‘The Hormuz lever surpasses the nuclear card’, MEE editor-in-chieff David Hearst says

In an exclusive interview with Harici Medya on the sidelines of the Antalya Diplomacy Forum, David Hearst, Editor-in-Chief of Middle East Eye, provided a profound analysis of the shifting tectonic plates in the Middle East.

David Hearst dissected the fragile ceasefire efforts between the US and Iran, highlighting a significant strategic rift between Washington’s domestic-driven pragmatism and Netanyahu’s ideological pursuit of a “Greater Israel.” While outlining how Trump’s agenda is increasingly dictated by fuel prices and electoral concerns, the veteran journalist argued that Israel is no longer merely defending its borders but actively redrawing them.

He further challenged the narrative surrounding Hezbollah’s decline, asserting that the group’s capacity for regeneration remains a formidable factor on the ground. Ultimately, Hearst concluded that Iran’s strategic leverage over the Strait of Hormuz has emerged as a far more potent tool than its nuclear capabilities in the current regional standoff.

So we are hearing about the ceasefire and the negotiations taking place with Iran and the United States. But from what we see, Israel has some sort of reluctance to follow the ceasefire, especially in Lebanon.

That’s pretty mildly. Well, that’s… yeah, that’s kind of me to say. Israel has a completely different agenda and that… sorry. Okay, I’ll let you answer.

Do you think that this ceasefire has capability to be held in the future? Do you think this is going to be permanent for the Middle East?

Sorry, which one?

The ceasefire between the US and Iran. Not in Lebanon.

No, not in Lebanon. Okay. Just that. I mean, Lebanon could blow up the entire thing. I think, first of all, it’s very, very… you’ve got to be really clear that there are two agendas afoot, right? Two war agendas. One was the Trump war agenda, which was based very, very much on his own personality. All his allies in the region—Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, Qatar—he has financial family interests in Qatar, said, “Do not attack Iran.” And he did. And that was very much what was in his head. He thought that he had been persuaded by Mossad and by the head of Mossad and Netanyahu that Iran was so weak after the attempted uprising in January that it could just simply be pushed and just all it needed was one more push. So he attacked Iran, thinking there would be regime change in about four days. All of it wrong. Every assumption he made and that he was given by Netanyahu in that meeting—I think it was February 11th in the White House, the Situation Room of the White House—was wrong.

So that’s Trump. Israel has a completely different agenda. It is tearing up its borders. It’s not defending its borders, it’s increasing its borders. And it’s doing so in Lebanon, it’s doing so in Syria. It’s doing so wherever it can. It regards itself as on a new war of independence, a new 1948. And behind that is a religious, deeply religious idea of Greater Israel, that the Jews once lived in a land which ran from the Nile to the Euphrates. It’s a completely different agenda from Trump.

Now Trump has realized that this war against Iran has been a disaster. It’s been a disaster for the price of diesel. What he cares about as an American president is the price of diesel at the pumps, of gasoline at the pumps in Nevada. And that’s going up and up and up, including everyone. And it’s a disaster. If you stop the war and suddenly someone turns around and says, “What was that about? What did you achieve?” and he can’t answer those questions… so there’s a philosophy that Netanyahu can’t answer those questions either. That’s why he’s… there isn’t a continual war. But for Trump, a continual war is a terrible idea because he’s facing the midterms, he’s got a split within Republicans. The image of Israel amongst average Americans is going through the floor. It’s losing its strategic messaging that it’s had for so many years, well, since 1948.

So I think there is war fatigue. I think on the Iranian side, a ceasefire helps them because it helps them recover, recover their missile launches and prepare for the next round if there is another round. They’re not worried about the blockade because they have shipped 38 million barrels of oil—not ton barrels, barrels of oil—out before the war. And that’s lying off the coast of China. It’s also got other ports in the Caspian. It’s got a land border. There is no blockade on Iran. There’s certainly a blockade on Iran from the south, but not from the north and certainly not from the east. There’s a land border that’s completely open. So Iran is not being blockaded.

And if you noticed, there is a US aircraft carrier at the moment that is transiting around Africa, the Cape of Horn in Africa, so as not to go through the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. Why is it doing that? Because they’re taking seriously Iran’s… the next card that Iran would play should war start again, would be to close the Red Sea and close the Suez, and the aircraft carrier is taking the long way around to prevent that actually happening. So I think Iran’s reply to an attack has been more effective strategically than the West or America would possibly acknowledge. And both sides are pausing, obviously. They’ve had their navy destroyed, they’ve had schools bombed, they’ve had universities bombed, they’ve been ravaged by war, but they’re quite capable of continuing it.

And I think Trump is the one who’s actually pausing for thought and saying, “What’s all this leading to?” And if you listen very closely to Barak, it was Trump who stopped Netanyahu from continuing the war in Lebanon, very obviously. They just said, “We closed it down.” You almost used those words. And that’s interesting. That was the most interesting thing that came out of that thing. They actually forced him to do it. So, I’m sorry, it’s a very long-winded answer from your very straight question. But I think there is war fatigue. I think there’s a realization in the US of exactly what it’s achieved. I think they now have experience, some small experience of a negotiating partner on the other side.

And if you notice, there were 70 specialists that Iran sent to the Islamabad talks. And you have Vance on the phone all the time to Netanyahu and… sorry, Vance on the phone all the time to Trump and Trump on the phone to Netanyahu. So it was a total imbalance. Now I think America is saying, “Hey, hang on a moment, we’ve actually got people who want to talk to us. Let’s see what we can do.” But these are baby steps at the moment. All they’ve agreed is a cessation. I think the real problem in these talks isn’t so much the nuclear issue. There’s less distance on the nuclear issue than there is on Hormuz. I think Hormuz is a card that one way or another, Iran will not give up, pay for it. They’ll say, “Yes, we’ve got free transport,” but they’ll be paying Iran.

