Ending the Iran–US Conflict on Terms Acceptable to Washington: A Negotiation Strategy Analysis
by David Farca, President of International Business Group & PCFR Board Member
I've spent a lot of hours on airplanes lately, and there's something about being stuck in a metal tube at 35,000 feet that pulls my mind away from work. Sometimes it wanders somewhere creative. Sometimes it lands on things that are part of my life but never quite make it to the top of my to-do list. Either way, I tend to think bigger in those moments — less about the next deadline, more about the long game.
That's how I found myself, somewhere over the country, chewing on the same question for the umpteenth time: after weeks of nonstop news coverage and dueling takes on the Iran conflict, and after a lot of back and-forth — some with colleagues in my recently created YPO Global Diplomacy Network's National Security Forum — what would it actually take to negotiate an end to this that the United States could live with?
It's a question I was always going to end up asking. Negotiation has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. One of my favorite classes in MBA school was built around the case studies of a Harvard negotiation professor, and I ate up every assigned reading — probably because I grew up around a family and a community that treated bargaining as a bit of an art form. It didn't hurt that I usually won the classroom simulations, either. I've kept reading on the subject ever since, and kept practicing, both the instincts I came by honestly and the tricks I've picked up along the way — much to my family's mild embarrassment when it shows up over something as ordinary as buying a shirt at a department store.
So naturally, I started wondering: what would my old professors say? What would the authors of the books that shaped how I think about this stuff — Getting to Yes, Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight, Getting Past No, Never Split the Difference, Negotiating the Impossible — tell the delegations sitting across from Iran right now?
I started jotting down ideas. But the more I dug in, the more obvious it became that I was thinking too small. If I've learned anything from my limited brush with diplomacy, it's that boardroom negotiation and geopolitical negotiation are not the same animal. So I went back to the drawing board — this time digging into the historical record: moments when American diplomats had actually gotten somewhere with Iran, and moments when any Western country had.
Between the negotiation playbook and the diplomatic history, a picture started to come together. What follows are ten tactics I think are worth serious consideration — plus a few closing thoughts on how they fit together. I've updated the piece since first drafting it in July, mostly because reality kept intervening: the framework Washington and Tehran signed in June has since collapsed, the cracks inside Iran's own leadership have become a good deal more public, and the U.S. midterms are now close enough to feel like a deadline rather than an abstraction. All three, if anything, sharpen the argument rather than change it.
Where the Conflict Stands
Since the US-Israeli strikes of February 28, 2026 — which killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — the conflict has cycled through at least four failed or partial ceasefires, each collapsing over the same unresolved issues: freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, the fate of Iran's enriched uranium stockpile, and the status of Iran-aligned forces in Lebanon and Yemen. The Council on Foreign Relations' Global Conflict Tracker puts the Pentagon's direct war costs at roughly $37.5 billion as of late July 2026, with a further $67 billion in supplemental funding requested from Congress; the Congressional Research Service, in its brief on the Strait of Hormuz, documents the resulting spike in US gasoline prices past $4.50 a gallon. Iran, meanwhile, has consolidated a tiered, fee-based control system over Hormuz transit that privileges Russian, Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani shipping, and Houthi forces — long-standing recipients of Iranian funding and arms — have begun directing threats toward the Bab el-Mandeb Strait as well, warning of a coordinated "operational alliance" between the two chokepoints that could push oil toward $200 a barrel.
The most consequential of those four ceasefires was the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, a 14-point interim framework Trump signed at a televised ceremony in Paris on June 17–18, complete with a triumphant social-media declaration — "Ships of the world, start your engines. Let the oil flow!" It set a 60-day deadline for a permanent deal. That deadline passed on August 17 with no agreement in place, and by most accounts without either side having seriously resolved the underlying issues the MOU had merely deferred. Trump's own public tone shifted within weeks, from that early confidence to, as he told a crowd in New York around the deadline, "There's nobody to negotiate with." Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Iran had "not yet made a decision to restart negotiations with the United States," even as Tehran pursued a narrower, separate arrangement with Oman over Hormuz shipping routes. Analysts have converged on a fairly consistent diagnosis of why it fell apart: Joey Hood, a former acting director of the State Department's Office of Iranian Affairs, called the MOU's language "very poorly written," arguing it left Iran room to read the document as conceding sovereignty over the strait; Khalid Al-Jaber of the Middle East Council on Global Affairs put it more generally — "Without clearly defined obligations, mechanisms for monitoring and implementation, and consequences for violations, an agreement can become little more than a temporary truce."
