The U.S.-Iranian relationship is worse than ever before. Over the last four months, the American and Israeli militaries have waged full-scale war against the Islamic Republic, including by assassinating much of its political and military leadership. Iran has retaliated by attacking U.S. military bases, infrastructure in Gulf Arab states, and Israel. The two sides struck a cease-fire deal in early April, and in June they signed a memorandum of understanding designed to end the conflict. But those deals have, so far, failed; Iran and the United States have continued to exchange fire. They remain far apart on core disputes, including those related to Iran’s nuclear program, the Strait of Hormuz, and sanctions relief. As a result, many analysts are skeptical that the parties can eventually achieve a permanent deal.
The increasingly sharp hostilities since the memorandum came into effect demonstrate that this skepticism is well-founded. Rather than marking a new chapter in U.S.-Iranian relations, the two sides remain mired in the old. They are trading accusations that the other is operating bad faith and claiming that each is breaching the agreement they reached in April. They are engaging in a fitful dialogue largely conducted through third parties, rather than speaking directly. And their continued use of military force proves that they are willing to up the ante. There were more than 300 U.S. strikes against Iran in recent days. Tehran has retaliated against at least five regional states, as well as multiple ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz.
Yet paradoxically, the war may have created a moment of opportunity for Iran and the United States to repair their broken relationship. That is because the conflict has descended into a mutually unsatisfying stalemate. Washington is clearly unable to topple the Islamic Republic, to compel it to give up its nuclear program, to make it stop supporting its regional allies, or to get it to give up control over the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran is unable to force the United States to vacate its backyard or to abandon its use of coercive economic and military tools. The war, in other words, has made it plainly apparent that neither government can deliver a knockout blow to the other at an acceptable cost—and that unmanaged hostility has become too costly and perilous.
In both capitals, many officials are starting to realize this fact, even as the fighting continues. As a result, some decision-makers in each have started looking for ways to coexist. For the first time in nearly a decade, senior American and Iranian officials have met directly as part of negotiations. They are discussing meaningful compromises. And the two sides may agree to set up a hotline that would connect their militaries, designed to help manage conflict before it spirals. If they make good on this tentative pledge, it will be the first such U.S.-Iranian channel since revolutionaries stormed the American embassy in Tehran, in 1979.
These efforts might well fail. The memorandum, after all, is on the verge of collapse. Each country is home to formidable forces that oppose diplomacy and prefer confrontation. There will certainly be limits to just how much these two nemeses can achieve via engagement. But both sides may eventually arrive, through sheer exhaustion, at the same reluctant conclusion: the old playbook has failed. Change will still be difficult, but it is imaginable.
MAXIMUM FAILURE
The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was the last serious attempt to stabilize and reset U.S.-Iranian relations. Formally, it was a narrow deal. Iran pledged to restrict its nuclear program and accept increased international inspections. In exchange, the United States offered limited sanctions relief. But politically, the JCPOA was a larger wager. If the status of Iran’s nuclear program could be solved, officials thought, perhaps Tehran and Washington could address other issues, such as Iran’s support for regional militias like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. Eventually, the two sides might even be able to establish a normal diplomatic relationship.
But this proposition was never properly tested. By the time the JCPOA was implemented, in January 2016, negotiators on both sides had reached their limits. Almost immediately after the deal went into force, it came under intense domestic pressure in both countries. In the United States, Republicans roundly rejected it, as did some Democrats, for being too accommodating toward Iran. In Tehran, President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif had to defend the agreement against critics who saw compromise with the United States as at best deeply naive and at worst outright treasonous. Neither group had the diplomatic stamina or the political space to address other points of tension in the bilateral relationship. And when President Donald Trump won office in late 2016, any remaining opportunity vanished. Trump had derided the JCPOA as the “worst deal ever negotiated,” and in 2018, he pulled out of the agreement. He promised that he would force Iran to change through a campaign of “maximum pressure.”
But ultimately the deal’s demise helped neither side. In Washington, advocates of maximum pressure may have believed that more sanctions and more isolation would force the Islamic Republic to accept a better deal, or perhaps to break under the strain. Instead, the regime endured. It expanded its nuclear program and became more repressive at home and more aggressive in the region. Rouhani was replaced by the belligerent Ebrahim Raisi, who empowered many of the factions that had denounced the JCPOA. But Iranian hard-liners were not successful, either. The country suffered enormous economic harm from U.S. restrictions, fueling waves of destabilizing protests. And after Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel, the Israeli and U.S. military responses dramatically weakened Iran’s regional partners.
Still, neither Tehran nor Washington shifted its posture. In fact, both became more aggressive—culminating in the war that started in February. But the resulting deadlock may come to alter assumptions in both capitals. At least some U.S. officials seem to understand that Washington has failed to effect change despite trying nearly every coercive instrument in the book. The Islamic Republic, for its part, may have survived the war, but if it does not recover and thrive, it may not survive the peace. The conflict has left its military battered and its already struggling economy in even worse shape. Public discontent remains substantial.
PAST AND PRECEDENT
Washington has made peace with its adversaries before. It tried to isolate China for 20 years after the Communist Party took control of the country. But in the early 1970s, after the United States lost indirect wars to China in Korea and Vietnam, some U.S. officials recognized that estrangement would not undo the Chinese revolution and that U.S. interests were better served by exploiting the geopolitical forces tearing Beijing from the Soviet Union. Washington thus began the slow process of normalizing relations with China. As it did so, the United States never gave up on its support for Taiwan. Instead, it bracketed questions of the island’s sovereignty so that Beijing and Washington could find ways to cooperate on areas of mutual concern. The ultimate lesson was not that hostility had vanished but that diplomacy could begin before fundamental disputes were settled.