On the nuclear side, even before the war started, and this is according to the Foreign Minister of Pakistan, there was an Iranian offer to dilute its entire stock of 60% highly enriched uranium, which would have meant it’s no longer highly enriched. But they insist on the right of enrichment. So there is still an issue between the two sides about could Iran continue to enrich. But there’s less of a gap. My feeling is there’s less of a gap on that because how do you get a bomb? You get a bomb through highly enriched uranium. If Iran is one way or another closing that uranium down, then there’s no bomb. And according to the IAEA, there’s no bomb program anyway, right? That’s the one thing consistently that they’ve said. I was talking to Mohamed ElBaradei, you know, the old… from the first Iraq War, second Iraq War, and he was saying, he was absolutely insistent, IAEA keeps on saying there’s no bomb program. Okay, there’s no weaponization program. Netanyahu keeps on saying they’re a week away from it, you know, they’re five days away from it. He’s been saying that for the last three years. So on enrichment, it’s much, much closer. But there’s still a tangent on Hormuz; there’s the biggest gap in the world.

When you look into what you just said with the Israel and American relations, their agenda is completely different. In the Middle East, we saw something similar happening in Syria where Israel wanted a more divided Syria while the United States prefers a more unified Syria. But when you look into the Lebanon crisis now and their agendas being maybe more radically different in Iran, do you expect a potential break-off in the relations between Israel and the United States?

There’ll never be a break-off in relations because their militaries are so tied together and their industrial complex is so tied. But there can now be American pressure on Israel. I think… you know, Tom Barak said several very interesting things. He said, “You can’t have a peace deal without Iran and in Lebanon without Iran and Hezbollah at the table.” He actually said that. Okay, this is an attempt to go run. Everyone knows that. The President of Lebanon does not have the power to disarm Hezbollah, right? It did not happen and it won’t happen.

But the only thing you can do is say we’ll have a ceasefire. Having had a ceasefire, you’ve got to think, where are Israeli troops? Israel’s project there is to clear the border out completely. And it’s destroyed all the bridges. And even after the ceasefire announcement, it destroyed the last bridge. You notice that the last bridge connecting over the Litani has now been destroyed. And they want a buffer zone all the way up to the Litani. That is unacceptable for any person in Lebanon, whether they’re Shia or Muslim, Sunni, anything, Christian, Maronite—you cannot have that. It’s Lebanon. And so, you know, okay, the army stopped fighting, but the new de facto border has been moved up a little bit. So you’ll constantly get… it’ll only be a matter of time before those positions are attacked.

The other thing about Hezbollah is that everyone wrote them off after 2004. They said—even I did, actually—I wrote articles saying, “Oh, it’s now much weaker than before.” I was completely wrong. You know, Hezbollah has actually got up and regenerated itself. You know, after the pagers killed so many people, we all thought, “No, no, no, no, they’d had enough. It was a defeat. It was a defeat.” I wasn’t wrong about that. But where I was completely wrong as an analyst was to underestimate the powers of regeneration of Hezbollah. And they’re fighting. A new generation of people are fighting. They don’t have mobile calls with each other because everything is being monitored. So it’s person-to-person contact. And they are fighting an existential battle with modern weaponry against Israeli tanks. And they’re doing it very, very bravely. And everyone wrote Hezbollah off because they said they’d been decapitated, this, that and the other. And in fact, they are now stronger than they were before.

One final question I want to ask you about the position of the Gulf states right now, because when you look into what Saudi Arabia is saying about “Saudi Arabia first,” but all the Gulf states, they were trying to go for a more neutral position in the beginning. But as Iran hits more targets inside these countries, they start to push the United States into a direction of continuing the war. At least that’s what the Western media is claiming. So we are trying to understand here, what does Saudi Arabia expect in the Middle East in Iran’s case? Iran wants the American military presence to be reduced in the Gulf states. Do you see this as a likelihood in the negotiations and also, will Saudi Arabia’s position change in terms of Abraham Accords, especially with Israel in the short term?

Okay, right, let’s talk about the Gulf and then I’ll come back to Saudi Arabia. This attack has split the GCC basically into three camps. One is the Qatar and the Omani camp, which is peace. We don’t want to retaliate. We’re angry. We were against the war, but we’re not going to fight it. On the other side, on the belligerent side, you’ve got the Emirates and Bahrain who may have already—there’s increasing evidence—already attacked Iran with drones. There’s an issue about a downed Chinese drone in Iran that could only have come from the Emirates, an attack drone. So they may already have started.

Now, in between the peace camp and the war camp is Saudi Arabia and possibly Kuwait. And they’ve gone from one side to another. They warned against the war, but then they opened up one of their bases. They started the war by saying the US cannot use bases in Saudi Arabia as a platform to attack. And then they gave one of their bases; halfway through the war they gave one of their bases for the America and then they became under attack. So they’ve done two things. I think your question is critical and, to be truthful with you, I can’t answer it. What is the post-war Gulf situation like? Okay, America, let’s say there’s a deal, America goes right… and what does it leave behind? It leaves behind a shattered Iran, an angry Iran, very angry with the Emiratis and Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and you know, a whole bunch of Gulf states who are now paying in some way or other to get their oil products out.

So that is the key question. Even if Trump walks away and says, “Peace in our time,” I agree… I created a problem, I’ve solved the problem that I created. Even if he maintains that, what is going to happen in the Gulf? And now you could say that the Persian Sea, the Persian Gulf really does belong to Iran. I mean, strategically, the Strait of Hormuz has been a much, much bigger lever than uranium.

Thank you so much, sir.

Thank you very much.