This is a war that is hurting the United States politically and economically in real time, against an adversary that has absorbed extraordinary internal losses — the assassination of its Supreme Leader, thousands killed in the regime's own suppression of the 2025–26 protests — and appears to calculate, rationally or not, that endurance costs it less than capitulation does.
Why Iran Believes Time Is on Its Side
Iran's willingness to prolong the conflict is not simple bravado; it reflects a coherent, if grim, cost-benefit calculation, and the calculation runs in Tehran's favor on several fronts at once.
A domestically repressive state can absorb costs that a democracy cannot. The IRGC's internal control apparatus means Iranian leadership does not face the electoral or media accountability that constrains a US administration — popular suffering does not translate into leadership change the way falling approval ratings or a hostile Congress does in Washington. Proxy leverage compounds this: Houthi attacks on Bab el-Mandeb impose global economic pain without exposing Iranian territory or forces directly, and Tehran can plausibly deny full control over Houthi decision-making even while arming and funding the group. A regime built partly on resistance narratives can also turn the war itself into a legitimizing device — the assassination of Khamenei chief among the grievances — converting external pressure into a domestic asset rather than a liability. And the sanctions-and-blockade runway has proven longer than expected: a CIA assessment reported by the Washington Post concluded Iran could weather the naval blockade for three to four months before more severe pain set in, a timeline Iran has already exceeded through its Hormuz control mechanisms and alternative buyers in China and Russia.
Against this, the United States faces classic democratic constraints — rising fuel prices, congressional war powers pressure, mounting deficit spending, casualty aversion — and, as of this writing, a fixed and fast approaching one: the midterm elections on November 3, 2026, now roughly nine weeks away. Republicans hold narrow majorities in both the House and Senate, control that historically slips for a sitting president's party in a midterm year more or less regardless of the underlying issue set, and an unresolved war paired with $4.50 gasoline is exactly the kind of kitchen-table grievance that shows up at the ballot box. Iran's system has nothing analogous. The IRGC and the Supreme Leader's office do not face a fixed electoral reckoning in nine weeks, or ever, the way a governing party does; their clock, such as it is, is measured in economic pain thresholds and internal legitimacy, not a calendar date fixed well in advance and impossible to move. Iran's implicit bet is that this asymmetry — one side facing a hard, external deadline it did not choose, the other facing only soft, elastic pressure — will force a concession before Iranian endurance runs out.
That bet is reinforced by a cost structure specific to this war. It is not a symmetric war of attrition; it is asynchronous. Iran fires mass-produced drones, ballistic missiles, and sea mines — items its defense industrial base can churn out relatively cheaply and can afford to lose in bulk (more than 2,000 drones and 500 ballistic missiles in the first four days of the war alone, according to a Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis, "Last Rounds? Status of Key Munitions at the Iran War Ceasefire"). The United States, by contrast, has been expending its most advanced and hardest-to-replace precision munitions: over 1,000 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles, plus Patriot, THAAD, SM-3, and SM-6 interceptors, at a cost of millions of dollars per intercept. CSIS estimates it will take three or more years to restore prewar THAAD and Patriot inventories and four to five years for Tomahawks, given current production of roughly 15 new Tomahawks and 20 new Patriots a month — with no THAAD deliveries at all forecast in 2026. Reporting from US News Networks, Al Jazeera, Military Times, and the Associated Press wire in May and July 2026 has confirmed the same figures independently. Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel now at CSIS, has warned that this drawdown is opening a "window of vulnerability" for a potential Indo-Pacific contingency — the US is, in effect, spending down its China-deterrence posture to fight an attritable adversary in the Gulf.
