenamos los ataques militares contra la República Islámica de Irán (…), que constituyen una violación del derecho internacional”, dice la declaración final pactada por los 11 países que, no obstante, evita señalar explícitamente a los autores del ataque, Israel y Estados Unidos. Los BRICS sí mencionan a Israel en su crítica de los ataques continuos contra Gaza, recuerdan que usar el hambre como arma de guerra es ilegal y piden la liberación de todos los rehenes. Los socios pasan, sin embargo, de puntillas por la guerra de Ucrania, desatada en 2022 por la invasión de Rusia, miembro fundador del foro. Y critican la guerra arancelaria sin mencionar al presidente de EE UU, Donald Trump.

El anfitrión, el presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, ha presentado a los BRICS como herederos del movimiento de países no alineados en la Guerra Fría. La reunión de este heterogéneo grupo, que representa a la mitad de la población mundial y el 40% del PIB, ha quedado deslucida por la ausencia del presidente chino, Xi Jinping, que por primera vez falta al encuentro anual.

Irán y Gaza destacan entre los asuntos que mayor esfuerzo negociador han requerido por parte de los diplomáticos que la víspera cerraron la declaración de los líderes de los BRICS, que se presentan como defensores del multilateralismo. En el punto dedicado a Irán, expresan su “enorme preocupación con la escalada de la situación de seguridad en Oriente Próximo” y con “los ataques deliberados a instalaciones nucleares pacíficas sobre la total salvaguarda del OIEA [la Organización Internacional de la Energía Atómica, de la ONU]”. Los BRICS apuestan por la solución de los dos Estados para el conflicto palestino-israelí.

Los países más reticentes a mencionar a Israel y EE UU eran la India y Emiratos Árabes Unidos, que tienen estrechas relaciones con ambos países, y Etiopía, cuna de los falasha, una comunidad judía local que emigró en masa al Estado judío en los años noventa.

Las referencias a los conflictos más candentes del momento en el comunicado final, de 31 páginas y 126 puntos, reflejan lo difícil que es el consenso en un foro con intereses tan dispares. En el caso de la guerra de Ucrania, los BRICS admiten sus respectivas posturas nacionales y como bloque se limitan a alabar los esfuerzos mediadores.

Si con los cinco miembros fundadores (Brasil, Rusia, la India, China y Sudáfrica) alcanzar acuerdos era complejo, es aún más arduo desde que, en 2023, se sumaron Arabia Saudí, Egipto, Etiopía, Emiratos Árabes, Indonesia e Irán. Una ampliación impulsada por Pekín con la que la superpotencia asiática ganó influencia, pero que países como la India o Brasil hubieran querido evitar porque temen que se diluyan sus voces y que se convierta en un foro antioccidental.

Vladímir Putin, que ha participado por videoconferencia por la orden internacional de arresto contra él, ha dicho que “la globalización liberal está obsoleta” y que “el centro de los negocios globales está situándose en los mercados emergentes”. Sí están presentes el presidente indio, Narendra Modi, el sudafricano Cyril Ramaphosa y el indonesio Prabowo Subianto. La delegación iraní la lidera el canciller Abbas Araghchi, y no su presidente, Masoud Pezeshkian, como estaba previsto hasta el ataque que empezó el 13 de junio. El ministro de Exteriores ruso, Serguéi Lavrov, se ha reunido en Río con su homólogo iraní para ofrecerle mediar en el conflicto sobre el programa nuclear.

La directora ejecutiva del BRICS Policy Center, Ana Fernández, explica que tras la ausencia de Xi existen varios factores, incluido que Pekín prefiere evitar el riesgo de verse arrastrada a pronunciarse sobre conflictos candentes y está molesta por la decisión brasileña de no sumarse a su proyecto de la Ruta de la Seda.

