Summary
Recent negotiations between the United States and Iran are described as fragile and strategically incompatible because the two governments allegedly operate from entirely different assumptions about the meaning of peace agreements. The analysis argues that Iran’s political and ideological structure prioritizes survival and resistance over reconciliation, making temporary truces more likely than lasting settlements. It also contends that internal power networks within the regime can undermine negotiated commitments even if formal agreements are signed. The conclusion warns that easing pressure too early could allow Tehran to recover its capabilities while preserving the system that sustains its regional influence.
Key Takeaways
- Negotiations are portrayed as fundamentally asymmetric because each side interprets “agreement” differently, with one side viewing diplomacy as a tactical extension of conflict rather than a permanent resolution.
- The argument emphasizes that ideological and theological concepts such as endurance, sacrifice, and temporary truces shape strategic behavior more deeply than material losses or conventional military calculations.
- Sustained economic and military pressure is presented as the only meaningful leverage, while phased agreements and sanctions relief are framed as opportunities for regrouping and rebuilding.
- Iran views negotiations not as a path to permanent peace, but as a continuation of conflict through diplomatic means. The regime sees agreements as tactical pauses that preserve the broader struggle rather than resolve it.
- Iran’s strategic culture is shaped by the concepts of endurance, sacrifice, and martyrdom rooted in Shi’a history. Survival and continued resistance are more important than material losses, allowing the regime to frame hardship as ideological victory.
- Temporary truces are a recurring strategic model used to buy time, regroup, and strengthen before resuming confrontation. Iran’s recent ceasefire behavior around the Strait of Hormuz is an example of this approach.
- Iran’s internal power structure is divided between pragmatic negotiators and hardline ideological institutions tied to the Supreme Leader and the IRGC. These parallel systems are capable of obstructing or quietly reversing concessions even after agreements are signed.
- The U.S. must not give up leverage too early through phased diplomacy. Sanctions, military pressure, and blockades have weakened Iran’s networks, and easing that pressure prematurely could allow Tehran to regroup economically and militarily.
The United States and Iran are negotiating again, and the mediators are once more describing the progress as substantial. After a U.S.-Israeli campaign opened in late February 2026, and Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, a fragile, Pakistan-mediated ceasefire took hold in early April. This past weekend, U.S. President Donald Trump declared that an agreement had been “largely negotiated, subject to finalization,” with the Strait to reopen in a first phase and detailed nuclear talks deferred to a second window of 30 to 60 days. Tehran’s foreign ministry called the draft a “framework agreement”—then clarified that nuclear issues are not part of the current negotiations, that the Strait would remain under Iranian management, and that sanctions relief is a “fixed position.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, more soberly, called it significant progress, “although not final,” and confirmed the blockade stays in force until any agreement is “certified and signed.”
Before anyone in Washington celebrates, a single principle should govern every round of negotiations: imagine the man across the table is an Iranian regime negotiator, schooled in the regime’s theology and its history, and ask what he would sign and why. Do that honestly, and the deal as Western diplomats envision it—a binding settlement that ends the conflict—does not happen. It cannot, because the two sides do not understand the concept of “agreement” in the same way. For the Islamic Republic, peace negotiations are war by other means.
The Theology of Endurance
The error begins with how the West measures conflict. As the British Middle East analyst Andrew Fox observes, Western strategic culture assesses war through material metrics—territory, infrastructure, casualties, economic damage—because modern Western states are products of Enlightenment rationalism and industrial bureaucracy. That, Fox notes, is precisely why one school of thought has already declared the current war an overwhelming American victory, a narrative fewer Israelis have rushed to adopt.
Tehran understands those calculations. It simply filters them through something older and more powerful: the Shi’a memory of persecution and sacrifice, above all the martyrdom of Hussein at Karbala in 680. Karbala is not a footnote in Iranian consciousness; it is a moral archetype. Hussein’s annihilation became, in Shi’a belief, a spiritual victory—the righteous minority standing against tyranny and impossible odds. Resistance itself became sacred.
This is why pressure so often hardens the regime rather than breaking it. The Islamic Republic was born from revolution, war, sanctions, and survival against overwhelming odds. As Fox argues, pressure does not necessarily discredit the regime internally; more often, it validates its entire narrative of a hostile world arrayed against it. Tehran does not define victory as Washington does. Its calculation is narrower and far more durable: Did the regime survive? Did resistance continue? If the answer is yes, the leadership can frame even catastrophic material losses as endurance—and therefore as a spiritual triumph. For a movement that prizes endurance, negotiation is never reconciliation. It is another arena of the same struggle.