The strategic implication is important and somewhat counterintuitive: time is not neutral here, and it is not obviously working in America's favor. Every additional month of high-intensity strikes degrades exactly the systems the US would need most in a future great-power contingency, while Iran's own attritable munitions economy degrades far more slowly relative to its needs. A negotiating strategy premised on "we can simply out-endure them" understates how much of America's own strategic capital is being consumed in the process — capital that, unlike approval ratings, cannot be restored by an election or a shift in public mood. It takes years of industrial lead time regardless of who is in the White House. Thomas Schelling's foundational insight in The Strategy of Conflict — that a party's leverage is not fixed but changes with time and circumstance — applies directly: the standard assumption that a militarily superior power's advantage only grows the longer a war runs should not be taken for granted here. Every month of continued exchange narrows, rather than widens, the credible-leverage gap the US can bring to the table. That argues for opening a settlement now, while the advantage is at its widest, rather than assuming delay will improve America's hand.
Ten Tactics for a Settlement Washington Can Accept
The negotiation literature, the historical record of America's own most successful diplomats, and the experience of other nations dealing with Tehran converge on a consistent set of tactics for exactly this kind of power-asymmetric, high-distrust, identity-laden conflict. Each is best understood together with the evidence — theoretical, historical, and comparative — that supports it.
1. Reshape the zone of possible agreement; don't assume one exists. Harvard Business School's James Sebenius and Michael Singh, writing in International Security on the US-Iran nuclear negotiations, argued that repeated failures were not merely tactical but structural: no Zone of Possible Agreement (ZOPA) existed because neither side's no-deal alternatives and on-deal incentives had been shaped to make one possible. Their prescription — a combination of credible cost-imposing moves and credible value enhancing moves, sized and timed together — is more disciplined than either pure pressure or pure inducement alone, both of which have failed repeatedly in this conflict. Applied here, this means simultaneously worsening Iran's no-deal alternatives (sustained, calibrated naval enforcement; targeted financial measures against Houthi funding channels specifically, separate from broader Iran sanctions) while credibly enhancing its on-deal alternatives — a verifiable investment vehicle, building on the $300 billion private fund already floated in the June framework, released in tranches tied to verified compliance rather than paid upfront.
2. Sequence issues; never bundle them. Every ceasefire in this conflict has collapsed when negotiators tried to fold Hormuz access, the nuclear file, and Lebanon into a single instrument — the June MOU, discussed above, being the clearest and most recent case. History argues strongly against this approach. Henry Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy after the 1973 Yom Kippur War deliberately did not try to resolve the broader Arab-Israeli conflict at once; he negotiated the narrower, achievable Sinai I disengagement between Egypt and Israel in eight days, then the Golan disengagement between Israel and Syria after roughly a month of shuttling, each backed by an internationally staffed monitoring force. The Iran nuclear file has its own precedent for the same discipline: the interim Joint Plan of Action of 2013 — a narrower nuclear freeze in exchange for limited sanctions relief — preceded the comprehensive 2015 deal by nearly two years. Wendy Sherman, who led the US side of those talks as Under Secretary of State, has said plainly that the two years of quiet, substantively unproductive relationship-building that preceded the interim deal were not wasted: "No time is wasted in a negotiation. Sometimes you have to hit a roadblock before you can break through." Applied to the current conflict, this argues for splitting the settlement into a first, internationalized freedom-of-navigation regime — which benefits China, India, and Europe as much as the US, and is therefore easier to legitimize as a global rather than purely American demand — followed by phased economic normalization tied to verified de-escalation of proxy attacks, with the nuclear enrichment endgame negotiated last and most heavily verified.
