I wanted to share a few more thoughts on the current ceasefire and negotiations between the United States and Iran. As I noted earlier, there’s something so rich about sending JD Vance to lead the negotiations since the vice president has bent over backwards to signal to everyone who will listen (or write stories) that he was absolutely, positively against the war in the first place. President Trump has sent Vance to conduct and really own negotiations that almost certainly wouldn’t go well for the United States.
This cannot be an accident.
I started this post before the news broke that the first attempt at negotiations had broken down or, at least for now, had failed. That news just tightened the box into which Trump placed Vance. If the war resumes, Vance owns that continuation because he walked away from the negotiating table. It’s almost as though he gave the original order. If the negotiations fail, that’s on Vance too.
So where are we now?
Both parties are desperate to get out of this conflict but in very different ways, and with limitations that may make it very hard for both sides to end the conflict.
Clearly both sides want to bring this war to an end. The motivation of the U.S. side is clear. Trump wants out of this badly. That’s the biggest reason why the U.S. is negotiating from a position of weakness. Everyone knows Trump wants out of this. He got in way over his head, without any apparent understanding of the economic repercussions the war would bring and how much control Iran would have over those repercussions. That’s the biggest story here. Trump started what was purely a war of choice. It blew up in his face and now his desperation to get out has put the U.S. in a terrible position.
Iran has a different but no less real desperation. Iran wants the war to stop because they’ve incurred vast damage to every part of their military infrastructure. But with all that damage they now hold a chit — control of the choke point of the Strait of Hormuz and thus a lot of the global economy. They absolutely won’t let go of that if there’s any way they can avoid it. We’ve been hearing for a generation about the threat of Iran having a nuclear weapon. But blockading the strait in practice is a vastly greater cudgel. It’s comparatively easy to use. The pain isn’t that great at first. A nuke is a great threat. But actually using it in any way that doesn’t cause you immense damage is quite difficult. With the strait, Iran has Trump totally over a barrel. It’s brutally clear.
But Iran is also being driven by a different flavor of desperation. There’s a really important New York Times article from two days ago which describes the scale of destruction inside Iran. Across every kind of civilian and military infrastructure, estimates range from $300 billion to $1 trillion in damage. A lot of that damage is to heavy industry infrastructure at the core of the nation’s economy. Already before this war the Iranian economy was teetering, with out-of-control inflation and currency collapse. This winter’s demonstrations in Iran, which triggered such a ferociously brutal crackdown, were certainly broadly against the regime and its repressions. But they were also specifically a response to the collapsing economy. Now that all seems infinitely worse.
The Times article even suggests the strong possibility the present government isn’t equipped to inventory the scale of the damage. Iran’s “mosaic” strategy, in which local military units are given autonomy to act without central control, in order to make the state’s defense more resilient, may be great in military extremity. But it’s not great for running a state or economy. The best reporting suggests that the government of Iran is now pretty much entirely in the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. That’s great as a force of domestic repression to keep the regime in place. But Iran is now facing a crisis that requires bureaucrats, civil engineers, economists.
What all of this means, I think, is that when Iran demands the return of all its frozen assets and an end to all sanctions, that may not be a bluff. It may be totally unrealistic. But it may not be a bluff. The regime’s survival may simply not be compatible with the kind of economic calamity the country now faces. So they may really need that money and that access to the global economy.
In some ways, the best angle for the Trump White House would simply be to pull back and allow Iran to simmer in this destruction. The regime may not be able to survive it. But of course Trump can’t do that because they need the Strait of Hormuz open. It may not be existential for the U.S. But it’s certainly existential for Donald Trump’s political future.
Iran has the upper hand because Trump so desperately wants a deal and wants out. But the Iranians are desperate too, just in a more delayed sense. The whole story illustrates the dangerous and unpredictable nature of war. You don’t know where it will end up. You may think you can end it on your own terms. But often you can’t. Both sides want or truly need things the other side simply can’t give. There is a whole complex area of study around mediation and negotiation designed to understand how parties in these situations find their way to something they can both accept. Here we must note that the U.S. apparently went into these talks with no diplomats or area experts at all, just the canny if unlikeable opportunist JD Vance and the real estate sharks and grifters, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff.
Since Trump is so lost he has now predictably escalated, now having the U.S. also blockade the Strait of Hormuz. (Take that, Iran!) There is a logic here: put additional pressure on Iran and China in the hope or creating more options or flexibility. It’s not a crazy strategy, just not a terribly straightforward one. What Trump really, really wants is free transit of oil tankers through the strait. Blockading the strait is at best a rather indirect way of accomplishing that.
Both sides desperately want out of this war. And that may keep them from quickly going back to outright war. But the war — the scale of destruction, its inconclusiveness, the global economic damage — has created a set of circumstances, a knot pulled terribly tight, that will make ending the conflict very hard.