What can we learn from the first round of talks between the between the United States and Iran since their truce deal was signed last week?
For the Trump administration, it’s going to be a difficult 60 days. Even supporters are lambasting the terms of the cease-fire, criticizing the president for handing the regime a financial windfall, raising the potential for tolls on traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, and offering no guarantees on Iran’s nuclear program or missile stockpiles. Israel has claimed that its attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon are not covered under the deal, and this at least temporarily disrupted talks over the weekend. Beyond that, most of the hard questions have been deferred, not resolved.
That’s the nature of truce deals—they set the parameters of the negotiations and point the two sides to a broader agreement. But in this case, the most likely outcome is not a breakthrough but a violent muddle, with on-and-off, but often limited, violence.
The most instructive parallel is not the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iran nuclear deal forged in 2015 and abrogated by the United States in 2018, but the 2025 Gaza peace plan. This Trump-orchestrated agreement was an initial diplomatic triumph, seemingly ending a grinding and devastating war. In reality, although the Gaza deal generated optimistic headlines, it was at best a framework for continued, but limited, conflict rather than a true settlement.
None of the longer-term promises of U.S. President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan—reconstructing Gaza, demilitarizing the territory, or deploying an international stabilization force, among others—have been implemented or are in the process of moving forward. Since the cease-fire with Hamas last October, Israeli operations have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in Gaza, with Israel at times curbing or halting aid deliveries. This violence has occurred without triggering a return to all-out war, and the parties stumble forward in a state of low-grade conflict that is neither peace nor war with no political solution in sight.
The nuclear file presents exactly this kind of intractable problem for the United States, Israel, and Iran. How much money Iran will receive, who will provide it, and whether any enrichment or stockpiling continues are questions with no clear answers, and both sides have incentives to claim the other is making concessions. Trump spent years slamming the Obama-negotiated JCPOA, and his administration is extraordinarily sensitive to any suggestion of similarity. Thus, the administration will be reluctant to say yes to any Iranian nuclear activity that allows long-term enrichment, does not remove current stockpiles from Iran, or otherwise suggests U.S. tolerance of an Iranian nuclear weapon. The lack of any safeguards written into the current agreement makes such criticisms especially likely.
The money problem compounds this, as any funds released to Iran risk flowing to proxies such as Hezbollah, rebuilding Iran’s missile stocks, or otherwise defeating the purpose of the latest war. The outlines of the agreement suggest that the United States is offering far more financial relief than was done under the Obama administration.
At the same time, as in Gaza, neither side wants a return to all-out war. Iran lost much of its leadership in the first days of the war, and the subsequent fighting, closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and U.S. blockade devastated Iran’s economy. The war also hit the United States and its allies hard. Threats and even limited military strikes are likely to be used to signal, but an all-out conflict serves neither side.
Understanding Iran’s approach toward future negotiations requires recognizing how fundamentally its strategic worldview has shifted.
The previous leadership under Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was hostile but cautious. You could count on Khamenei to denounce the United States and Israel, but under his leadership, Iran was unwilling, for example, to close Hormuz during Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025, even under severe pressure.
The new leadership has absorbed a different lesson from that episode: that the United States only understands force and that Iran must and can stand up to it.
This attitude makes Tehran more intransigent. Iran has historically been an exasperating negotiating partner, and the conditions today make that worse. The new leadership is still consolidating power and probably requires some internal consensus before any commitments can be made binding, especially on issues involving the United States and Israel. Making this harder, communication among Iranian officials is probably impaired. The assassination campaign made Iran’s counterintelligence problems clear, and leaders are likely to limit communication, fearing potential targeting. Negotiations conducted under those conditions are likely to be slow, opaque, and prone to sudden reversals.
At the same time, Iran’s use of proxies to attack or threaten Israel, the United States, and other enemies has largely failed. Israel devastated Hezbollah and Hamas, and their degradation has become a source of weakness—Iran must protect Hezbollah, not the other way around—rather than leverage.
Iran’s abilities to strike U.S. allies in the Gulf and close the Strait of Hormuz, however, are game-changers. Iran can strike targets belonging to U.S. allies as a form of coercion, pressuring those states to accommodate Iranian interests or to lobby Washington on Iran’s behalf. It has shown that it can close Hormuz, a move with global economic consequences that imposes real costs on the United States and its allies. And it can extract tolls. Whatever euphemism is used (transit fees, maritime security arrangements, etc.), these provide relief from U.S. economic pressure, which before the latest war was the primary weapon used by the United States to weaken Iran.
