The Iran war was President Donald Trump’s emphatic answer to the Obama-era nuclear arms deal. Instead of exhaustive negotiations and multilateral enforcement to end Tehran’s nuclear program, he opted for overwhelming force.
Now is his administration’s moment to chart a new course. The question is what it can accomplish essentially alone.
At times, postwar negotiations have been inflection points, germinating new ways to think about peace. The United States built a new order of international rules and institutions after World War II, specifically to bind nations together and make war less likely.
Why We Wrote This
Delegates from the U.S. and Iran are preparing to meet in Pakistan, where the world hopes they can turn a fragile ceasefire into lasting peace. But can you build peace without trust?
Yet, as the Iran conflict pauses, and delegates head to Islamabad for peace talks this weekend, America’s traditional allies are reluctant to help – if they’re inclined to help at all. And the postwar international order that the U.S. built has been sidelined by Washington.
The Trump administration has been criticized for wielding security through power, not mutual trust, and the Iran war has only deepened that doctrine. That raises doubts among diplomats and experts about what the current peace talks can accomplish long-term. Without trust, peace deals risk becoming just temporary pauses between conflicts. And the effect is clear: Nations from Europe to the Gulf are seeing the need to arm up in response.
“These postwar orders tend to have a life cycle,” says Ian Lesser, a distinguished fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Brussels. “The international system naturally orders itself, but sometimes it takes a cataclysm. We’re not talking about that scale, but there is a connection between conflict and the global order, especially when the global order is being questioned.”
A surprising ally
The fact that the coming talks are in Pakistan is significant. It is perhaps the only country that has the trust of both the United States and Iran. Its role shows how quickly things can change.
Just a couple of years ago, in 2024, Pakistan and Iran were at a standoff themselves after Iran launched missiles at Pakistani territory. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden froze out former Prime Minister Imran Khan, famously never even talking to him. But cooler heads prevailed with Iran, and Mr. Trump’s trust came after an Islamabad charm offensive that included nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
As a result, Pakistan is at a unique moment in its history. “Perhaps for the first time, Pakistan has diplomatically placed itself in such a way that such strong adversaries trust it as the common denominator,” says Pakistani politician Syed Naveed Qamar. “This has never happened before.”
That makes Pakistan crucial to the U.S. administration. “Trump had no other option except for Pakistan to work this out,” says Yaqoob Khan Bangash, a foreign policy expert at the Institute of Business Administration in Karachi.
The negotiations, which are expected to start Saturday morning, will be led on the U.S. side by Vice President JD Vance and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff. The list of issues they need to tackle is long and complex, including Iran’s nuclear program, its ballistic missile arsenal, its use of militant groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, and its control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Ending the fighting
One deal Mr. Vance and Mr. Witkoff might seek to model is the Gaza peace plan. There, the emphasis was on simply stopping the fighting. That deal’s longer-term aims have, so far, gone unfulfilled. “They’ve not gotten much buy-in on the back end, such as rebuilding and troop commitments,” says Laurel Rapp, a U.S. expert at Chatham House, a security think tank in London.
That is part of a pattern, she says, pointing to the Trump administration’s pledge last summer to do 90 trade deals in 90 days. “The reality is that the arrangements are very flimsy and difficult to implement,” she says. “They are only half negotiated, so they are not operative.”
The clear advantage of going it alone is in speed and freedom. Washington can avoid the complications of dealing with multiple countries simultaneously. During the current two-week ceasefire, the Islamabad negotiators could come up with something that brings the fighting to a more permanent stop, but the challenges would then come in how to address the causes and effects of the conflict.
On opening the Strait of Hormuz, for example, Europe is likely to help. But it has set clear guidelines to ensure it is not seen as contributing to the American war effort.
“Given U.S. dominance and leverage over European allies, it can cajole and coerce if its partners are not on board,” says Ole Jacob Sending, a geopolitical expert at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo. “But it won’t have the same credibility if it’s solely based on pressure.”
Iran is coming to these talks with a lot of leverage, Dr. Sending notes, and one way to counter that would be the enthusiastic buy-in of other states.
“If you want the long-term effects, the best way is to get other actors on board,” he says.
Less restrained – and less effective?
The Iran nuclear deal – agreed to during Barack Obama’s presidency – took multiple years to negotiate, but it involved even Russia and China, giving confidence that Iran couldn’t cheat by finding workarounds.
Such agreements aren’t perfect. From Vietnam to the Iraq War, America has long chafed at having to build coalitions and follow international laws. Mr. Trump “wants to free the U.S. from these constraints to costly and unreliable allies,” says Dr. Lesser of the German Marshall Fund.
But he has also gone a crucial step further. He is not only acting almost entirely alone, he is also simultaneously undermining the mutually agreed-upon structures for global security, from the United Nations to NATO.
“Under the old order, such wars would be regionally destructive, but within an order where the U.S. was the unchallenged leader,” says Dr. Lesser. “The system now is less stable.”
The Trump administration’s threats to leave NATO, attack Greenland, and abandon Ukraine have all contributed to Europe’s largest postwar defense expenditures. The Iran war is now convincing Gulf states that they need to do the same to protect themselves.
The trend points in a clear direction, adds Dr. Lesser: “If you want to feel safe, you need to have nuclear weapons.”
Ms. Rapp of Chatham House can imagine a scenario in which U.S. negotiators in Pakistan will have to craft their own version of the Iran nuclear deal.
Given the costs of the war and the fact that such a mechanism was already in place, however, Mr. Trump, she says, “will have a higher political hill to climb to say he got a better deal than Obama did.”