US vs Iran: No celebration yet for Iran
By Uji A. Iliyasu
Tehran can be forgiven for wanting to exhale. After months of missiles, blockades and burning oil terminals by US. The past week has brought talk of a Hormuz shipping framework with Oman, denials of direct US negotiations, and reports that Washington and Tehran are edging toward some new arrangement.
Somewhere in the Iranian capital, officials are no doubt tempted to declare victory, or at least survival, and to start planning for a return to normal life. That temptation should be resisted. Nothing in the record of this conflict suggests that a lull is the same thing as an ending.
Donald Trump does not fight wars as the crow flies. He fights them in zigzags, threats, pause, deal, betrayal, threats again, and Iran has already been caught in that pattern more than once.
In April, barely an hour before Trump’s own deadline for Tehran’s “capitulation” was due to expire, the two sides struck a two-week ceasefire that reopened the Strait of Hormuz. It held for exactly as long as it was convenient. By July, Trump had reimposed the naval blockade he had just lifted, cutting off the oil sales that had briefly sustained Iran’s economy, and declaring the truce “over” in language that dispensed with even the pretence of diplomacy.
A second, more ambitious attempt followed in June: a 14-point memorandum of understanding, brokered with Pakistan’s help, meant to end hostilities for 60 days. That one did not even make it to its expiry date. By mid-July, the two countries were trading strikes daily, and American strikes on Iranian nuclear infrastructure in Bushehr province in early July finished off what remained of the memorandum’s credibility.
Twice now, Iran has watched a signed or announced agreement dissolve within weeks, each collapse followed not by a return to the status quo but by an escalation beyond what came before. There is no reason to assume a third arrangement will behave differently, and every reason to assume the opposite: that any current thaw is less a resolution than an interval, the kind of pause Washington has used before to regroup, resupply, and recalibrate its targets before returning with heavier ordnance.
This is not a uniquely Iranian experience of American power; it is simply how this administration negotiates. Trump has spent the past six months issuing ultimatums that shift as often as the battlefield does: one week vowing to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages,” the next praising a diplomatic breakthrough, the week after that authorising fresh strikes because talks “fell short” of expectations only he seemed to have set.
Reporting in recent days suggests the administration is already weighing a fresh, sustained bombardment of Iranian missile sites, even as officials elsewhere describe a shipping deal edging closer to completion. Both of these things are apparently true at once, which is precisely the point: Washington is capable of extending a hand and preparing a fist in the same week, sometimes through the same officials.
There is also the matter of Trump’s coalition. He answers not only to his own instincts but to allies and advisers within his own government who view any de-escalation as premature, who have pushed consistently for harsher terms, and who will not simply accept a negotiated off-ramp if they believe Iran’s government or its nuclear programme remains intact enough to threaten Israel or Gulf shipping lanes in the future.
Those voices do not disappear because a shipping corridor reopens. If anything, a genuine lull is precisely the moment they are likely to argue loudest for finishing the job while Iran’s air defences and economy remain “degraded”.
A president who has shown he can be moved by pressure from Israel, from hawks in his own cabinet, and from his own frustration at the pace of diplomacy is not a president whose current mood can be relied upon as a forecast of his mood in three weeks.
None of this is an argument against talking. Diplomacy, even fragile and repeatedly broken diplomacy, has bought Iran time before — the April ceasefire alone allowed Tehran to move billions of dollars of oil before the noose tightened again. Every week without bombardment is a week to disperse assets, reinforce air defences, and shore up what remains of the economy.
But time bought through a shaky truce is not the same as security won through a durable settlement, and Iran’s leadership would be making a serious error if it treated the former as though it were the latter.
What Tehran should do now is plan on the assumption that any current calm is temporary. That means keeping air defence and command structures dispersed rather than consolidated, because concentration is what past bombardments have punished most severely. It means not staking the country’s economic survival entirely on a shipping arrangement that, as Iranian officials themselves have been careful to note, does not guarantee the strait’s automatic reopening and could be suspended as easily as it was granted.
It means continuing to hedge diplomatically, with Oman, with Pakistan, with any party willing to mediate, while treating each new document not as a finish line but as a snapshot of a moment that could be gone within days.
Iran has now lived through two collapsed agreements and a war that has repeatedly been declared close to its “biggest bombing” phase. A third round of hope is understandable. A third round of unpreparedness would not be.
The unexpected, in this conflict, has consistently arrived on schedule. Iran’s leadership should sleep, if it sleeps at all, with one eye open.