3. Rely on trusted neutral intermediaries — and never undercut them. Fisher, Ury, and Patton's foundational Harvard Negotiation Project text, Getting to Yes, counsels insisting on objective, legitimate criteria rather than raw power claims; a neutral intermediary is often what makes that possible when direct talks are politically toxic for one or both sides. The precedent with this exact adversary is direct: in 1981, Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher secured the release of 52 American hostages entirely through Algeria, which evolved from a simple message-relay into an active "flying committee" shuttling proposals between Washington, Tehran, and Algiers. More recently, Sultan Qaboos of Oman personally approached then-Senator John Kerry in 2012 to offer Oman's services, and Oman went on to host the secret talks between US officials William Burns and Jake Sullivan and their Iranian counterparts that produced the Joint Plan of Action and, eventually, the JCPOA. Switzerland has served as the US "protecting power" in Tehran since 1980 — what regional analysts call a "break glass in case of emergency" channel that, according to Swiss officials, has remained active even now, through the current war. Pakistan holds the mirror-image role, representing Iranian interests in Washington, and — along with Qatar — has continued exchanging messages with Tehran even through the current post-MOU impasse. But the comparative record also carries a sharp warning. In 2010, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva negotiated directly with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and secured a real concession — Iran's agreement to ship 1,200 kilograms of low-enriched uranium out of the country — only to have Washington reject the resulting Tehran Declaration, having already lined up Chinese and Russian support for a new sanctions resolution without telling Ankara or Brasília. Turkish and Brazilian officials were blindsided, and the episode remains, fifteen years later, the clearest cautionary tale available: a mediator who successfully extracts a real concession from Iran can be discredited by Washington running an uncoordinated parallel track. If the US is going to lean on Qatar, Oman, Switzerland, or Pakistan now, it needs to give each a genuine mandate and coordinate its own sanctions and military moves with them — not repeat 2010.
4. Negotiate with the faction that can actually say yes — but don't mistake the visible fault line for the real one. Robert Mnookin's Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight stresses analyzing internal factions within an adversary rather than treating it as monolithic, and distinguishing tactics appropriate for pragmatists from those needed to marginalize spoilers. The split inside Tehran has become considerably more visible since this essay was first drafted. President Pezeshkian said this month that "the war must end at some point... it would be better to end it today, while we are in a position of strength and dignity, and the entire world acknowledges our victory" — about as direct a public pitch for a negotiated exit as an Iranian president has made. Hardliners have responded by blaming him for the shattered economy and the failed June framework; according to one senior cleric with family ties to Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, Pezeshkian has threatened to resign as many as 28 times over the dispute, though he has publicly denied any intention of stepping down and insists his government remains coordinated with the military leadership. On its face, this looks like exactly the moderate-versus-hardliner split this tactic calls for exploiting. It is more complicated than that. Analysts at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies have pointed out that Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Araghchi — the two officials actually running the talks — have not consistently acted as a dovish counterweight to the IRGC so much as a political leadership that, when it counted, backed the Guard's own escalation playbook: Ghalibaf has threatened that Hormuz will reopen only under "Iranian arrangements," Pezeshkian himself praised the IRGC's July strikes on shipping as having "acted responsibly," and Araghchi has said Iran will remain "the guardian of the Strait" forever. The practical implication is that the pragmatic camp's appetite for a deal is real and increasingly public, but it is bounded by the same nationalist red line on Hormuz sovereignty that the hardliners hold — which is one more reason the golden-bridge framing in tactic 5, below, is closer to a precondition than a nicety. This is also where the Trump administration's own negotiating style has cut against its interests: public ultimatums delivered by social media create what negotiation scholars call audience costs, making any Iranian concession look like personal capitulation to a hostile foreign leader and strengthening the case that the pragmatists cannot be trusted to negotiate without losing face. A style built for one-on-one commercial rivalry — the anchor-and-leverage approach Donald Trump describes in Trump: The Art of the Deal — damages a strategy that depends on giving Iran's pragmatic camp room to move, however well it may generate short-term uncertainty about US intentions.
