US, Iran negotiate via ultimatums and attacks with fragile ceasefire on the brink of collapse

The latest exchange of attacks between the United States and Iran may mark the end of a fragile ceasefire that has withstood numerous violations over the past two months.

“The Bully of the Middle East is dead,” President Donald Trump wrote early Wednesday on social media after Iranian missiles struck US assets in Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan.

The strikes were in retaliation for US attacks on southern Iran near the Strait of Hormuz in response to what Mr Trump had said was Iran’s downing of a US helicopter over the strait on Tuesday.

“We’re going to hit them hard again today,” he told reporters in the Oval Office.

Later on Wednesday, US Central Command said it had begun launching “additional self-defence strikes... against multiple targets in Iran... in response to Iran’s unwarranted and continued aggression.”

Shortly after the US announcement, Iranian media reported explosions in the southern part of the country.

For the moment, an outright return to full-on war still looks unlikely.

United Nations Secretary General António Guterres on Wednesday described the ceasefire as “more like a lesser fire,” and both sides clearly want the war to end, even as they seem locked in a diplomatic stand-off.

Mr Trump directly interceded with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last weekend, later claiming that he forced Israel to stop attacks on Iran that it said were retaliation for Iranian strikes.

Iran said its strikes on Israel were themselves a response to Israeli bombing in Lebanon that Tehran wants ended as part of a peace deal with the US.

Vice President J.D. Vance, in a CBS News preview of an interview scheduled to air Sunday, repeated Mr Trump’s frequent assurances that a deal is “very close” and “could happen in the next week”.

But, Mr Vance allowed, it “could also happen months from now.”

“We prefer the language of diplomacy,” Iranian negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf wrote on Tuesday on social media, “but we speak other languages far more fluently. Break your commitments, and we’ll switch to what we speak best.”

What remains unclear is how the two sides will find mutually agreeable diplomatic language that would spell an end to the conflict, and whether they can find it before all-out war explodes again.

“We were really close to a deal, but . . . they keep playing us for suckers,” Mr Trump insisted Wednesday.

Yet there have been no known direct talks since April 11, when Mr Vance, along with White House negotiators Steve Witkoff and Mr Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, sat down in the Pakistani capital with senior Iranian officials.

After more than 20 hours of talks, Mr Vance said, “We made some progress” but “just could not get to a situation where the Iranians were willing to accept our terms.”

In recent weeks, what has passed for ceasefire diplomacy has been a draft memorandum of understanding and messages sent back and forth through intermediaries, with each rewriting the text in ways the other finds unacceptable.

Meanwhile, both sides have continued to block the Strait of Hormuz, interrupting the flow of 20 per cent of the world’s fuel supply.

In Islamabad in April, Mr Vance alluded to what appears to be Mr Trump’s bottom line.

What the US had laid on the table, the Vice President told reporters, were the “things we absolutely needed to see in order for the President of the United States to feel like he was getting a good deal.”

A new deal, with old echoes

In terms Mr Trump has spelled out numerous times, a good deal is one that he believes is better than the 2015 agreement signed by President Barack Obama.

That accord sharply restricted Iran’s ability to enrich uranium, imposed other limits on its nuclear program and mandated rigorous international verification, in exchange for easing US sanctions.

Mr Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2018, during his first term, calling it the “worst deal ever” and saying it put Iran on the path to developing a nuclear weapon. He reimposed strict sanctions and added some new ones.

Two years later, the Iranians ended what US intelligence and International Atomic Energy Agency monitors said had been adherence to the terms of the agreement and began installing advanced centrifuges that produced near weapons-grade uranium at 60 per cent enrichment, building prohibited new nuclear sites and dodging IAEA inspectors.

Many nuclear experts believe a similar deal is the only viable option to avoid a continuation of the war.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action allowed minimal enrichment at 3.67 per cent for 15 years; mandated the removal of existing enriched uranium stockpiles, which were transferred to Russia; and capped for a decade the number and type of centrifuges Iran could have, as well as their locations.

In Islamabad, Mr Vance offered a moratorium on enrichment with a sunset provision of 20 years.

Tehran countered with an offer of 10 years or less. There has been some optimism in Washington that they could settle on 15 years.

The US contribution to the agreement was the unfreezing of some Iranian assets — money owed from long-ago oil sales to American allies or purchased weapons that were never delivered under US sanctions.

Mr Trump, who has harshly criticised Obama for delivering “pallets of cash” that he describes as a payoff, has indicated that some money could be unfrozen down the line if Iran complies with all his demands.

But unlike with the JCPOA — which was negotiated for two painstaking years by senior officials from the US, five other countries, the European Union and teams of nuclear experts — neither side this time around seems amenable to the intricate give and take of diplomacy or lengthy technical talks amid mutual distrust and the pressures of domestic politics.

“We — experts and journalists — should say that whatever Trump and his negotiators can get Iran to agree to will be better than the JCPOA,” said George Perkovich, senior fellow in the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“Because otherwise Trump will not end this disastrous war.”

“They’re not going to get complete surrender,” Mr Perkovich said.

And if Mr Trump says that his deal would be better than Mr Obama’s, he said, “the Iranians are going to say we have to get a better payoff.”