The deeper problem is trust—or rather its absence. Tehran watched the United States withdraw from the JCPOA despite a statement by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran was complying with the agreement. Then the United States used negotiations in 2025 as cover for an Israeli attack. As a result, it’s now likely that Iranian leaders doubt Washington is negotiating in good faith and are skeptical that any agreement would be a lasting one. This contributes to a short-term mentality.
Israel has been excluded from the negotiations (and was even blocked from reading the text of the truce deal before its release) despite having more existential interests in the conflict than the United States. Neither Israel nor the United States wants a nuclear-armed Iran, and both oppose Iran’s missile program and closing of the Strait of Hormuz, among other shared objectives. However, their priorities and timelines have diverged significantly, with the United States emphasizing Hormuz and Israel more focused on Iran’s support for proxies and its nuclear and medium-range ballistic missile programs.
Israel will hold elections in October, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is always weighing the domestic political implications of every foreign-policy move he makes. The deal is widely perceived in Israel as favoring Iran, and this reflects poorly on Netanyahu. More fundamentally, Israel has been in a state of continuous, multifront conflict since Oct. 7, 2023, striking not only Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza but also (on a more limited scale) Syria, the West Bank, and Yemen. It is establishing what appears to be a permanent military footprint and buffer zones in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, an implicit decision to trade the prospect of peace for strategic depth.
Political analyst Natan Sachs has described this overall approach as “anti-solutionism”—a foreign-policy approach that treats the absence of a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians not as a failure but as an objective. Under this logic, no Palestinian victory is acceptable, not even a moderate one represented by the Palestinian Authority. This logic is now applied to other conflicts as well. Israel is using force to set its adversaries back, not to gain advantage at the negotiating table. The costs of this approach—ongoing suffering in Gaza and the West Bank, expanded conflicts in Lebanon and Syria, severe strain on Israeli society, and accelerating damage to Israel’s international reputation—are real, but they have not yet produced a political incentive sufficient to change course.
Israel may thus act as a spoiler, striking Hezbollah in Lebanon and otherwise maintaining an aggressive posture. Iran, believing that it must protect its proxy and that it has leverage, may again disrupt traffic in the Strait of Hormuz or try to put pressure on U.S. allies, believing that the only way to stop Israel is to go through Washington.
The strains extend well beyond the U.S.-Israel relationship. Gulf states that depend on U.S. security guarantees have watched the last year with deep unease, as the United States was unable to protect them from Iran’s drones and missiles during the war and now moves forward on an agreement that places no limits on Iran’s rearmament. Before the cease-fire agreement was finalized, Qatar made financial payments to Iran in exchange for immunity from attacks with at least tacit U.S. support.
In the future, Qatar and other Gulf states may prefer to hedge than rely on U.S. guarantees. They might also deny the United States basing and accessing rights, concluding that it cannot reliably protect them and that hosting U.S. military bases makes them more of a target rather than more secure.
European and Asian allies have their own grievances, and these build on prewar U.S. offenses, including tariffs on close allies and talk of seizing Greenland from Denmark, a close ally. The United States did not consult these allies before attacking Iran and then turned around and made demands of them, such as sending forces to help open the Strait of Hormuz, that were both unrealistic and resentful in tone. The cumulative effect has been to raise questions about the reliability of U.S. leadership that will outlast any specific agreement with Iran.
The deepest uncertainty is what the United States actually wants from the Middle East over the long term. The latest war suggests that Washington may remain focused on the region, but the Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy boasted that the Middle East “is no longer the constant irritant, and potential source of imminent catastrophe, that it once was.” The United States has no interest in a peace process, and support for Israel, one past driver of U.S. involvement in the region, is waning among both Republicans and Democrats.
The Middle East, however, has a history of defeating minimalist U.S. strategies. The deal with Iran will be implemented—or not—in a context shaped by U.S. flip-flopping, Israeli military operations, Iranian proxy activity, Gulf state hedging, and allied frustration. Vague language in an agreement about future progress cannot hold together actors with such different interests and such limited trust in one another.
The most honest prediction is the least satisfying one: This conflict will continue at varying levels, in one form or another, for a long time.