5. Build Iran a golden bridge on sovereignty and identity. William Ury's Getting Past No describes "building a golden bridge" — making an agreement look like the other side's own idea and preserving their dignity — as the way past a resistant counterpart. Daniel Shapiro's Negotiating the Nonnegotiable supplies the underlying reason this matters here: his "Tribes Effect" describes how adversarial groups treat any concession as a threat to core identity, and a deal that appears to ratify humiliation — in this case, a decapitation strike on Iran's own leadership — will be rejected even when materially favorable, unless paired with identity-affirming, face-preserving elements. Iranian officials across both camps, as just discussed, have converged on the same red line: no return to a pre-conflict status quo with no Iranian say over the strait, but real willingness to negotiate a joint-management arrangement with Oman. Framing continued Iranian involvement in strait administration — jointly with Oman, under international oversight — as sovereignty preserved rather than surrendered is far more survivable domestically for Tehran, for pragmatists and hardliners alike, than an American demand for unconditional access. Maximalist, publicly humiliating rhetoric — the "TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE" ultimatum style, warnings of national annihilation — tends to harden precisely this identity-based resistance rather than extract concessions; it is the opposite of a golden bridge.
6. Verify with escrow, not promises. The 1981 Algiers Accords again supply the working model: roughly $7.96 billion in frozen Iranian assets were deposited with the Algerian Central Bank and released only upon Algeria's independent certification that all hostages had left Iran safely, and a standing Iran-US Claims Tribunal at The Hague was created to resolve financial disputes — an institution that still functions today. A verified, escrowed reconstruction fund released in tranches against confirmed compliance, rather than promised upfront or handed over on trust, is a forty-five-year-old, tested mechanism, not a novel proposal — and, as the June MOU's collapse demonstrated, the absence of exactly this kind of mechanism is a large part of why "compliance" with the last framework became a matter of dueling interpretations rather than a checkable fact.
7. Control the information environment around the talks. Richard Holbrooke's negotiation of the Dayton Accords in 1995 — which ended the Bosnian War after thirty-four prior ceasefires had failed — succeeded partly because he physically isolated the Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian delegations at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and deliberately cut them off from press access, so none could posture for domestic audiences mid-negotiation. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who opened those talks, and Holbrooke's own "lock-up" and "step-by-step" method stand in direct contrast to the high-visibility, real time commentary that has characterized this conflict — including the June MOU's own signing ceremony and its social-media victory lap, followed weeks later by an equally public declaration that there was "nobody to negotiate with." Publicly declaring a deal done, only to have it collapse, or announcing deadlines that are then quietly dropped, creates the kind of credibility decay Schelling's brinkmanship framework warns against — Iranian negotiators have already begun discounting US deadlines and threats in public statements, exactly the "cry wolf" dynamic a disciplined, less public process would avoid.
8. Use leverage that is real, not merely threatened. Kissinger's own parting words to Hafez al-Assad during the Golan shuttle — describing negotiators who "walk up to the brink" and hope for "a branch" on the way down — is a vivid, practitioner-level statement of the brinkmanship dynamics Schelling formalizes: uncertainty about a party's next move can genuinely widen the range of outcomes a counterpart will accept. But Dayton shows the more reliable version of the same principle: the Bosnian Serb leadership came to the table only after NATO airstrikes had visibly and concretely demonstrated that their alternative to negotiating was worse than the deal on offer — a demonstrated deterioration of their alternatives, not merely an assertion of one. The naval blockade and Hormuz enforcement measures already in place function the same way; the task is to keep that pressure credible and calibrated rather than escalatory beyond what the deal itself requires.
9. Move now, while the balance of leverage still favors Washington. Because Tomahawk, Patriot, and THAAD inventories take three to five years to restore and cannot be accelerated by political will alone, every month the high-intensity phase continues trades away leverage the US will want for other contingencies — most acutely, Indo-Pacific deterrence — in exchange for marginal additional pressure on Iran that Tehran has already shown it can absorb. The midterms sharpen this further: a genuinely credible push for a settlement realistically needs to happen in the roughly two months remaining before November 3, both because a fresh Congress could reshape the domestic politics of any deal and because Iran's leadership has every incentive to watch the election returns before deciding how much urgency it actually needs to show. This argues for front-loading the diplomatic effort now, while stockpiles and political capital are still adequate to back a credible threat, and for multilateralizing enforcement of any freedom of-navigation regime so that the burden of sustaining pressure does not fall on US assets alone.