Mr Trump has vacillated between threatening the Iranian regime with renewed bombing — including widespread attacks on civilian infrastructure — and declaring that both sides are on the cusp of a deal.

But he has also, in his own inimitable way, asked the American public for patience, amid deep frustration with gas prices that have skyrocketed because of a war of his own making.

“Just sit back and relax, it will all work out well in the end — It always does!” he posted on social media.

Hard-liners at home and abroad

Mr Trump must also contend with Republican hard-liners who believe Tehran’s Islamist regime must be vanquished once and for all.

“Once you start it, you’ve got to finish it,” Wisconsin’s Republican Senator Ron Johnson told MS NOW just days ago.

“I’d like to keep the blockade on Iranian ports, and, in the end, we got to finish the job,” Mr Johnson added.

“Whatever it takes.”

Inside Iran, the successive elimination of government leaders during 40 days of nonstop US and Israeli bombing left the hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in a stronger political position, with little willingness to yield.

While Tehran’s previous leaders were “more restrained and conservative, the new leadership . . . is much more of the belief that restraint is the reason Iran ended up in war,” said Vali Nasr, an Iranian historian and professor of international affairs and Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University.

Joel Rayburn, a former diplomat who served in the first Trump administration and is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said what he considered recent Iranian escalations are aimed at undermining the US in the region and creating “fractures” between the US and Israel.

“They are behaving as though they think a full return to military operations is off the table for the US,” Mr Rayburn said.

Both sides have declared victory on the battlefield between the February 28 start of all-out war and the April 8 ceasefire declaration — the US by having done tremendous damage to Iran’s naval forces, air defence and missile launchers, and Iran by retaining much of its drone and missile arsenal and the ability to build more.

But judging by their public statements, there has been no agreement resolving any of their differences. And no certainty about whether the two sides are actually even talking to each other.

Early last week, Tehran said it had suspended all contact with the US because of Israel’s ongoing strikes on Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Iran warned that its Houthi allies in Yemen also could close the Bab el-Mandeb Strait leading to the Suez Canal, according to state-aligned media.

Sequencing the ceasefire

Reports that the US and Iran had stopped communicating were “false and erroneous,” Mr Trump said in a social media post last week.

“The conversations between us have been going on continuously . . . where they lead, one never knows,” he wrote, “but as I told Iran, ‘It’s time, one way or another, for you to make a Deal.’”

Iran says the memorandum under discussion does not deal with its nuclear program; Trump said last week that it must include nuclear restrictions on Iran.

The President has said repeatedly that he has secured a pledge from Tehran that it will never build a nuclear weapon. But that vow was already enshrined in the JCPOA more than a decade ago and has been voiced many times since by Iran.

Verifying that promise, however, will take negotiations over what nuclear activities are allowed and a mechanism to monitor compliance.

Mr Trump has also said that Tehran has agreed to allow the US to enter the country and unearth and remove about 470 pounds (about 213 kilograms) of highly enriched, near weapons-grade uranium, buried beneath tons of rubble from last year’s US bombing of Iranian nuclear sites.

“We will go in sometime in the not-too-distant future” to dig out and take home the material, he told reporters last week.

Iran says it has never agreed to turn over the uranium and will deal with the material under a separate, eventual nuclear agreement.

Iran has also said that it will never give up the ability to enrich low levels of uranium for its civil-use reactors.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a Senate hearing last week, said Tehran must make “significant concessions on what they intend to enrich.” Minutes later, he said Iran would be allowed no enrichment at all.

According to Iran, the memorandum on the table deals only with conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz to unimpeded international shipping.

Once it is signed, Iran’s nuclear program is to be discussed during an additional 60 days of “negotiations”.

Last week, Iran’s deputy foreign minister for legal and international affairs, Kazem Gharibabadi, gave a detailed rundown on Tehran’s positions.

While Iran recognises that “straits considered international waterways” are subject to international law, “the reality is that the Strait of Hormuz lies entirely within the territorial waters of Iran and Oman,” he said, according to Iran’s Nour News.

Iran has no intention of restricting traffic once an agreement is reached, Mr Gharibabadi said, but is entirely within its rights to recoup expenses for ensuring “safe and secure passage”.

Mr Trump and Mr Rubio have repeatedly said that no tolls, fees or other conditions on free traffic through the strait will be tolerated.

“Another issue tied to our interests is the release of Iran’s frozen funds,” Mr Gharibabadi said.

“At a minimum,” he added, Iran “insists that 50 per cent of its frozen assets,” a total of about $24 billion held by the US and its allies, “be made available immediately upon the signing of the memorandum of understanding, with the remainder released after a reasonable period.”

Mr Trump has said he will not consider releasing any money until all US demands are met and a final nuclear deal is signed.

“We insist that any text must address war damages and provide compensation to Iran,” Mr Gharibabadi said.

“This must be included in the text. The format, amount and financial mechanisms for payment will be determined through negotiations, including the 60-day negotiation period following the signing of the memorandum.”

While both sides are examining the draft, he said, “the US may send messages requesting revisions, which can lengthen the review process. We have also requested revisions to certain parts of the text.”

Susannah George contributed to this report.