Esta es la segunda de tres grandes reuniones internacionales de las que el presidente Lula será anfitrión en un año. Antes, Brasil ya acogió el G-20 y en noviembre celebrará la COP, la cumbre climática de la ONU, que por primera vez será en la Amazonia.

Lula, que con 79 años está en su tercer mandato no consecutivo, ha constatado “el colapso sin parangón del multilateralismo” y ha criticado abiertamente las prioridades políticas de Occidente. “Es más fácil destinar el 5% del PIB al gasto militar que el 0,7% prometido a la ayuda oficial al desarrollo”. El antiguo sindicalista acusa a la OTAN de alimentar la carrera armamentística.

El brasileño ha enfatizado que el mundo acumula más conflictos que nunca. Ante eso, su receta es la que defiende desde hace un cuarto de siglo y que los BRICS comparten ahora: la reforma profunda del Consejo de Seguridad de la ONU. Lula considera imprescindible “hacerlo más legítimo, representativo, eficaz y democrático”. Y para eso, el Sur Global reclama que representantes de África, Asia y América Latina se sumen a los cinco miembros permanentes actuales.

What did save Iran after 12 days of Israeli total control of its airspace, which facilitated an extraordinary onslaught on Iran’s Islamic Republic that hit its nuclear programme, destroyed many of its symbols of government, and decapitated its military hierarchy? Suppose you ask Fayyaz Zahed, an Iranian reformist political analyst. In that case, he answers that “it was not the regime’s delusional ideology, but Iran’s ancient history, and the experience of surviving invasions by Alexander the Great, the Mongols, and the Arabs.”

Similar to China’s case, Iran’s rich history and imperial legacy have shaped its self-perception as the center of the civilized world — a nation destined for greatness — and informed its policies in the Middle East and beyond. The arc of Iran’s history spread from centuries of imperial grandeur in antiquity to the moment when the empire faced a new power rising in the south, Islam, thus marking the beginning of a Persian decline and eventual collapse in the 19th century under the imperial ambitions of Great Britain and Russia. Past greatness has made the dire memories of encroachment by foreign powers in the contemporary era an Iranian version of China’s “Century of Humiliation.”

Hence, like China, Iran’s modern history has been a struggle for status befitting a great power, marked by a vigilant jealousy of its sovereignty. A non-Arab country in an Arab region, unique also for being the only state in the Muslim universe having Shia as a state religion, Iran’s external relationship needs to be understood against its self-perceived exceptionalism. Closer to our time, the consequential meaning of the British-American coup that overthrew the democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 laid the groundwork for popular anti-Western sentiment that grew throughout the 1970s, ultimately leading to the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

Since then, there has been a tendency in the West to see Iran as a monolith of Ayatollahs and radicals bent on destroying Israel, for which they need the nuclear bomb. In such a scenario, Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s Churchill, fighting heroically to save his people from imminent annihilation. This, I am afraid, is an utterly simplistic, even false, reading of a far more complex reality. Iran is a richly diverse society, and so is its political class. The division between reformists and fundamentalists within the political system is a genuine one. The Iranian reformists, first among them the current president, Masoud Pezeshkian, and his entire team, want to rein in the nuclear project, reach an accommodation with the West, and bring an end to the sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy. It is there that they perceive the threat to the regime’s survival.

The drive to nuclear status has been an obsession of the Ayatollahs, their most potent symbol, and the insurance for regime survival, the ultimate protective shield of the Islamic revolution against its challengers in the region and beyond. North Korea is their proof. Although the nuclear program has never delivered a bomb, and only scant energy at astronomical cost, it has been the mullahs’ most potent nationalist symbol. Securing the regime’s survival is the objective, not annihilating Israel, which is far more likely to be destroyed at the end of a long war of attrition, for which the Iranians created and lavishly financed the ring of proxies surrounding the Jewish state, than under a mushroom cloud.