10. Equip envoys with real tactical skill, not just a mandate. Chris Voss's Never Split the Difference — drawn from his years as the FBI's lead international kidnapping negotiator — offers concrete, teachable technique for exactly the emotionally charged, high-distrust counterpart described above, closer in spirit to what this conflict actually resembles than the commercial-dealmaking assumptions of The Art of the Deal. Labeling Iran's stated grievances directly ("It seems like Iran views this as a matter of sovereignty, not just shipping fees") is a practical way to build the golden bridge described in tactic 5. The "accusation audit" — naming Iran's likely suspicions about US intentions before Tehran voices them — can blunt the reflexive rejections that have marked several rounds of this conflict, including the recriminations that followed the MOU's collapse. "No"-oriented questions ("Is it your position that Iran will never accept any third-party role in managing Hormuz?") invite a safe "no" without requiring Iranian negotiators to make a public "yes" that hardliners could call capitulation, directly addressing the audience-cost problem in tactic 4. And the Ackerman bargaining model — an extreme initial anchor followed by calibrated, shrinking, non round-number concessions — preserves the leverage-creation logic of tactic 1 while avoiding the credibility decay flagged in tactic 7, since each concession is visibly smaller and more deliberate than the last. None of this is a substitute for the structural choices in tactics 1 through 9; it is the tactical layer that should equip whichever envoys carry them out. And like every tool in this essay, it cannot manufacture a willingness to deal that does not exist — if Iran's hardliners have concluded that continued fighting serves them better than any agreement, no combination of rapport-building technique will produce one.
What the Collapse of the June Framework Confirms
The recent MOU's failure isn't just a news update to note in passing; it functions close to a natural experiment testing the tactics laid out, because it seems to have violated several of them at once. It bundled Hormuz access, the nuclear file, and — implicitly — the future of Iran-aligned forces in Lebanon into a single, vaguely worded 14-point framework rather than sequencing them, which is precisely what tactic 2 warns against, and it is a large part of why the strait became, as one account put it, "the fundamental issue in ending the conflict, while the nuclear issue was a can kicked down the road." It relied on a 60-day political deadline and reciprocal goodwill rather than the kind of verified escrow-and certification mechanism described in tactic 6; there was no neutral third party empowered to certify compliance the way Algeria did in 1981, which is a large part of why the two governments now offer flatly contradictory accounts of what they actually agreed to. And it launched with maximal public fanfare — a signing ceremony, a triumphant "start your engines" post — that left no room to quietly manage implementation problems as they arose, the opposite of the information discipline tactic 7 recommends; a public pivot to "there's nobody to negotiate with" is a hard position for Washington to walk back if and when talks resume. None of this means a durable deal was impossible in June. It means the specific way this one was built made its collapse close to overdetermined, and it's a fairly direct argument for building the next attempt differently rather than simply trying the same framework again with a later deadline.
A Phased Framework
Put together, these ten tactics point toward a settlement built in stages rather than a single comprehensive agreement — consistent with tactic 2 above, with every historically successful precedent examined in this essay, and, in the negative, with what just happened to the June MOU.
● Phase 1 (immediate, weeks): A mutual, verified halt to strikes; an internationalized freedom-of navigation guarantee for Hormuz, multinational rather than solely US-flagged; humanitarian and prisoner-exchange gestures as identity-affirming, trust-building signals alongside the substance — with the terms this time specific and independently verifiable rather than the ambiguous language that let the last framework collapse into a dispute over interpretation.
● Phase 2 (60–120 days): Tranche-based release of frozen assets and investment-fund disbursement, tied to verified reductions in Houthi attacks on Bab el-Mandeb and cessation of Hormuz mining; a joint Iran-Oman strait management structure with international observers.
● Phase 3 (6–12 months): The nuclear file — enrichment caps and IAEA verification — negotiated last and under multilateral, not solely US, legitimacy, drawing on the P5+1 structure that originally produced the JCPOA.
