The latest U.S. military conflict with Iran appears to be over.
Washington declared success. Tehran claimed victory. Israel insisted it remains free to strike Hezbollah.
Some sticking points remain. For example, Iranian officials insist de-escalation in Lebanon was part of the deal; Israeli leaders deny it.
To most onlookers, the contradictions may seem like confusion, bad faith or evidence that the agreement is already unraveling.
But after more than two decades studying how wars end and whether the peace holds, I have learned that contradictions are often a sign the negotiations are working. The real danger lies elsewhere: in what the U.S.-Iran agreement leaves out.
The price of caving
It would be a mistake to assume the United States and Iran are bargaining only with each other.
The political scientist Robert Putnam called diplomacy a “two-level game” in which leaders negotiate abroad and at home at once. And no deal abroad survives unless it can be sold to the audience back home.
The U.S.-Iran agreement is closer to a five-level game. Washington must satisfy Iran, Israel, Congress, its Arab partners and its European allies. Tehran must satisfy Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard, Iran’s most powerful military institution. Iran must also contain a public whose anger over sanctions can spill into the streets, and it must keep Russia and China on its side.
Every gain at the negotiating table must be sold to people who are not at the table.
That is why the messaging contradicts itself. Each side is talking past its rival to its own people. Washington calls relief from sanctions a reversible decision. Tehran stresses its sovereignty. Israel advertises its freedom to strike.
And the price of caving differs from place to place. In Washington, it might be electoral. In Tehran, factions of hard-liners may exact a heavy political price from leaders who compromise with the West, a lesson learned by President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif after the 2015 nuclear deal.
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Diplomacy has always worked this way. The first recorded peace treaty, struck by Egypt and the Hittites – an ancient civilization centered in modern-day Turkey – after the battle of Kadesh 3,000 years ago, survives in two versions, each written in its own language for an audience at home.
In October 2025, I saw the Egyptian text carved into the walls at the Karnak complex, a vast array of temples, pylons and chapels near Luxor in southern Egypt. A copper replica now hangs outside the U.N. Security Council, where agreements like these are still negotiated today.
Peace between Egypt and the Hittites held not because the parties told the same story but because each could tell one its own people would accept.
Generous with rewards, short on penalties
Contradictory messaging, then, is not the problem. The problem is that the same multilevel pressures that scramble public narratives also shape what negotiators are willing to put into an agreement.
Each side bargains hard for rewards it can display at home and resists penalties for noncompliance that it would have to defend later. The result is a U.S.-Iran deal generous with benefits and short on enforcement.
While conducting research for my 2009 book “Securing the Peace,” I found that negotiated settlements ending civil wars break down at roughly twice the rate of wars ending in outright military victory. Although my research focused on civil wars, the broader lesson applies to war settlements more generally. They fail not because of what is written on paper but because they lack credible enforcement once implementation begins.
This weakness is hidden at the moment of signing, when all parties are still collecting the benefits an agreement promises. It surfaces later, once those rewards are exhausted and nothing exists to deter or punish defection.
The 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty makes the point. It endured not simply because Egypt regained the Sinai Peninsula and Israel won recognition, but because those gains were embedded in a broader enforcement structure: phased Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai tied to compliance and sustained U.S. economic and military assistance to both countries. The treaty also deployed the Multinational Force and Observers in 1982 to monitor Sinai’s demilitarization. More than four decades later, the treaty holds.
The lesson for any U.S. settlement with Iran is clear. Durable peace depends not only on what parties gain but on the institutions and incentives built to enforce it long after the signing ceremony ends.
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By that standard, the U.S.-Iran agreement is built to wobble. It is generous with rewards and short on penalties. The United States lifts its blockade, issues oil waivers, releases frozen Iranian funds and promises more than US$300 billion in reconstruction.
Iran reopens the Strait of Hormuz and dilutes its enriched uranium on its own soil, while keeping the machinery to enrich more. Nearly every step confers a benefit on someone; almost none imposes a cost on the party that walks away.
Enforcement is left to a U.N. Security Council resolution that has not been written. The hardest question, enrichment, is pushed into a final deal that may never be reached.
And there is a deeper problem. The actors most capable of destroying the agreement are precisely those least constrained by it. Israel, Hezbollah and the broader network of Iranian-backed militias across the region all sit outside the agreement. They gain little by complying and risk little by defecting because they never signed. A settlement that excludes powerful spoilers has no way to make breaking it hurt.
None of this means collapse is imminent. The history of peacemaking – from Kadesh to the Dayton Accords that ended the Bosnian war, to the Belfast Agreement that halted the 30-year sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland – shows that public blowups and threats to walk out are normal stages, not proof of failure.
But surviving the turbulence is not the same as lasting. The question is not whether setbacks come. History shows they will. It is whether the parties build institutions capable of deterring defection before the rewards are spent and the incentives are gone.
That points to a clear task, and it is not the one most are watching. The task is not to reconcile competing narratives. It is to create automatic costs for anyone who returns to violence, including actors who never sat at the negotiating table.