If it wanted a nuclear bomb, Iran could have produced it long ago. Iran’s scientific and technological excellence, supported by a rich human capital, makes it far better positioned than North Korea and Pakistan, two nuclear powers, to join the nuclear club. If Iran doesn’t yet have the bomb, it is because it has not yet made the political decision to produce it. This war may have settled the debate inside Iran’s political class in favour of the bomb. Iran’s now demonstrated vulnerability is proof of its need for a nuclear bomb, like North Korea’s, to protect itself.

In other words, Netanyahu will go down in history not as Israel’s Churchill, as he presumes to be, but as the father of the Iranian atom bomb. He has twice torpedoed a diplomatic solution that the Iranians always wanted, first when he convinced Donald Trump in 2018 to withdraw from Obama’s 2015 nuclear agreement, whose provisions the Iranians fulfilled to the letter, and now by starting a war in the middle of a negotiating process over a new nuclear deal.

Moreover, since the end of the Iran War, Netanyahu and his friend in the White House, Donald Trump, are engaged in a campaign of deception that obscures the picture. U.S. intelligence knows better than its own president. Neither Iran’s nuclear programme nor its ballistic missile threat has been obliterated; possibly the atomic project was postponed by only a few months. The Iranians have taken away from the Fordow site more than 400 kilograms of enriched uranium to 60% which can be enriched to 90% in a matter of days, enough to produce 10 warheads. There are undamaged centrifuges, there are enough scientists, and there are unknown sites. Iran has already stopped any watchdog from monitoring its nuclear activities, and it will not be a surprise if it decides to abandon the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty).

Still, this war is a moment of reckoning for the Islamic Republic, as its hollow empire has been diminished by Israel’s breaking of its entire proxy system. Sunni Pan-Arabism has been a fiction, and Shiite Islam was supposed to supplant it as the voice of the masses. Ayatollah Khomeini, the father of the revolution, and his current successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, positioned themselves as the Frantz Fanons of our age who would redeem the wretched of the earth.

But, instead of redemption, what Israel’s combat pilots found lying under the skies of Tehran was an unpopular and repressive Iranian regime that has spent billions of dollars on a nuclear program and on projecting the Islamic Revolution through armed regional proxies, while presiding over a domestic economic disaster and stifling paralysis. Iran’s gross domestic product, or total output, has fallen 45% since 2012. Crippling international sanctions over the nuclear program contributed to this downward spiral, but so did corruption, a bungled privatization program and bloated state companies.

The regime, remote from a youthful and aspirational society, looks sclerotic to many, and its religious leadership is now up against the wall. “The Islamic Republic is a rotten tooth waiting to be plucked, like the Soviet Union in its latter years,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. If we pursue the Chinese simile, China’s political stability requires, according to Xi Jinping, an “overall structure of values,” a structure that in Iran relies on a minority of the people and a corrupt, to the bone, nomenclature that pervades them.

In rethinking its post-war strategy, Iran does not have too many friends to rely on. Its “allies” were a disappointment. Russia is entangled in the Ukrainian quagmire, China is happy seeing the United States consumed by the forever wars of the Middle East, Syria is now negotiating a peace deal with Israel, and Iran’s proxies have all been diminished by Israel.

Still, recent history shows that Iran has always been capable of adapting its policies to its weaknesses. In 1988, to save the regime from destruction, it accepted a dishonoured end to its war with Iraq. In 2003, following the U.S. invasion that had toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan and Iran’s nemesis, Saddam Hussein, in Iraq, the Ayatollahs were willing to reach a Grand Bargain with the American Satan, giving up their entire nuclear programme and dismantling their regional system of proxies.

Alas, the radicals in Tehran proved to be far more rational than the Americans. The answer to Iran’s demarche came from then vice president Dick Cheney. “We do not negotiate with evil,” he said. This is a poignant lesson in the power of stupidity in history. Iran is not in a dissimilar condition these days. It is willing to negotiate with the U.S. a nuclear deal in exchange for shielding the regime from an American or Israeli attack. This is not about a final peace settlement; it is about buying time while the regime regroups and revises its strategy to adapt it to the changing conditions.

