Diplomats like ambiguity. But as President Donald Trump’s emissaries try to craft a permanent ceasefire agreement in the Iran war, they will need certainty about one essential detail: safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. So far, that seems to be a shimmering mirage.
Trump was exulting early Wednesday about the current fragile ceasefire with the same overheated rhetoric that he used a day before with his ultimatum that “a whole civilization will die” if Iran didn’t capitulate and open the strait. A day later, he was proclaiming, “this could be the Golden Age of the Middle East!!!” In Iran, “big money will be made.”
Not so fast. By late Wednesday, Iran’s Fars News Agency reported that the strait was fully closed. And the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, suggested Tehran might withdraw from talks unless Israel halts its attacks on Lebanon. A war that began without a clear strategy for victory seemed to be converging, perhaps inevitably, on an endgame missing a formula for peace.
How did we get here? Partly it was the diplomats’ beloved ambiguity. Trump announced that a 10-point Iranian proposal was “a workable basis on which to negotiate.” Iran said it was “considering” a 15-point peace plan from the United States. The two term sheets are radically different, but never mind: A war-weary Trump had long forgotten his March 6 demand for “unconditional surrender.”
The fog of diplomacy here is thick. But officials close to the negotiations explained to me some basics. Pakistan, backed by China, has been leading a widening global coalition that for 10 days has crafted a framework for a settlement. Contacts about this peace deal between Washington and Tehran were muddled, partly because of wartime havoc inside Iran. Message exchanges that would normally take two to three hours have stretched to 24 to 36, officials said.
Pakistan emerged as mediator because it has good relations with most of the key players — the United States and Iran, certainly, but also China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Islamabad is said to regard diplomacy as more masked ball than two-person tango. And its diplomats are sometimes maddeningly adept at the art of ambiguity.
An early diplomatic marker, though not widely noticed, was a March 31 initiative by China and Pakistan “For Restoring Peace and Stability in the Gulf.” This initiative, which officials said was discussed during a March 16 phone call between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, set out a simple peace agenda: cessation of hostilities, start of peace talks and, perhaps most important, “security of shipping lanes.”
The China-Pakistan initiative followed a similar effort by Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, who met in Islamabad with diplomats from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt for “consultations on efforts aimed at de-escalation in the region,” according to Pakistan’s foreign ministry.
A similar call for collective action to reopen the strait came from 46 former government ministers organized by the International Crisis Group. They modeled their proposal on the 2022 Black Sea Initiative that reopened shipping there in the midst of the Russia-Ukraine war.
As this diplomacy was advancing, with the White House’s blessing, Trump was escalating his threats against Iran, including a profane Easter rant: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” Pope Leo XIV called such language “truly unacceptable.”
Trump seemed almost to be narrating his own war movie, as in his Tuesday post — threatening to destroy Persian civilization and then musing: “WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”
This erratic bombast has cost Trump support and credibility in Congress and among European allies, who have been notably uninvolved in collective action to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But in some capitals where politics is understood to be performance art, Trump’s bellicosity was seen as “just showbiz,” as one official told me.
One problem for Trump as he searches for an exit ramp is that the final goals of the United States and Israel may diverge. The United States has tried to preserve the economic infrastructure of Iran and avoided arming ethnic rebels in ways that could fragment the country and create internal chaos. Some Israeli strategists favor an alternative approach of encouraging separatist movements among Kurds, Baluchis, Azerbaijanis, Khuzestani Arabs and others. And Israel wants to continue pounding Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, despite growing American concern.
Peace talks had been expected to start in Islamabad on Friday. Who might attend is a guessing game: Vice President JD Vance? Iranian speaker Ghalibaf? So are the items on the negotiating agenda. And most of all, so is the future status of the Strait of Hormuz, open when the war began and still effectively closed.
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