After more than three months of war, failed ceasefires, blockades and negotiations, the United States and Iran have finally agreed on the text of a deal intended to end the conflict. Donald Trump says the agreement is complete and will be formally signed in Switzerland, while Tehran has confirmed agreement on a memorandum establishing a further 60-day ceasefire and negotiations after verification of American commitments, including lifting the blockade. The agreement is also intended to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, whose disruption became Iran’s most effective source of leverage during the war. The political difficulty is already visible inside Iran, where hardliners are attacking the settlement as capitulation and supporters of the agreement are being forced to defend concessions made after months of resistance. The war therefore appears to be ending in neither the decisive American victory nor Iranian collapse that sometimes seemed possible earlier this year. Instead, both sides have returned to bargaining. That is not evidence that the war achieved nothing, but it does force a difficult question: if political disputes ultimately return to negotiation, what exactly did three months of warfare change that could not have been changed through diplomacy beforehand?
The answer is partly that war changes the bargaining range. Before February, Washington and Tehran disagreed about what each could force the other to accept. Military conflict provided extremely expensive information. Iran discovered how vulnerable its military infrastructure and leadership were to American and Israeli air power. The United States discovered that overwhelming conventional superiority did not allow it to dictate Iranian behaviour cheaply, because Tehran could retaliate through missiles, drones and disruption of Hormuz. Both sides therefore enter the settlement with fewer illusions about the balance of power. War in this sense operates as a catastrophic information mechanism: states fight partly because they disagree about capabilities, resolve and acceptable costs, and stop when enough uncertainty has been removed that a negotiated division becomes preferable to continuing the experiment.
This is one reason wars sometimes end with agreements resembling arrangements available before they began. That does not necessarily mean the fighting was irrational from each government’s perspective. Before the conflict, neither side may have believed the other would actually bear the costs it later demonstrated itself willing to bear. The tragedy is that information about resolve was purchased through destruction rather than communication. International institutions exist partly to make that information cheaper by allowing inspections, mediation, signalling and verification. When those mechanisms fail, states learn through force instead.
The Iranian nuclear question makes this particularly uncomfortable. Washington entered the conflict partly because it regarded Iran’s nuclear capabilities as an unacceptable future threat. Yet the United States and Iran had been engaged in indirect negotiations immediately before the war. The final agreement will therefore need to produce substantially stronger verification or restrictions than the diplomatic route appeared capable of producing beforehand if the enormous costs of the conflict are to have a clear strategic justification. Otherwise, future governments may reasonably conclude that the war changed bargaining power without changing the fundamental political problem.
This does not mean diplomacy is always morally superior to force. Negotiations conducted without credible consequences can become exercises in delay. If Iran believed it could expand nuclear capabilities indefinitely while Washington remained unwilling to impose serious costs, Tehran would possess little incentive to compromise. Military power can therefore strengthen diplomacy by altering the consequences of refusal. But the relationship should be instrumental: force is strategically rational when it improves the conditions for a political settlement, not when demonstrating force becomes an objective independent of the settlement it is supposed to produce.
Iran’s use of Hormuz created the mirror lesson. Tehran could not defeat the United States militarily, but it could impose costs on the global economy large enough to make continued conflict less attractive. That gave Iran bargaining power disproportionate to its conventional strength. Yet the strategy also harmed India, China, Gulf economies and other states that were not responsible for the American campaign. Iran therefore demonstrated both the effectiveness and the limitation of asymmetric coercion. Geography can provide leverage, but using it aggressively encourages everyone dependent on that geography to search for alternatives.
The emerging agreement should consequently attempt to depoliticise Hormuz as far as possible. Commercial navigation through a waterway essential to the global economy should not become a recurring hostage in every US-Iran confrontation. Iran has legitimate security interests along its coastline, but sovereignty over coastal territory should not imply unrestricted authority to determine whether unrelated countries can trade through an international chokepoint. Equally, Washington should not treat freedom of navigation as a general licence for permanent economic coercion against Iran. A stable settlement needs rules that constrain both sides rather than merely recording which side possessed more leverage when the document was signed.
