For weeks, the parameters of a preliminary agreement to end the war between the United States and Iran have been clear to its negotiators. The hang-up? How to devise a deal so each side can claim a win.
Washington and Tehran — both neither fully victorious nor completely defeated in the war — badly want a deal. But they also need something they can present as favorable to the hawks and hard-liners back home.
Added to this fundamental dispute are the peculiarities of the two countries’ leaders. One of them is in hiding and slow to sign off on any proposal; the other is so unpredictable, his own envoys struggle to negotiate on his behalf.
Unsuccessful efforts at devising this alchemy of wording have mired the two sides in a state of neither war nor peace. They have left the global economy in limbo, too, as both sides continue their blockades of the vital Strait of Hormuz.
The longer this uncertainty persists, mediators warn, the higher the risk the whole peace process will be derailed. The tenuous nature of it all was reinforced on Monday when Israel and Iran exchanged strikes for the first time since the April cease-fire, bringing the Middle East back to the precipice of full-blown war before both sides backed down.
Any framework for a peace agreement is likely to require Iran to allow normal maritime traffic through the strait and the United States to halt its blockade of Iranian vessels. It is also likely to include a pledge to hold a second phase of negotiations culminating in Iran’s giving up its highly enriched uranium stockpile and Washington’s easing economic sanctions in return. And any deal is widely expected — perhaps most problematically for President Trump — to unlock some of Iran’s frozen assets.
The dilemma is how to sequence the terms, said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House.
“The U.S. wants to get everything and not give too much at the beginning,” she said. “And the Iranians want to get things at the beginning and give things along the way.”
On one side of the equation is Iran’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who is still in hiding out of concern about being targeted like his father, the former supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, killed by U.S.-Israeli strikes in their opening salvos of the war. Mediators interviewed for this article, who like other officials requested anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters openly, said it took days to respond to tweaks in the framework because of the courier system used to communicate with him.
Just as Mr. Trump faces Iran hawks at home, the younger Khamenei needs to ensure that the deal does not incense his hard-liners, particularly high-ranking officers in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. They argue that Iran — with its newfound ability to close traffic in the Strait of Hormuz — should not concede anything to a country that killed many of their top leaders. Convinced that Washington will inevitably attack Iran again, they are pushing the kind of aggressive posturing that led to Tehran’s strikes on Israel this week.
Then there is a mercurial Mr. Trump, frustrated by his inability to speak directly to Mr. Khamenei and impatient with Iran’s drawn-out negotiating style. He has repeatedly reneged on terms agreed to by his top negotiators, a dynamic that began in the very first round of talks after the cease-fire in Pakistan in April, two mediators and an official with direct knowledge told The New York Times.
At those negotiations, they said, Mr. Trump’s envoys — the real estate mogul Steve Witkoff and Vice President JD Vance — told the Iranians that Mr. Trump would accept a deal in which Iran suspended its nuclear enrichment program for 10 years. Iranian officials said they agreed to that initial proposal — and were shocked when the president turned around and insisted on a 20-year suspension. It was a major reason, the mediators said, that those talks fell apart.
In the latest round of negotiations, some mediators and Iranian officials said that as the two sides waited days for Mr. Khamenei to respond to the latest draft, Mr. Trump added new conditions regarding Iran’s nuclear program and frozen assets. The move infuriated Iranian officials, who described it as validating Tehran’s mistrust of Mr. Trump.
The chaotic nature of the talks themselves has not helped matters. Because Tehran continues to refuse direct talks with Washington, a rotating set of countries — currently Pakistan and Qatar — have to shuttle between them. At times, analysts said, there is more than one document in circulation, with only a few people at the very top aware of which draft is the live one.
Despite the starts and stops, most analysts believe that some kind of a preliminary deal — likely to be temporary and vague — will emerge in coming weeks. “Not because anyone wants one,” Dr. Vakil said, but because both sides need one.
Iran, suffering from runaway inflation and a currency collapse even before the war, is plunging ever deeper into a devastating economic crisis. Mr. Trump has to grapple with deeper global economic shocks as his party faces midterm elections this fall amid crushing prices at the gas pump.
During a call on Monday, Mr. Trump told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel that the United States and Iran were within days of a breakthrough for talks on a long-term nuclear deal, according to multiple officials with knowledge of the call.
Even if an initial deal is reached, the probability that it will lead to a final, comprehensive nuclear agreement is far less likely, Ms. Vakil said.
Keenly aware of the slim chances of reaching a final deal, Tehran is insistent on the unfreezing of tens of billions of dollars’ worth of frozen Iranian assets in the region — a term U.S. negotiators initially agreed to, mediators and Iranian officials said.
But this has become a thorny issue for Mr. Trump, who is fixated on not wanting to look weak and who was a vocal critic of the Obama and Biden administrations for unfreezing several billion dollars’ worth of Iranian assets in apparent exchange for the release of U.S. citizens.
Previous drafts of the deal were said to allow Iran access to up to $24 billion of its assets frozen in regional banks — although very likely only through the purchase of certain goods. Nonetheless, such an agreement could allow Mr. Trump’s political rivals to accuse him of giving Iran access to many more billions than the presidents he once attacked.
As diplomatic negotiations trudge along, a restrained military tug of war is playing out in the Persian Gulf.
U.S. forces have escorted dozens of vessels through the strait, all while the two sides have engaged in repeated exchanges of fire. Washington is trying to erode Iran’s hold on the strait while reinforcing the U.S. blockade on Iranian shipping, said Farzan Sabet, an Iran analyst at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland.
The goal, he said, is to raise economic pressures on Iran while alleviating them for the global economy, thereby strengthening Washington’s hand in the diplomatic talks. “It’s like a negotiation beneath a negotiation,” Dr. Sabet added.
But that strategy has largely failed as Iran has repeatedly shown its willingness and ability to fire back at Washington’s Persian Gulf allies — including a strike that hit Kuwait’s international airport last week, leaving one person dead.
Mr. Trump has argued that Iran is responsible for stalling the talks by dragging its feet over concessions he sees as inevitable.
“They’re strong, they’re proud, there are things they never thought they’d be doing that they’re going to have to do,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “They’ve got no choice, and it takes a little while.”
Yet Iran’s leaders appear quite comfortable with the possibility of failed talks and a return to war, according to the mediators. That is in part, they say, because of how convinced Iran is that Mr. Trump — who campaigned on promises to avoid endless wars — is keen to avoid drawn-out hostilities.
The Iranians are working on the assumption that time is on their side — that a sliding global economy, rising energy prices, and inflationary pressures in the United States will eventually force the president’s hand.
“We start to enter some very difficult economic territory by the end of this month and into July for the global economy,” Mr. Sabet said. “They think Trump can maybe hold out for weeks, whereas they can hold out for months.”
Elian Peltier contributed reporting.
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