Three months after joint U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran started a war in the Middle East, the United States remains stuck in strategic limbo, with no clear resolution to the conflict in sight. Dueling U.S. and Iranian blockades have closed the Strait of Hormuz to nearly all maritime traffic, removing some 14 million barrels per day of Persian Gulf oil from world markets. Despite weeks of punishing airstrikes, the Islamic Republic remains intact and defiant. Diplomatic exchanges mediated by Pakistan are ongoing, and both American and Iranian officials have suggested that a deal is in the works. But the U.S. and Iranian negotiating positions remain far apart, not least because the United States continues to strike Iranian military targets amid the peace talks, with recent rounds of bombings earning threats of retaliation from Tehran.
The situation with Iran is untenable—yet as badly as Trump needs and wants a deal to end the impasse, his own decisions continue to sabotage the bargaining process. For an agreement to be reached, Trump will first need to recalibrate his demands to match the strategic reality, which now favors Iran. That means dropping maximalist positions on Iran’s nuclear program and giving up for good any hope of imposing constraints on Iran’s missile capabilities or support for proxy forces.
For a deal to stick, Trump will also need to grapple with a problem created by U.S. actions over the past 18 months: a lack of credible assurances, which we wrote about in Foreign Affairs last year. Pushing Iran into a deal requires more than just military threats. It also requires convincing the Iranian regime that by cooperating with U.S. demands and giving up its nuclear program, Tehran can prevent future aggression from the United States and Israel. By attacking Iran during negotiations and engaging in maximalist online rhetoric, such as his threat to erase a “whole civilization,” Trump has made it increasingly difficult for Washington to offer the types of commitments that Tehran will require before it agrees to even a minimal version of U.S. demands.
A narrow path to a deal still exists, but it will require U.S. concessions, on both the Strait of Hormuz and the nuclear file. Necessary, credible assurances could come in several forms, including a phased process that separates the status of the Strait of Hormuz from nuclear negotiations and rewards Iran for moving on either issue or for using third-party guarantors such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
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