The ceasefire between the United States and Iran looked fragile from the moment it was announced, but whether it survives two weeks is almost beside the point. More important is that the Trump administration negotiates knowing that the Islamic Republic stands to lose more from the war resuming than Washington does.
President Donald Trump announced a pause to fighting just hours before his self-imposed deadline on Tuesday to destroy Iran’s “civilization” if they didn’t cave to his demands. Trump was blustering in hopes of extracting major concessions, but he then seemed eager to accept the off-ramp offered by Pakistan. Oil prices saw their largest one-day drop since 2020 on Wednesday, and the Dow spiked more than 1,300 points.
Vice President JD Vance, presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff plan to speak Friday with the Iranians in Islamabad. Trump wants an agreement that reopens the Strait of Hormuz and averts an endless war — while still achieving war aims like preventing the regime from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
It’s unlikely Iran will agree to a deal that will be acceptable to the U.S. As of Wednesday night, only a few container ships had moved through the Strait of Hormuz. The speaker of Iran’s parliament accused Washington of breaching the truce, and Tehran is already threatening to withdraw from the Friday talks.
Despite the massive damage inflicted upon the country by the U.S. in recent weeks, the regime acts like it holds the cards. Its leaders are demanding the U.S. pull all troops out of the Middle East and accept Iran’s right to pursue nuclear weapons. The question is why Trump would bend over backward to keep obviously unserious talks on track.
President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal shored up the Iranian economy but did nothing to counter Iran’s malign regional strategy. The first Trump administration, in contrast, rejected unserious negotiations and employed maximum pressure to strangle Iran’s economy and deprive funding to regional menaces like Hamas. Rather than build on that momentum, President Joe Biden got bogged down by years of humiliating negotiations while the Iranians continued to enrich uranium and fund their terrorist proxies.
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a Wednesday briefing at the Pentagon that 80 percent of Iran’s air defenses have been destroyed, including more than 450 ballistic missile storage sites and 800 warehouses of one-way attack drones. Those numbers may sound impressive, but there is still more work to be done to degrade Iran’s offensive capabilities and its capacity to rebuild them. Unrecovered nuclear material is also a serious concern.
This war killed dozens of Iran’s top leaders, but the regime remains intact. Their goal will be to string out negotiations as long as possible so they can regroup and rebuild. The desire to seek a settlement is understandable, but no deal is better than a bad one.
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