00:00Let's bring our next guest who says that neither the US nor Iran appear committed to any long-term
00:04resolution of the underlying tensions at the root of the conflict. Joining us now is
00:09Jessica Aguinawa, who is the Academic Director at the University of New South Wales Public Policy
00:14Institute. Jessica, great to have you with us. And we've seen from the start, the 15-point plan,
00:19the 10-point plan, the last round of negotiations, that a lot of the really substantive issues
00:22have the parties very much far apart, almost existentially apart, right?
00:27What does that mean going forward now that this truce has been extended? We're now talking
00:32about the possibility of some type of a cold war, a frozen war in your wording, a sort of
00:39forever war, if you will. Yeah, that's right. So there are sort of a couple of tracks upon which
00:45things are happening. So there's the track of more substantive political agreement around those
00:52really tricky issues. For example, what happens with the Strait of Hormuz? What happens with
00:58Iran's capacity to enrich uranium and the whole nuclear issue? What happens in terms of sanctions
01:05on Iran? And we're really not seeing any movement on those deeper issues that are driving this conflict.
01:13And then on a sort of a parallel track, we have these shaky agreements around a ceasefire,
01:20which at the moment really depends a lot on the fact that I think Trump wants a cessation of
01:25hostilities, wants to kind of withdraw the US from that full-scale military campaign that we saw
01:33in those weeks of full-scale war. And so what I see happening is that most likely the ceasefires will
01:42hold because ultimately that's in the Iranian regime's interest at the moment as well. Whilst they have
01:48withstood the US bombing campaign so far and Israeli military strikes, they really wouldn't be able to
01:54withstand that forever. I mean, they might survive as a regime, but there'll be massive costs for them
01:59of that. So I think that the ceasefire will hold, mainly because it looks like that's the direction
02:05that Trump wants to pursue. But at the same time, on that other track of those really substantial
02:09issues, I don't think we're going to get any agreement anytime soon, if ever, between this current
02:16Iranian regime. And that means that there'll be a lot of volatility, there'll be ongoing costs
02:22for the Iranian people, for the region and also around the world. And so whilst it might be a sort
02:29of a frozen conflict, it doesn't mean that there wouldn't be flare-ups of violence, but also ways
02:35in which the conflict is actually going to have a heavy price for, you know, countries not only in the
02:42region, but globally.
Comments