By Staff Reporter
There is a scene that keeps returning, unbidden. It is the morning of 26 February, and in Geneva, indirect talks between Iranian and American negotiators — mediated by Oman, as they had been for months — are threading carefully toward something that looked, cautiously, like progress. The Strait of Hormuz is open. Ships are moving. The nuclear question is live but contained. Multiple sources who were present have confirmed that those talks were, by the cautious standards of diplomacy, going somewhere. Forty-eight hours later, the bombs began to fall.
The memorandum of understanding signed — or to be signed, on Friday in Geneva, assuming no further last-minute catastrophes — brings the United States and Iran back to almost exactly that same table, at almost exactly that same point. The Strait is to reopen. The nuclear negotiations are to resume. The ceasefire, fitful and fragile as it has been, is to be extended. It is, as one senior diplomat put it with characteristic restraint, “where they were 24 hours before this conflict started.”
What happened in between was a war that nobody needed to fight, that achieved almost none of its stated objectives, and that has left thousands dead, a global economy rattled, and a region whose trauma will take years to even begin to measure.
Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Munir Akram, is not a man given to false modesty. In an interview on Sunday night, he was clear about what he believes his country has achieved. “I think Pakistan can be very proud of the role we have played in bringing an end to the conflict,” he said. “I think we can very well say that Pakistan has been the architect of the peace.”
Islamabad served as the principal back-channel between Washington and Tehran throughout weeks of fighting, threading communications between two governments that have not trusted each other since 1979 and show little sign of doing so now. That Pakistan, a country too often treated in Western diplomatic circles as a problem to be managed rather than a partner to be cultivated, should have played this role is itself a significant geopolitical footnote.
But Akram is not under any illusions about what has actually been achieved. “The peace will remain fragile,” he said. “Until there is a resolution of the outstanding issues — the nuclear issue, the sanctions issue, the future administration, if any, of the Strait of Hormuz — these are all issues that will have to be addressed in the forthcoming negotiations.”
He is right, and the list of unresolved questions is long enough to be sobering.
Start with what the memorandum of understanding actually does. According to Pakistani officials who have seen the text — which, pointedly, has not been published — it runs to 14 points across two pages. It provides for the simultaneous lifting of Iran’s closure of the Strait and the American naval blockade of Iranian ports. It establishes a 60-day window for nuclear negotiations in Geneva, extendable if there is progress. It outlines a phased process for sanctions relief and the release of frozen assets. Iranian funds held abroad will be unfrozen in stages, tied to progress in talks.
What it does not do is resolve anything fundamental.
Iran’s nuclear programme remains in place. Its missile capabilities, though damaged by weeks of American and Israeli bombardment, are not destroyed. Its ties to Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Shiite militias of Iraq are, by all available accounts, intact. The regime in Tehran — far from being toppled, as Benjamin Netanyahu promised when he declared on 28 February that he had waited his entire political life for this moment — has survived, and has emerged from the experience not weakened but, in certain respects that matter enormously in the politics of the region, emboldened.
Akram put it plainly. “Iran has suffered hugely in terms of the destruction of the country,” he said. “But they have emerged from this with a greater sense of confidence that the worst that could have happened to them — which was a combined Israeli-United States attack — they have survived that.”
The new leadership, with Mojtaba Khamenei replacing his father as supreme leader and a younger generation of Revolutionary Guards commanders taking the helm, is not a more moderate one. It is, if anything, less cautious. These are men who have been tested in an existential fight and have not broken. They will not arrive at the Geneva table as supplicants.
The nuclear negotiation itself is the centrepiece of everything that follows, and the difficulties are both technical and political in a way that makes the next 60 days — and potentially considerably longer — deeply uncertain.
Under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran maintained low-level uranium enrichment at 3.75 percent. It was a compromise that neither side loved but that both could live with. The situation today is categorically different. Iran now holds approximately 400 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent — approaching weapons grade — stored somewhere that inspectors have not confirmed. It also holds around ten tonnes of material at lower enrichment levels.
