Iran and Israel exchanged strikes. This threatens the fragile ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran that has been in place since early April.
The word "fragile" is doing a lot of work here. A ceasefire that breaks when the two countries it was supposed to constrain start bombing each other wasn't fragile. It was imaginary.
The U.S. brokered a ceasefire between itself and Iran in early April. Iran and Israel were not part of this ceasefire. They kept striking each other. Now those strikes threaten the ceasefire that never applied to them in the first place.
This is like saying your diet is threatened because you ate a pizza. You didn't have a diet. You had a fantasy you told yourself while ordering the pizza.
The ceasefire was between the U.S. and Iran. Not between Iran and Israel. Those are different countries. Iran and Israel have been enemies since 1979. They did not suddenly become friends because America and Iran stopped shooting at each other for six weeks.
But retail traders saw the headline and panicked. They sold their tech stocks and bought defense contractors. They read "fragile ceasefire" and thought it meant something was about to break. Something already broke. It broke before it existed.
The ceasefire was always irrelevant to Iran and Israel. They continued their decades-long conflict without pause. The only thing fragile was the illusion that a bilateral agreement between two other countries would stop them.
Calling this ceasefire fragile is like calling a napkin a parachute and then acting surprised when someone falls to their death.
Photo by Saifee Art on Unsplash
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