OPINION:
After 40 days of open warfare, Iranian and American negotiators left Islamabad earlier this month without an agreement, an outcome that surprised few but clarified much.
The talks unfolded amid deeper mistrust, a wider agenda of disputes and widening gaps on core issues, all hardening the barriers to any breakthrough.
Yet these harsher realities make diplomacy indispensable at any point in recent memory.
For Iran, war has become a necessary evil, with Tehran increasingly viewing itself as facing an acute, potentially existential threat.
Before the recent strikes, Iran’s signaling combined readiness for confrontation with openness to diplomacy. Once war broke out, Iranian decision-makers appeared to have shifted toward the view that the long-standing doctrine of “No war, no peace” had reached its limits.
The conflict forced a competing position: War should continue until credible and durable security guarantees are secured.
Iran is likely to seek comprehensive, verifiable assurances rather than narrow, transactional concessions.
Despite severe blows, Iran sustained the war and carried out retaliatory strikes. Domestically, this endurance is framed as resilience, even victory. Yet Iranian leaders are also aware that indefinite fighting is not sustainable.
The wartime experience shifted the language and reality of escalation. Signals from Tehran and Washington now converge around a “fingers on the trigger” posture should negotiations fail.
Meanwhile, the escalation trajectory, from earlier Iran-Israel exchanges to the 12-day war of June 2025 and the recent 40-day war, has reinforced a shared strategic reading: Each cycle raises the threshold.
Equally important is the structural expansion of the negotiating field. Whereas earlier talks were largely structured as a U.S.-Iran dyad within frameworks such as the P5+1, the current process involves a broader constellation of actors, including Persian Gulf players and energy market stakeholders.
The bargaining environment now encompasses security, energy, maritime stability, sanctions and regional dynamics, all tightly interlinked.
The Strait of Hormuz sits at the center of this expanded bargaining space. Tehran recognizes the global sensitivity of this choke point, but its posture reflects more than wartime signaling or a bargaining chip. As Iran’s regional reach has narrowed, the strait is being recast as a state-controlled instrument of leverage: less ideological and less reliant on non-state actors, and more grounded in strategic utility.
The strait thus becomes not only a pressure point but also a potential economic instrument, reflected in discussions of transit fees.
Moreover, diplomacy has shifted from topical bargaining to multidomain negotiation.
Two approaches have long structured U.S.-Iran diplomacy: issue-specific bargaining versus comprehensive frameworks enabling cross-issue trade-offs. The former has generally prevailed, with the nuclear file isolated in exchange for sanctions relief, while other disputes were bracketed out.
Yet those issues were never truly peripheral. The current moment presents a rare configuration in which a broader, multi-issue architecture appears viable. Political, economic, military and legal tracks are now intertwined, expanding both the bargaining space and the cost of any concession.
Changes are also visible within Iran’s negotiating apparatus. The delegation led by Iranian parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf signaled broad representation of the political establishment and may facilitate buy-in from more security-oriented factions within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The inclusion of figures long critical of engagement with the United States, such as Mahmoud Nabavian, points to a subtle but important shift: Previously hard-line voices are now inside the negotiating framework.
The picture inside Iran forms another critical dimension. The war generated both a rally-around-the-flag effect and a collective trauma. Civilian areas and infrastructure were hit, and Iran’s airspace remained vulnerable to sustained strikes.
Although retaliatory attacks reinforced perceptions of capability for many Iranians, they did not eliminate the sense of exposure.
Meanwhile, wartime solidarity cannot endure without stability, as recent protests underscore fragility, where economic pressure and sociopolitical demands can translate into unrest.
Domestically, the postwar period offers an opportunity to recalibrate governance: either toward tightening securitization or toward new channels of engagement with dissatisfied and dislocated segments of society, distinct from those aligned with the political establishment.
All of this points to an emerging cautiously calibrated pragmatism. The war has crossed red lines that would once have been inconceivable. Tehran’s central red lines now focus on territorial integrity, sovereignty and the rejection of the normalization of military action against Iran as a low-cost option.
Deep mistrust continues to constrain its choices, even as past negotiations show that flexibility remains possible.
The U.S.-Iran confrontation is no longer a sequence of crises, but a structurally transformed environment in which war, deterrence and negotiation are permanently entangled.
As complexity rises and predictability declines, diplomacy becomes less a pathway to resolution and more a continuous instrument of risk management.
The central question is no longer whether an agreement will be reached but whether a next level of escalation can still be contained.
• Tohid Asadi is an assistant professor at the University of Tehran and a Tehran-based journalist.
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