“First of all, it will have to be established where this material is,” Akram said, “and how this will be disposed of — whether it will all be exported out of Iran, or whether some will be exported and some will be down-blended to a lower level of enrichment.”
The American position has been that all enrichment must stop entirely. The emerging compromise, as Akram understands it, is that Iran’s right to enrich under the Non-Proliferation Treaty would be formally recognised, but Tehran would voluntarily halt enrichment activities for a defined period — various timeframes have been floated, none of them confirmed.
Then there is the inspection question. The International Atomic Energy Agency, whose credibility Tehran has questioned in the past, will need to verify whatever is agreed. Does Iran still trust it? If not, who does the verifying? These are not peripheral questions. They are the substance of the negotiation.
“Certainly it will be different from the JCPOA,” Akram said. “One can judge whether it’s better or not better, but it will be different.”
The immediate risk, though, is not that the negotiations will fail — it is that they will never properly begin, because the ceasefire that frames them will collapse first.
The dangers are multiple and they are coming from several directions at once.
Israel is the most visible source of instability. Netanyahu was excluded from the negotiations that produced Sunday’s memorandum, and the political fallout at home has been swift and severe. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called the agreement “bad for Israel and the entire free world. Period.” Defence Minister Israel Katz announced that Israeli troops would remain in Lebanon, Gaza and southern Syria “indefinitely”, a position he said he had communicated directly to Pete Hegseth. Itamar Ben Gvir, the national security minister whose politics are not easily understated, posted on Monday morning that the agreement “does not bind us.”
Netanyahu himself, characteristically, said less and meant more. He told reporters that the agreement was Trump’s decision, adding only: “I expressed my opinion. On the other hand, we have our interests.” The statement was simultaneously a distancing and a threat.
The Sunday air strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs — launched hours before the deal was finalised — may have been, as Hebrew University political scientist Gayil Talshir suggested, an act of political theatre rather than strategic calculation. A demonstration that Netanyahu retains the ability to say no to Washington, aimed at a domestic audience months before an election. If so, it was an extraordinarily reckless piece of theatre: Trump, who has not been measured in his response, reportedly called Netanyahu to ask “what the fuck are you doing.”
But Talshir’s further observation is the devastating one. “By playing this foolish game for his political base,” she said, “he provided the final push for a memorandum of understanding that is among the worst Israel could have imagined.”
Netanyahu promised Israelis he would destroy the Islamic Republic, dismantle its nuclear programme, sever its ties to Hezbollah, and eliminate its ballistic missiles. None of those things have happened. Hezbollah is standing. Hamas is standing. The Iranian regime is standing — and is ruled by men who are, if anything, harder than those who preceded them. The Israeli prime minister faces a general election before the end of October with a war record that even his supporters are struggling to defend and a relationship with Donald Trump that has deteriorated faster and more publicly than almost anyone predicted possible.
Akram is under no illusions about the Lebanese dimension. “It’s a very fragile situation,” he said, “and Israel can find a thousand different ways of triggering an escalation of fighting in Lebanon which would be unacceptable to the Iranians.”
The crucial variable is whether Trump can hold Netanyahu back. On Sunday, for the first time in modern American political memory, a US president and vice president sided openly and publicly against an Israeli prime minister in real time — Trump on Fox News, Vance in a follow-up interview — over an active military operation. It was a rupture without modern precedent.
But Trump’s leverage has its limits. Netanyahu has elections to win. And as Akram noted, the hardliners in Tehran are not the only spoilers with skin in the game. “In Iran also, there are hardliners. There have been demonstrations against this understanding. So there could be provocative actions also from some rogue elements in the military establishment there, or among hardliners, to take some provocative actions that could lead to a breakdown of the ceasefire.”
