To understand where talks on ending the war between the US and Iran currently stand, all we can confidently assume is that Donald Trump’s pronouncements offer no guide. The US president said an agreement had been “largely negotiated” on May 23.
That proposal would have reopened the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for sanctions relief and the unfreezing of Iranian assets. But it would not have immediately extracted concessions on Iran’s nuclear activities and ballistic missile capabilities. In response to backlash from Republican hawks, Trump subsequently toughened the US position.
The following week, Trump again claimed he was “on the verge” of approving a peace deal and US officials started briefing that Iran had made critical concessions. Iranian officials denied reports they had accepted major concessions on uranium enrichment or the future of their nuclear programme.
Talks were then suspended on June 1 after Iran protested Israel’s offensive in Lebanon, and the US and Iran exchanged military strikes. Trump declared he “couldn’t care less” if the talks were over, but by the evening, was once again insisting negotiations were continuing “at a rapid pace”.
According to Iranian media, the current situation is that Iran is studying the latest US proposal but communications between the two countries are paused. The US and Iran have also traded military strikes in recent days. So why are the two sides seemingly unable to close the gap between their respective positions?
One obvious obstacle is the dysfunctional conditions under which negotiations are taking place. The simple act of communicating through intermediaries creates delays and complications. The fact that messages must then be considered by a reordered and fractured political system that is reluctant to use even basic communications technology for fear of revealing officials’ whereabouts adds another layer of complexity.
But even a more unified Iranian regime operating in peacetime would still have to contend with the message incoherence, unpredictability and unprofessionalism that masquerades as statesmanship in Washington. Iranian officials do not believe Trump has the attention span to negotiate a complex agreement, nor do they believe he can be relied upon to honour any agreement he signs.
In June 2025 and then again in February 2026, Iranian diplomats believed they were engaged in serious negotiations and were already working through the technical details of a potential agreement, only for US and Israeli military strikes to follow shortly afterwards.
This has important implications for the choreography of any deal to end the current hostilities. Iran wants Washington to make concessions – on sanctions relief, ending the US maritime blockade and unfreezing Iranian assets – first before it reciprocates. It also wants any agreement to be legally binding on future US administrations. The former is politically very difficult for Trump and the latter is constitutionally impossible.
Amirhossein Khorgooei / ISNA News Agency / EPA
Trump himself has made a very unconvincing case that he can force Iran to accept his maximalist demands. These include strict limits on Iran’s ballistic missile programme, an end to its support for proxy groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas and the dismantling of Tehran’s nuclear activities.
And yet he appears desperate to avoid signing a deal that could be compared to Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran (known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA). Trump recklessly vandalised the JCPOA by withdrawing the US from the deal in 2018.
The JCPOA contained 159 pages of commitments and technical annexes. It took 20 months for a small army of diplomats and nuclear experts to negotiate. Currently, American diplomacy is being spearheaded by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kuschner, and a billionaire real estate magnate, Steve Witkoff. And Trump himself seems unsure on what would qualify as reasonable safeguards for preventing Iran from building a nuclear weapon.
At the same time, Iran’s enriched uranium is thought to be lying in highly hazardous gas form mostly buried under collapsed facilities bombed in the 12-day war of 2025. So the initial process of verifying how much enriched uranium Iran has poses a far greater technical challenge than it did in the lead up to the JCPOA. This in turn affects the negotiations because sanctions relief would be based on how much enriched uranium Iran ships out.
Iran’s strengthened hand
The US is also engaging in talks with greatly diminished leverage. By using military force against Iran, it has already played its ultimate coercive card. Both domestic and international opinion largely views the outcome as a failure.
Iran, by contrast, believes it has survived the conflict. It is now ruled by a generation of leaders shaped by the experiences of this war and by a renewed confidence that hard power and the strategic use of Iran’s geography can be used to reshape the regional order.
This has emboldened Iran to introduce demands that lay well beyond the scope of the JCPOA, most notably its insistence that any wider settlement addresses Israeli military operations against its ally Hezbollah in Lebanon.
It seems highly doubtful that a comprehensive deal can be reached that adheres to Trump’s proclaimed red lines. More realistically, though by no means assuredly, a deal may emerge that sees Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz in return for financial incentives, with the other issues kicked into the long grass and postponed to an uncertain second phase of negotiations.
The lesson of this war is that the Gulf states will surely have much diminished faith in Washington’s ability to achieve a stable regional order. Its inability to contain Iran, prevent escalation or protect its allies from the consequences of its own failed military intervention is likely to accelerate efforts to build alternative security arrangements within the region.