The domestic Iranian reaction may become one of the agreement’s greatest vulnerabilities. Hardliners can argue that Iran endured enormous casualties, the death of Ali Khamenei, damage to military infrastructure and months of economic pressure only to accept restrictions demanded by Washington. This is where political legitimacy becomes inseparable from international bargaining. A government can accept an economically rational agreement and still face domestic opposition if citizens interpret the settlement as humiliation. National dignity is difficult to quantify, but states repeatedly accept extraordinary material costs to preserve it. Negotiators therefore need to leave Iran enough political agency that the agreement can be defended domestically as reciprocal restraint rather than externally imposed submission.
Trump faces the same requirement in reverse. He needs to demonstrate that the agreement produces something materially stronger than the situation preceding the war. If Iran retains essentially the same nuclear options, if Hormuz can be closed again immediately or if regional attacks simply resume after sanctions relief, the administration will struggle to explain why American forces fought for months. The agreement therefore needs verifiable outputs rather than rhetorical commitments: inspection access, defined nuclear limits, maritime guarantees and predetermined consequences for violations.
The strongest component would be automaticity. If Iran violates nuclear restrictions, specified sanctions return without requiring months of new political negotiation. If Washington fails to implement agreed sanctions relief after verified Iranian compliance, Iran receives access to an agreed dispute mechanism rather than immediately abandoning the arrangement. Good institutions reduce the amount of trust required because they establish consequences before the next crisis occurs. America and Iran do not need to become friends. They need to know what happens if either side defects.
This is why the agreement should outlive Trump and Mojtaba Khamenei institutionally. One of the weaknesses exposed by the collapse of the 2015 JCPOA was that an international bargain could be reversed dramatically after a change in American administration. Iran then had less reason to believe that future concessions would purchase durable sanctions relief. Congressional involvement, international verification and participation from European and regional guarantors could make the new agreement harder for either government to abandon casually. Political agreements become credible when they are embedded deeply enough that future leaders inherit incentives to preserve them.
There is also a broader philosophical lesson about victory. Modern wars are often discussed as though one side must win and the other must lose. But many conflicts end because both sides eventually prefer an imperfect settlement to the expected future cost of continuing. That is not moral equivalence between their objectives, nor does it mean responsibility for starting or escalating a conflict disappears. It means political settlements are judged by whether they create a more stable future than the war they terminate.
This agreement should therefore not be evaluated primarily through photographs of Trump announcing victory or Iranian leaders claiming heroic resistance. Those narratives are partly necessary for domestic politics and can even help the settlement survive. The meaningful test is what the Middle East looks like several years from now. Is Iran further from a nuclear weapon? Is Hormuz open? Have sanctions eased in response to verified compliance? Have missile and proxy confrontations declined? Has Iran’s economy begun reintegrating enough that renewed war carries a larger opportunity cost?
If those conditions emerge, the agreement will have created a self-reinforcing peace. Trade resumes, energy prices stabilise, businesses invest and governments acquire economic assets they would lose by restarting the conflict. Peace becomes stronger when it stops depending solely on leaders’ goodwill and begins generating constituencies whose interests require its survival.
India should welcome that outcome while remembering the vulnerability the war exposed. For months, Indian economic conditions were influenced by decisions made in Washington, Tehran and Jerusalem because imported energy travelled through a chokepoint India did not control. Strategic autonomy therefore cannot stop at diplomatic non-alignment. It requires energy diversification, reserves and enough domestic productive capacity that external conflict does not narrow India’s choices excessively.
The US-Iran agreement may become one of the most consequential diplomatic settlements of Trump’s second presidency, but its importance lies precisely in whether it makes itself less newsworthy over time. Successful institutions become boring. Ships pass through Hormuz. Inspectors visit facilities. Oil trades normally. Sanctions change according to agreed rules rather than military threats. Governments disagree without immediately reaching for missiles.
After months of war, that may sound insufficiently dramatic. It is actually the point. The purpose of a successful peace agreement is not to create one final moment of victory. It is to create rules under which future disagreements no longer need moments of war at all.