“Hudaybiyyah” is Not Peace
There is a precise doctrinal template for this, and Islamic culture expert Dr. Harold Rhode mapped it in his book Modern Islamic Warfare. The model is the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, the truce that the Muslim Prophet Muhammad concluded with the Quraysh tribe of Mecca, because his forces were too weak to win. He agreed to a 10-year truce and used the pause to regroup. He broke the agreement roughly two years later, after realizing he was strong enough to defeat his enemies. As Rhode shows, this became the model for Islamic agreements, whether with non-Muslims or Muslims. The lesson endures: Islamic agreements are, at best, hudnas, the means by which the weaker party licks its wounds and waits for the opportunity to resume the fight. Rhode concludes that there are never any final peace treaties; everything is temporary until the battle can be resumed on better terms.
This is not an academic point. Yasser Arafat declared it repeatedly. In a 1994 speech in Johannesburg, days after a White House signing ceremony, he compared the Oslo Accords to Muhammad’s agreement with the Quraysh—a truce to be honored only as long as it served the cause. Western audiences who had worked for that agreement spent years denying that the recording was authentic because it did not align with what they wanted to believe.
The “Hudabiyyah” pattern repeated this April. Iran nominally accepted a ceasefire conditioned on reopening the Strait of Hormuz—and re-closed it within hours, making compliance contingent on fresh demands it knew Washington would refuse. That was not the Islamic Republic’s violation of the spirit of the agreement. To Tehran, it was the faithful execution of the principle: the pause exists to regroup, not to concede. The current insistence that Hormuz remain under Iranian “management,” which they intend as de facto sovereignty, even as the regime signs a framework to reopen it, is the same logic wearing a diplomat’s suit.
The Architecture Beneath the Signature
Even the sincerest Iranian negotiator cannot deliver what Washington wants. This is because real regime power runs through two competing currents. The pragmatic security and intelligence establishment can negotiate; it prioritizes state survival and, under sufficient pressure, genuinely wants a way out. But the hardline theocratic faction—anchored in Herasat, the ideological enforcement apparatus embedded in every ministry, bank, university, and IRGC business empire—does not answer to the negotiating team; it answers to the Supreme Leader. At this point, no one is sure that the new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is alive or functioning. Herasat can slow-walk implementation, route sanctions relief into patronage networks, and quietly rebuild whatever was agreed to be dismantled.
The Soviets perfected this type of architecture: political commissars in every institution, parallel structures, factional balancing at the top. They signed arms agreements and violated them through those parallel structures. They did not collapse from external pressure alone; they collapsed only when economic failure made the patronage system unsustainable. Iran has refined the same model over 47 years. This is the quiet danger in a phased deal that reopens the Strait now and defers the nuclear question for 60 days: the first phase relieves the pressure, and the second phase allows the machine to reconstitute itself under new cover.
Washington’s Unexploited Leverage
The genuine difference at this moment is leverage. Military strikes and a near-total collapse of imports have, for the first time, degraded the IRGC’s capacity to fund the dependency that keeps the machine running. That real leverage is the blockade Rubio rightly insists on keeping until an agreement is certified. The question is whether Washington’s framework is designed to use that leverage or to surrender it prematurely in exchange for a hudna dressed as peace.
Trump’s instinct that the blockade remains leverage until the deal is signed is sound, but offering the regime free oil trade undermines the economic headlock. The U.S. temptation to bank on a Hormuz reopening as a first-phase “win” is the trap.
The prerequisite to any durable Iran deal is therefore the hardest one for Western negotiators to accept: stop assuming the person across the table wants the same thing you do. Think like your adversary, and the cycles of the past three months snap into focus—the constructive rounds, the narrowing differences, the framework agreed in principle and then qualified into incoherence. The pattern is not diplomatic friction. It is the doctrine working exactly as intended.
Trump has said that he doesn’t make “bad” deals, and on May 24, 2026, he posted on his Truth Social platform that he was in no hurry to complete an end-of-war agreement with Iran after spending weeks insisting that Tehran must make nuclear concessions or face renewed attacks: “I have informed my representatives not to rush into a deal.”
Yet, Tehran has and will always try to push Washington down another rabbit hole, buying the time it needs to regroup, resupply, reorganize, and redeploy its multidimensional, multinational terror machine. The only agreement worth having is one enforced by a U.S.-led victory- collapsing the regime and winning on terms the regime cannot quietly evade—because the regime that survives a deal will read its survival, as it always has, as victory.