The guarantee on both sides is essentially the same thing dressed in different language: the capacity to cause mutual harm. America’s guarantee is the threat to resume military action. Iran’s guarantee — and Akram was explicit about this — is the Strait. “If there is a violation, they can go back to closing down the Strait.” For a conflict that drove American inflation to four percent, rattled global stock markets, and threatened agricultural supply chains across sub-Saharan Africa, that is a guarantee with serious teeth.
What is needed now, Akram argues, is deliberate quietness. “I think it would be very important that these negotiations do not take place in the glare of publicity and media attention, because in that way, the politics may drive them towards hard positions, and hard positions will drive them towards breakdown.”
His prescription: working groups on each issue — nuclear, sanctions, the strait — composed of diplomats instructed to produce agreements without fanfare, without press conferences, until something is actually ready to announce. High-profile summits produce either breakthroughs or spectacular collapses, and the ratio has not recently been favourable. The better model is the quiet, grinding, unsexy work of technical diplomacy conducted far from the cameras.
Pakistan, he believes, should continue to play a mediating role. And a broader coalition — Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, China — will be needed to keep the pressure applied from multiple directions if the agreement is to hold.
“There is no trust between the United States and Iran,” he said. “And this memorandum of understanding will not restore that trust. This trust will only come at the end when a comprehensive agreement is achieved.”
It is worth pausing over what has been lost in the three and a half months between that Geneva table in late February and the Geneva table to which negotiators are now returning.
More than 3,400 people have been killed. Tens of thousands of homes have been damaged or destroyed. The Iranian economy, already under severe sanctions pressure before the war, has been battered further. Israel has burned through irreplaceable stocks of munitions and missile interceptors. America has spent what independent analysts estimate at close to a billion dollars a day, while its credibility as a superpower — its ability to deter enemies, reassure allies, and project reliable dominance — has taken the kind of visible damage that does not repair quickly.
The Gulf Arab monarchies, whose entire business model rests on being islands of stability guaranteed by American power, are shaken. Privately, their officials are already speaking about diversifying their allegiances. About learning to live with Iran. China has been watching all of this very carefully, and not without satisfaction.
Donald Trump launched this war on the claim of “imminent threat.” His own former director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, declined to endorse that claim. The school in Minab, in southern Iran, where American strikes killed more than 120 children — most of them girls under twelve — in the war’s first hours, will not be rebuilt by a memorandum of understanding. The parents of those children will not be consoled by a signing ceremony in Geneva.
Trump’s announcement — “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!” — was presented as a triumph. It was, in fact, a description of fixing the problem his own war had created. The ships were moving in February. He stopped them. He is now claiming credit for starting them again.
That pattern — the announcement as the goal, the substance as an afterthought — is one that has become recognisable. The Board of Peace convened on 19 February. The war began nine days later. The Gaza ceasefire was declared; Gaza remains a humanitarian catastrophe. The Ukraine settlement was promised within 24 hours of inauguration; it has not materialised. Each time, the headline is claimed, and the detail is deferred.
The 60-day nuclear negotiation is the next deferral. Whether it produces something durable or collapses under the weight of its own contradictions depends on too many variables to predict with any confidence: the behaviour of Israeli hardliners, the room for manoeuvre of Iranian technocrats, the attention span of an American president whose enthusiasm for difficult diplomatic detail has not historically been his defining characteristic.
Akram’s concluding thought is the one that lingers. “Everything will change in the aftermath of this conflict,” he said. “The structure of security in the region as a whole — which may not be formally on the table — will require some form in which to address the issues that have arisen between Iran and the Arab states of the Gulf. What would be the future relations between them?”
Nobody knows. And that is, in its way, the most honest summary available of where the world stands on the morning after an unnecessary war has been paused, but not yet ended, by a document whose text remains confidential and whose durability remains entirely to be proved.
The strait is open, for now. The bombs have stopped falling, for now. Friday’s ceremony in Geneva, if it happens, will produce photographs and handshakes and statements of cautious optimism. Then the real work begins.
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