Over the weekend, the United States and Iran failed to come to an agreement in Pakistan to end their war. At first glance, the two sides are miles apart. The United States wants the Strait of Hormuz to reopen, significant restrictions on the Iranian nuclear program, and limitations on Iran’s missile arsenal and support for proxies such as the Lebanese militia Hezbollah. Iran, for its part, wants to monetize its control of the strait, full sanctions relief (including the release of frozen assets), a cease-fire in Lebanon, and most important, lasting assurances that the United States and Israel will not resume their war against Iran.

The talks took on an extraordinary sense of urgency, in part, because Iran has discovered a new trump card: its ability to effectively close the Strait of Hormuz. In fact, doing so has worked so well in creating leverage that on April 13, Trump began his own blockade, vowing to prevent any ships engaging with Iranian ports from entering or leaving the strait. The success of Trump’s counter-blockade will be determined by whether Iran can endure more short-term economic pain than the United States.

As incongruous as the U.S. and Iranian positions appear, it is in the interest of both parties to end the war. The United States has inflicted carnage on the global economy for minimal gain. Meanwhile, Iran’s military and civilian infrastructure have been severely degraded, thousands of Iranians have been killed, and Iran has sacrificed its relationships with Gulf neighbors to survive the U.S.-Israeli onslaught.

As Washington and Tehran enter a new, perilous phase of the conflict, the United States will have to contend with an evolving Iranian regime. As resilient as it has been so far, it faces systemic problems and is in the early stages of a transition. The fate of U.S.-Iranian negotiations, then, will rest on how Trump navigates Iran’s domestic political changes and whether his perception of what is achievable corresponds with Iran’s reality. In the short term, Trump needs to be tactically nimble, ending the war while conceding as little as possible to keep the Strait of Hormuz open. In the long term, however, he needs a coherent strategy—something that he failed to develop before starting the war.

BATTLE OF THE BRIDGE TROLLS

The paradoxical and likely enduring legacy of this war is that Iran was militarily pummeled yet also reestablished deterrence. For the last several decades, Iran’s security architecture largely consisted of three distinct pillars: its missile program, the latent ability to build a nuclear weapon, and support for non-state and terrorist proxies, such as Hamas and Hezbollah. In the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack, Israel, with support of the United States systematically targeted those pillars. Israel decimated Hamas and Hezbollah and, along with the United States, buried much of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure in June 2025. When Israel and the United States attacked Iran on February 28, 2026, it seemed like Iran’s missile program was the last available mechanism for deterrence or retaliation.

What this latest round of........

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