Iran’s clash with Israel, a peer competitor for regional supremacy and a bitter theological enemy, is a conflict between two existentially vulnerable powers. This, I would argue, is a typical Thucydides Trap, which Israel would like to see usher in a definite showdown. Israel’s zero-sum game strategy is driven by its Holocaustic fears and unrealistic aspirations to uncontested hegemony. Iran’s idea of the destruction of Israel stems from a Shiite eschatological belief in the return of the last Islamic messiah, Imam Mahdi, amid an Armageddon that the destruction of Israel will trigger.

If history has any lesson in it for Iran, it is that Shi‘ism should avoid falling into the same delusional trap of destroying Israel that had doomed Sunni pan-Arabism. By pouring its energy and resources into a war of annihilation against Israel, it would jeopardize its primary objective: regime survival. Like Xi Jinping, Supreme Leader Khamenei is haunted by the memory of the fall of the Soviet Union. The lessons they both drew are similar: stick to the fundamentals of the regime, only that China is a global power, and Iran is a diminished, decimated power at war with Big Satan standing behind the Little Satan.

But Iran is not alone in letting illusory ambitions cloud its judgment. If Israel cannot destroy Iran’s nuclear program, it certainly cannot achieve total victory over Iran’s regime. The idea of toppling the Iranian regime through a bombing campaign, a design that Netanyahu had clearly set as an objective, was a delusion, a total lack of historical culture. Both Donald Trump’s call for Iran’s “total surrender” and Netanyahu’s drive for regime change through a bombing campaign were delusions, a total lack of historical culture. The Allies’ call for Germany’s “unconditional surrender” in World War II was what kept the Nazi regime to fight to the bitter end. And, regime change requires, as in Iraq, boots on the ground, which in this case would be suicidal to the invaders. In Iran, there are now signs of a patriotic surge even among opponents of the regime who have spent time in prison.

It is, then, not just Iran: none of Israel’s security challenges can be overcome through “total victory.” The Islamic Republic is humiliated and not in a place it’s ever been before, but it could still stay alive long enough to exhaust Israel in a war of attrition and get the United States entangled in a conflict it does not want. No matter how many bombs Netanyahu drops, diplomacy will remain the only answer. Nor could Israel hope for the tacit complicity the Arab states demonstrated in the war against Hamas and Hezbollah. While these countries have no love for Iran, they have a vested interest in regional stability, primarily as they work to diversify their economies. The risk would always remain that a cornered Iran might even attack the Gulf states directly, hitting their oil installations or disrupting transport lanes in the Persian Gulf. These countries want a nuclear deal, not a regional conflagration.

Meanwhile, Israel’s military hubris is becoming inadmissible to its Arab moderate allies. They wanted Israel as an equal partner in a regional peace, not as a new hegemon. Wisely, the Gulf states have in recent years reached out to Iran in quest of stability that would allow them to focus on their economies. Now they are in for years of uncertainty that can adversely affect their grand economic plans and the confidence of foreign investors.

The Middle East is at the threshold of a new chapter that calls for visionary leadership that is capable of thinking in grand diplomatic terms. This means bringing the war in Gaza to an end, opening a political horizon to the Palestinian nation, and extending the Abraham Peace Accords to Syria and Saudi Arabia. But if a new Middle East is what we want to build, Israel needs to assume the diplomatic wisdom that the Gulf States have shown in their rapprochement with Iran. An Israeli-Arab peace should not be a confrontational enterprise against Iran. It must be a step toward integrating Iran into a broader system of peace and security in the region. Iran’s rivals in the Middle East should not take its humiliation as the last destination of the historical process. Iran is a great nation with a formidable history and an extraordinary capacity for resurgence. It is up to its neighbours, Israelis and Arabs, to make it so that this would be a benign, rather than a malignant, comeback.

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