On Sunday, Abbas Araghchi denied the Trump administration’s claims that another deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is imminent.

Instead, Araghchi explained, Tehran’s hammering out an arrangement with Oman that’d allow for orderly transit for approved vessels. Direct negotiations with Donald Trump aren’t possible currently, he went on.

“New” articles about the situation in the Gulf are a mainstay of the daily newsflow, but reading between the lines, not much has actually changed over the past two or three weeks.

By refusing to take the win in March — i.e., by declining to leave well enough alone and let the Guards parade the Monty Python Black Knight impression they were guaranteed to perform anyway — Trump has willed into existence the very state of affairs he was ostensibly trying to avert when he went to war in February.

Rationales for the war vary by the day and tend to center around Iran’s nuclear program. But another excuse revolves around the Iranian threat to freedom of navigation through the world’s most important maritime energy chokepoint. (Polling consistently suggests voters view the war as a mistake, regardless of rationale.)

It’s pretty obvious now that the only way the IRGC’s going to revert to a pre-war stance on the Strait is if the US pulls up stakes altogether in the region, which is to say abandons all of its major military bases and most of its minor outposts too. Failing that, the Iranians are likely to insist on some manner of joint control over the waterway with Oman.

The good news for the world is that, as it turns out, the closure of the Strait wasn’t the macroeconomic catastrophe many “experts” insisted it would be. There are a variety of explanations for that, and there are plenty of good arguments to support the notion that we haven’t experienced the worst of the fallout. But so far anyway, life goes on.

The bad news for Tehran is that the Strait’s now a wasting asset. I’ve been over that half a dozen times at least. The Gulf monarchies will find other ways to get trapped product to markets. They’re already working on it. And insurance premiums for vessels transiting the Strait will never fully normalize, which means the waterway will be avoided when possible even once it’s open.

In the meantime, the US naval blockade of Iranian ports means the Guards are losing revenue just like everybody else. And at this juncture, it’s worth asking whether the US could checkmate the IRGC simply by giving the regime exactly what it wants.

Imagine for a moment that Trump swallows his pride and the isolationist wing of the GOP succeeds in overriding the Israel lobby and old guard, interventionist Republicans beholden to America’s military-industrial complex, on the way to supporting a wholesale military abandonment of the region. That’s exceedingly unlikely, but let’s pretend.

That’d be a “dog catches the car” moment for Tehran. Yes, Israel would remain a state, so the regime would still have a raison d’être. But after the celebrating and grandiloquent gloating was finished, what then? What’s the narrative from the IRGC and the clerics if “Great Satan” were to just up and leave one day? Not in a dramatic Saigon/Kabul moment, but rather in a brusque decampment accompanied by some sort of arrogant, vaguely ethnocentric press release declaring it’s time for the region to “decide for itself the path it wants to take.”

In that scenario, what do you say if you’re Mojtaba Khamenei and the Guards? A lot initially. But what’s your “day after” plan? What do you tell a populace you’ve oppressed for decades on the excuse that only you can protect them from a threat that’s now gone?

That’s the same quandary the Kim dynasty would face in the (also unlikely) event the US accepted Pyongyang as a legitimate nuclear state. What do you do then if you’re the Kims? Because at that point, the whole country will have a lot of questions, and they’ll all amount to this: “Ok, we won. High fives. Now what’d be really great is if we can have a functioning economy and start working on the trappings of representative government.”

It says a lot about how little America’s actually accomplished in the Mideast that it’s even possible to suggest it wasn’t worth it. Ask yourself: How wrong do things have to go, and for how long, before something as incalculably beneficial to America as the petrodollar can be deemed not worth the trouble in hindsight?

The petrodollar’s more than a “system.” It’s a kind of ordering principle that weaves American hegemony into the very fabric of global finance, international relations and geostrategy. In theory, no cost is too great in the service of preserving it, because the benefits are incalculable. And yet the costs by now almost surely outweigh those benefits. That’s how FUBAR America’s Mideast entanglements are: The sum total of the fuckups is such that it eclipses the transfinite.

Everyone knows that. So why not just leave? Take this opportunity to get out. Israel’s a nuclear state with a military ready, willing and fully capable of running roughshod over anyone in the vicinity. Israel faces a lot of threats to its security, but exactly no credible threats to its existence. Jordan will be fine either way, and I dare say they’d be better off without hosting US military personnel. The Saudis are armed to the teeth. So are the Emirates. Iran would rather not be firing projectiles at neutral Qatar, to say nothing of blameless Oman. Iraq’s going to be a quasi-Iranian client state either way (i.e., America stays or America goes). You can thank George W. Bush for that.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah’s not going away, not as a paramilitary nor as a political party. Paradoxically, the best way to keep the peace is for Israel to accept that. As for Syria — and with apologies for how unsympathetic this sounds — they’ll either figure it out or they won’t. It’s the Wild West in there, and Israel should ask itself if pursuing an interventionist agenda’s likely to produce a better outcome than a laissez-faire approach. I think the answer’s “no,” and if Mossad’s rejoinder is, “Well, the whole idea is to ensure Syria remains a failed state,” I’d politely suggest that’s a heinous agenda.

Finally — and this too is obvious to everyone — the Palestinian question has no “answer.” A stateless people carved out a home for themselves and in the process created another stateless people who understandably never got over it. Israel’s adamant that those people’s right to self-determination, to the extent they have such a right, is subordinate to its own.

As for “the international community,” whatever that overused term even means, the Palestinians are like the polar bears. Everyone says they want to save them, but no one actually does. I don’t know how adept Palestinians are at running casinos but… well, you get where I’m going with that, right?

So, here’s my unsolicited advice to Trump. You want to be a “transformational” US president? You want to “end forever wars?” Ok, here’s your chance. Pull up stakes in the Mideast, leave the place to thrive or burn and tell everyone there the American public doesn’t give a shit which. Because the vast majority of us most assuredly don’t.