Making peace with Iran is going to be just as painful as waging war.
JD Vance’s first attempts at talks in Switzerland to solidify a memorandum of understanding with Tehran into a permanent end to the war are already in treacherous waters, although the vice president said some important progress was made over the weekend.
The MOU signed by Trump in France last week halts fighting, opens the Strait of Hormuz and offers economic carrots to Iran in exchange for a pledge never to develop nuclear weapons. But it leaves vital details like the future of Tehran’s nuclear program and its stocks of enriched uranium to be hashed out over 60 days of high-stakes negotiations.
The best thing in the agreement’s favor is the end of direct US-Iran hostilities.
“There’s decent chance at least that the truce holds simply because it is in the interest of both sides,” Philip Gordon, a former senior US national security official, told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on Sunday, citing Tehran’s capacity to begin earning millions of dollars a day in oil revenues. “Iran has an interest in sticking with this. And the United States certainly has an interest in sticking with this, because it doesn’t want to resume the war.”
On GPS: Former Obama administration official on the path to lasting peace with Iran
Co-mediators Qatar and Pakistan said in a statement late Sunday US time that the talks took place in a “positive and constructive atmosphere” and that “encouraging progress” was made. They said a roadmap was agreed to reach a final deal within 60 days. Vance said that Iran had agreed to let international nuclear inspectors into the country.
But the vulnerability of the framework is quickly becoming obvious as the same strategic pressures and constraints that defined the war now threaten the peace.
Iran is seeking to apply its newly acquired leverage and has claimed to shut down the Strait of Hormuz. Trump responded with a new threat of violence Sunday and warned Tehran’s negotiating team might not make it home. And a clash between Israel and Iran over Lebanon threatened to scupper the entire process.
In Washington, there’s rare bipartisan concern that the president gave too much away to make the agreement, along with doubts that it will last, despite relief that fighting could end permanently.
The turbulence undercut Trump’s claims that he won a historic victory and suggests global economic relief secured by ending the war is tenuous. Tehran is showing it will drive an excruciating bargain with Washington. More broadly, the tension refocuses attention on what Trump’s critics see as a strategic blunder by the president in launching a war that is yielding to a messy, perhaps monthslong aftermath.
Yet the memorandum still represents the best hope of averting a return to conflict that could cost many more Iranian and American lives, draw Gulf states back into the crossfire, and again rock the global economy, driving up prices for consumers already struggling to meet the costs of everyday life — a factor Trump cited in trying to justify the MOU last week.
While Trump’s Democratic critics are pointing out the strategic failures of his administration, there’s still a strong US national interest in the agreement holding and the administration securing the best end-game possible.
A tense weekend since Trump returned home from Europe laid bare the strategic challenges ahead.
▶ The president remains deeply frustrated with Iran. He’s repeating the kind of threats that failed during the war to make it comply with the MOU. On Sunday, for instance, he threatened to take over the Strait of Hormuz himself if Tehran didn’t reopen it. The huge costs of that move kept the US from trying to do so during the war. Iran may therefore doubt the credibility of his warning, delivered with an expletive during a Fox News interview.
Tehran also understands that Trump is in a hurry as he seeks to recoup economic and political benefits of a peace deal before November’s midterm elections. “Don’t they ever think to themselves that if their threats had actually worked, they wouldn’t have reached this level of desperation today?” Iran’s chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, wrote on X on Sunday. His gambit suggests that Iran has no intention of giving the US president a fast deal that will allow him to quickly claim a political victory.
But Vance denied that Trump’s threats had almost derailed the talks. “What we told the Iranians yesterday is: ‘When you guys engage in what us millennials might call trash talk, you can’t expect the president of the United States not to respond and not to correct the record,’” he said.
▶ Iran’s regime also apparently wants to show that its survival created a new strategic dawn in the Persian Gulf. Its declaration that the Strait of Hormuz is closed — in defiance of the MOU — was intended to force Trump to enforce a ceasefire in Lebanon following Israeli strikes on the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia.
Iran is both testing Trump’s ability to control Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and showing it intends to preserve its regional power through proxy groups. While Trump and Vance have harshly criticized Israel, the president sent his own message back to Tehran on Sunday, warning he’d hit it “very hard” if it didn’t rein in Hezbollah.
▶ History shows that Israel often continues military activity up to and beyond ceasefire deadlines to demonstrate that it will never compromise what it regards as its vital national security interests. It struck what it described as Hezbollah targets in Lebanon on Friday and Saturday, but as the talks started in Switzerland, a fragile ceasefire descended.
Netanyahu is in a dicey spot, torn between Trump’s pressure and the opposition of many Israelis to the US president’s agreement. And Iran’s insistence on an end to all fighting in Lebanon means a nation constantly dragged into other countries’ wars could again upend hopes of regional peace.
▶ Despite grim prospects, the Trump administration is making an audacious bet exemplified by Vance’s comments before the talks to the people of Iran. “If your leadership is willing to give up being a driver of regional instability, if they are willing to give up nuclear weapons ambitions for the long term, then the United States is willing to fundamentally transform our relationship with that country,” he said.
But history shows such a goal may be flawed. For nearly 50 years, Iran’s revolutionary leaders have defined their regime as the enemy of America. There’s little evidence that a new band of pragmatists has risen in Tehran who will embrace an economic opening that could fray their repressive control.
The fallout from the memorandum is also causing political uproar in Washington.
It worsened tensions between the president and Republican senators already inflamed by a showdown over his choice of Bill Pulte as interim director of national intelligence and his attempts to force a reluctant GOP majority to pass sweeping changes to voting arrangements before the midterms.
There’s also deep skepticism over the memorandum’s terms — including waiving sanctions on Iran’s energy and pharmaceutical exports while 60-day talks are underway and a $300 billion fund to reinvigorate its economy that the US says will be funded by regional powers. Trump’s critics warned he simply paid for the reopening of the strait and squandered US leverage in delicate talks to come on Iran’s nuclear program.
However, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a GOP hawk and presidential ally, defended Trump’s approach, even without much hope it will work. “If you don’t have a diplomatic path through the MOU, then you have to go to war or some other form of coercion. Let’s try this. Let’s try a diplomatic solution,” the South Carolina lawmaker told CBS’ “Face the Nation.” But he added that “I think it’s going to fail.”
Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, called the Iran agreement a “cataclysmic failure of (Trump’s) own making” and an “abject surrender.” On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he warned that “Iran gets all of the benefits, literally billions and billions of dollars, and America continues to hurt and see the losses from the $100 billion we spent in the war to every American citizen seeing their costs skyrocket.”
An acrimonious few days reveal Trump’s vision for a nuclear-free Iran and a transformed Middle East as, for now, a distant aspiration. They suggest the strategic dead end he created by launching the war is now matched by a similar conundrum thwarting the road to peace.
Waging war failed to fulfill US goals. A tough start shows that making peace may be similarly futile.
This story has been updated with additional information.
