When US President Donald Trump signed a ceasefire agreement with Iran during dinner at the Palace of Versailles last month, many saw an irony. His host, French President Emanuel Macron, may have wanted to make sure the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed before Trump changed his mind, and possibly calculated that the gilded Hall of Mirrors would appeal to his guest. But the choice of venue inevitably invited comparisons between the one-and-a-half page agreement and the extremely lengthy Treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919 at the end of World War One. The 1919 treaty reshaped Europe, but its demands for huge reparations left an angry and embittered Germany and helped to set the stage for another global conflagration just 20 years later. Might the Iran deal, different in so many ways, nevertheless come to be seen as similarly fateful? This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.

This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.

Almost three weeks later, a fragile ceasefire more or less holds. But after several skirmishes in and around the Strait of Hormuz, and with none of the issues that led to war anywhere close to being resolved, the situation in the Middle East looks every bit as precarious as it did before.

Meanwhile, Iran is in the midst of profound change. The country is saying farewell to its former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed more than four months ago in the devastating joint US-Israeli airstrikes which began the war and decapitated much of the regime in Tehran. It's a big moment: a grand reminder that the old guard has given way to the new. And with the new faces comes a new approach with its own implications. The US and Israel may have sent many of the country's former leaders to early graves, but have they been replaced by even more formidable foes?

"This war is much more consequential and larger than we have given it credit for thus far," Vali Nasr, professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies, told me. "All major wars of this magnitude ultimately reorder the chess board," he says. "This will do it for the Middle East."

Back in January, Iran was wracked by popular protest which both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predicted might herald the collapse of the Islamic Republic. Iran's economy was already in tatters after decades of international sanctions. The country was also still badly wounded after a 12-day war with the US and Israel six months earlier. Iran's nuclear programme, long a diplomatic tool of leverage, had not been obliterated, as Trump boasted, but had been significantly damaged. The whereabouts of its stockpile of uranium, believed to be enough for 10 or 11 atomic weapons if enriched further, was not certain, but much of it was thought to be buried under rubble near the Isfahan nuclear complex.

Further afield, Iran's "Axis of Resistance," a loose alliance of proxies and allies around the Middle East, had experienced a series of major setbacks. In Syria, the regime of close Iranian ally Bashar al-Assad was gone, swept away in a few heady weeks at the end of 2024. In Lebanon, Israel had assassinated leading members of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah group and decimated the ranks of its fighters with exploding pagers and walkie-talkies. In the Gaza Strip, another Iranian ally, Hamas, had suffered a similar fate. Israel responded to the group's devastating October 2023 attacks with a relentless assault that laid waste to much of Gaza and killed tens of thousands of civilians. And when - in response to the Gaza war - Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen had launched ballistic missiles at Israel and started attacking shipping in the Red Sea, Israel, the US and UK had all launched counter strikes, some of them targeting the group's leadership.

After so many setbacks at home and abroad, the consensus was that Iran was in a highly vulnerable state. The New York Times reported that Trump had received several intelligence reports indicating that Iran was weaker than at any point since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The idea that it could fight the US and Israel to a standstill seemed far-fetched. And yet, that's what happened. The Islamic Republic is still standing, thanks in part to its ability to close one of the world's most important waterways, the Strait of Hormuz, and strangle the global economy. Trump is fond of saying that he's achieved regime change in Iran. Vali Nasr doesn't disagree, but says this has actually worked to Tehran's advantage. "A whole new generation has taken over," he says. "They have a very clear agenda. They managed the war and now they're going to manage the peace as well." The new leadership is not made up of the sort of people Washington is used to calling "woolly-brained apocalyptic ideologues", says Nasr, but of generally post-revolutionary leaders ruthlessly focussed on preserving the state and willing to act more decisively than their predecessors. At 56, the country's new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei is 30 years younger than his father, Ali Khamenei, who was believed to be in frail physical condition when he was killed at the start of the war.