● Phase 4 (longer horizon): A regional non-aggression framework, echoing the Helsinki-process model reportedly floated by Saudi Arabia, addressing the broader proxy-conflict architecture in Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq rather than leaving it to fester as the next flashpoint.
Risks and Limits
No framework guarantees success. Domestic political pressure could force Washington into a premature, underverified deal — exactly the failure mode Deepak Malhotra's Negotiating the Impossible warns against in asymmetric negotiations conducted under a domestic clock, and arguably close to what happened with the rushed June MOU. IRGC hardliners may reject any deal regardless of its design, in which case Mnookin's "when to fight" framework becomes operative rather than "when to negotiate." The instability inside Iran's own leadership is itself a risk to any process: a Pezeshkian government weakened by resignation threats and hardliner blame-shifting may simply not survive long enough, or retain enough authority, to close a deal it has proposed in good faith. Israel has stated it is not bound by any US-Iran agreement touching Lebanon, and represents a potential spoiler outside Washington's control. China and Russia's interest in a stable Hormuz does not automatically translate into diplomatic cooperation with US aims, and Iran, as its handling of the China-brokered rapprochement with Saudi Arabia in 2023 showed, will instrumentalize any settlement to serve broader strategic goals of its own — in that case, using the deal to undercut the US-backed Abraham Accords process. A further, easily overlooked risk cuts the other way: because the war is asynchronous, the temptation to simply wait Iran out is more dangerous than it appears. Every month spent testing that assumption is a month of multi year lead time on Tomahawk, Patriot, and THAAD production that cannot be recovered on demand, regardless of who wins the midterms or how public opinion shifts afterward.
Summary
These findings indicate that the United States is negotiating from a position that is materially strong but politically fragile, against an adversary that is materially weak but politically durable — and, on the narrow question of precision-munitions stockpiles, quietly gaining ground the longer the fighting continues. The June framework's collapse is a useful, if costly, confirmation of the diagnosis rather than a reason to abandon it: it failed in more or less the ways the tactics below would have predicted, which is a reason for more discipline the next time around, not less. The evidence assembled here — from the academic negotiation literature, from America's own most successful diplomats, and from the experience of other nations dealing with this same adversary — converges on a consistent prescription: reshape the zone of possible agreement deliberately rather than assume one exists; sequence issues instead of bundling them; work through trusted neutral intermediaries without ever undercutting them; negotiate with the faction inside Iran that can actually say yes, while recognizing that faction's own room to maneuver is narrower than it looks; build face-saving, identity-respecting off-ramps rather than demanding visible capitulation; verify with escrow rather than promises; control the information environment around the talks; back leverage with demonstrated fact rather than mere assertion; move while the balance of advantage still favors Washington, with an actual election on the calendar to concentrate the mind; and equip the envoys carrying all of this out with real tactical skill. None of it guarantees a rapid end to the conflict. But it describes the most defensible path to a settlement that protects the core US interests at stake — freedom of navigation, non-proliferation, reduced military exposure — without requiring an unconditional Iranian surrender that the regime's own structure makes nearly impossible to deliver.
Selected bibliography of the negotiation literature drawn on throughout this essay:
Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (Harvard Negotiation Project).
James K. Sebenius and Michael K. Singh, "Is a Nuclear Deal with Iran Possible? An Analytical Framework for the Iran Nuclear Negotiations," International Security 37, no. 3 (Winter 2012).
David A. Lax and James K. Sebenius, 3-D Negotiation (Harvard Business School Press, 2006).
R. Nicholas Burns, Robert H. Mnookin, and James K. Sebenius, Kissinger the Negotiator (HarperCollins, 2018).
Robert H. Mnookin, Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight (Simon & Schuster, 2010).
Deepak Malhotra, Negotiating the Impossible (Berrett-Koehler, 2016).
William Ury, Getting Past No (Bantam, 1991).
Daniel Shapiro, Negotiating the Nonnegotiable (Viking, 2016).
Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Harvard University Press, 1960).
Chris Voss with Tahl Raz, Never Split the Difference (HarperBusiness, 2016).
Donald J. Trump with Tony Schwartz, Trump: The Art of the Deal (Random House, 1987).