Vietnam provides an even more dramatic case. The United States spent years trying to prevent a communist victory in the country, including fighting a devastating war that killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians and soldiers. It lost, and then spent years trying to isolate Hanoi. By the mid-1990s, however, Washington concluded that normalization could serve American interests better than permanent estrangement, since normalization would expand trade, promote regional stability, and give the United States greater influence in Southeast Asia. The two countries thus began a phased process of normalization: Washington eased Vietnam’s international economic isolation, lifted its trade embargo, and signed a consular agreement. In 1995, the United States and Vietnam restored diplomatic relations and opened embassies. This process never entailed forgetting the war, much less reaching a shared understanding of it. But the governments set up mechanisms to address its most painful legacies, including a joint effort to find out what happened to missing Americans through archival access, field investigations, and excavations. This process helped lay the groundwork for Vietnam to become an important U.S. partner in the 2010s and 2020s, as Washington moved some American supply chains out of China.
Not every U.S. effort at reproachment has ended well. In 2014, President Barack Obama normalized relations with Cuba, arguing that decades of isolation had failed to advance U.S. interests or democratize the island. But Obama’s actions rested heavily on executive action, lacked deep bipartisan support, and faced entrenched, intense opposition (including from the Cuban diaspora)—much like his nuclear deal with Iran. As a result, it, too, was promptly undone by Trump.
But the White House’s current efforts with Iran do not need to mimic Obama’s efforts with Cuba or the Islamic Republic. This process begins from a different place: a war that both sides have just endured. It has much in common with U.S. efforts to restore ties with Beijing and Hanoi. Tehran is more entangled in active regional conflicts than any of those governments were at the moment of their respective openings, and its nuclear program remains a source of great tension. Yet Iran and the United States might both be starting to realize that they cannot resolve those issues through coercion. Diplomacy with adversaries rarely begins with moral clarity. It begins when the costs of illusion exceed the discomfort of reality.
ONE WAY OUT
None of this means that a grand bargain is on offer. It is not. In fact, the immediate task is simply to make sure the memorandum of understanding does not fall apart thanks to a thousand, increasingly deep cuts. The Strait of Hormuz must remain open, follow-on negotiations must be taken seriously and last longer than a casual Sunday brunch. The deconfliction channel between the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the U.S. military’s Central Command must deliver results.
Both sides should also learn a key lesson of the past: the JCPOA became vulnerable not because it was technically weak but because it was politically orphaned. Its opponents were patient, organized, and relentless. Its defenders incorrectly assumed that implementation would generate its own constituency. Any new arrangement with Iran must be built with the opposite assumption: that spoilers will move faster than beneficiaries.
Consider, first, the tough internal Iranian test. The Islamic Republic is now led by a new, untried supreme leader and a political elite whose wartime unity almost certainly masks deep disagreements over the future. Some will see accommodation with Washington as the only way to stabilize the system after a devastating war. Others will see it as ideological erosion disguised as pragmatism. But although Iranian elites may have divergent visions for the future, they share the immediate imperative of securing perceived wartime gains—including control over the Strait of Hormuz. The balance between these camps will not be decided by speeches. It will be decided by whether diplomacy results in economic relief that ordinary Iranians can feel.
For the Trump administration, the question is whether it understands the magnitude of its own pivot. Should the generous sanctions relief spelled out in the June memorandum eventually take effect, the result would be more than mere inducement. It would signal that, after four decades of trying to coerce the Islamic Republic into submission or crisis, Washington may finally be willing to abandon containment. That does not mean Washington needs to forgo trying to change what it deems to be problematic Iranian policies at home and abroad. But it would suggest that the United States is cognizant of how poorly pressure has worked in the absence of engagement and thus decided to recalibrate how it balances diplomacy and pressure. This is a hard admission for any U.S. president to make. It is especially hard for one whose political brand rests on never admitting defeat.
Iran and the United States do not need to become friends.
The immediate challenges are evident. Contrasting interpretations of the memorandum of understanding mean that the document is on life support less than a month after it was signed. Rather than restoring freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, the two sides continue to contest control over the waterway, sparking sharp tit-for-tat exchanges. Israel continues to insist it has freedom of action in Lebanon, where Tehran has demanded an end to attacks and full Israeli withdrawal. The deconfliction mechanism could thus be overwhelmed before it matures. Washington will face a choice it has long avoided: whether it is prepared to restrain not only Iran and its partners but also allies whose actions can drag the United States back toward conflict.
Even if spoilers are kept in check and Tehran and Washington go back to litigating their deal at the table instead of on the battlefield, there is no guarantee that the two sides can define and establish a peaceful coexistence. After years of assassinations, sanctions, hostage-taking, broken promises, proxy wars, and ideological enmity, Iran and the United States remain deeply skeptical of each other. It doesn’t take much for negotiations to fall apart. The current moment may then be remembered as another missed opportunity—a brief interlude between rounds of violence.
But Iran and the United States do not need to become friends. They need a floor that does not collapse with every political shift. And if they succeed, the implications are enormous. A stable U.S.-Iranian relationship would eliminate one of the main engines of escalation in the Middle East, reducing the risk that every local conflict turns into a regional war. And it might entice Iran to compete less through disruption and more through diplomacy and commerce. That, however, will require Tehran and Washington to use the current moment at a starting point for defusing other ticking bombs—such as those involving Lebanon, the Palestinians, and Syria—that Israel has unsuccessfully tried to deal with militarily. It will also require that Iran rebuild trust with its Gulf Arab neighbors and pursue inclusive solutions to issues such as the future of the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s support for nonstate actors.
These talks would then be remembered as the moment when Washington stopped asking how to defeat the Islamic Republic, and Tehran decided that geopolitical success required something other than permanent confrontation. After 47 years of enmity, that would be a revolution of its own.
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