The coming months of Iran-US formal and informal negotiations, and of jockeying by all sides on the ground, at sea, and in the air, will be fascinating and crucial in shaping the direction of the Middle East for years to come.
But right now, readers should get used to the idea that many of the most crucial issues are unlikely to be immediately resolved, and even if framework deals are reached on some of them, truly resolving them could easily take months.
In that sense, Saturday’s negotiations in Pakistan and further Iran-US talks between now and the 14-day deadline ending at the end of April are actually quite narrow: will the countries go back to war, will they make enough progress within 14 days to continue talks and refrain from going back to war, and will they reach a framework deal for resolving the Strait of Hormuz crisis and ending the Lebanon war?
Resolving the nuclear issue, the ballistic missiles issue, the sanctions issue, when US forces will withdraw from the region, and ending the war in a more final sense will likely take longer.
Given that at this stage, both the US and Iran think they have the upper hand (yes, shockingly, the Islamic regime thinks it has the upper hand even though it has been clobbered, since it survived so far and has a chokehold on Hormuz), neither side is rushing to make long-term strategic concessions to the other side.
This is why the first round of talks ended not only without a deal but also without even setting a new date for further talks.
Even if the talks jump forward in positive ways between now and the end of April or are extended, along with the ceasefire, into May, thorny and complex technical issues like Iran’s 60% enriched uranium cannot be resolved in a couple of weeks.
Rather, the expectation is that in the best-case scenario, Iran, supervised by the IAEA and possibly the US or other third parties, extracts its 60% enriched uranium from under significant amounts of rubble under multiple bombed nuclear sites over a period of months in order to have it transferred to Russia or otherwise neutralized.
Resolving the Hormuz crisis and the conflict with Lebanon will not take months, so they are the first issues likely to be resolved.
Iran wanted the Lebanon war to end before the talks so they could take credit for ending it and bank it as a concession they would not need to pay for in the talks. The US wanted Hormuz to be opened as the price for ending the war, so that negotiations would be focused immediately on the nuclear issue.
Neither side got what they wanted going into the talks, since both pressing issues remain open.
However, the US and Iran are not standing still outside the negotiating room.
After a one-off massive bombing by Israel on Tuesday, all over Lebanon – intended to show that Jerusalem viewed Lebanon as excluded from the ceasefire – US President Donald Trump ordered (not an exaggeration) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to tone down attacks on Hezbollah.
Since then, there have been no IDF attacks in Beirut or in general in sensitive areas north of the Litani River, with most attacks focused on fighting in southern Lebanon or on Hezbollah rocket teams who are about to fire on Israel.
Hezbollah has maintained some fire on northern Israel, but at overall reduced levels. The US also sent two destroyers through the Strait of Hormuz to establish safe passage and potentially deal with sea mines.
Iran's public desires
In public, Iran claimed that it forced the vessels to retreat, but in practice, it allowed the vessels to pass through without firing on them, though it retains the capability to attack such ships. Iran also wants money, since it is falling apart economically on levels never seen before, following 38 days of being pounded from the air.
An easy partial initial deal would be to release some or all of the approximately $6 billion in Iranian funds (a tiny fraction of what Iran needs), which Qatar has held frozen since the fall of 2023. These funds were supposed to go to Iran with the approval of the Biden administration as part of a prisoner release and multi-part potential new nuclear deal, but everything was frozen after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel.
There is some symmetry here: neither side will win anything militarily or on nuclear or ballistic missile issues, but both sides will get a much-needed economic breather. Paradoxically, Iran has the upper hand on this issue, since its economic situation is so poor and will take so long to fix that, if negotiations drag out for more weeks or even months, strategically speaking, it will not actually be that much worse off.
In contrast, Trump promised Americans that the war would not impact them economically, but it has been impacting them at the gas tank severely for a few weeks now. Alleviating that pressure is a political necessity for Trump, such that dragging out talks on the issue for several weeks or months will damage him much more in relative terms.
Put differently, the Iranians have already hit rock bottom; Trump can still avoid that scenario if he cuts a deal soon enough.
Because the Iranians have this short-term advantage and because Israel has not really accomplished any new strategic gains in Lebanon for the last few weeks since it completed seizing the south, Tehran will likely secure a ceasefire between the IDF and Hezbollah as part of the price for any initial agreement relating to Hormuz.
Of course, the sides could still go back to war, and it is crucial that Trump has kept all US forces in the region to preserve that viable, continuous military threat.
Israeli military officials are beside themselves in the belief that they delivered nearly everything they possibly could have on the military playing field, but that almost nothing lasting has been achieved diplomatically to date by Netanyahu, who retains influence with Trump but may be, to some extent, excluded from any real decisive impact on the Iran-US talks.
Yet, neither side came into these talks in good shape. Both came in because they have been losing ground for weeks despite multiple attempts to gain a more decisive upper hand. That means that neither Iran nor the US is likely to rush back to war, even if no deal is sealed after 14 days.
Rather, both sides are likely in a staring contest to try to eke out whatever small additional initial concessions they can get around the 14-day deadline or after a first extension of the talks into May. Only after a deal – or at least a framework – for opening Hormuz in exchange for ending the Lebanon war will more serious talks about the larger issues for permanently ending the war likely occur.