Last weekend, President Donald Trump vowed that he would carry out huge strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure, in a threat meant to get Iran’s government to open up the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s closure of the strait was one of the most geopolitically significant developments in a war that began last month with U.S. and Israeli strikes against Iran, and has caused chaos in the region and in the world economy. In recent days, however, Trump has seemingly searched for ways to de-escalate the conflict, promising to postpone the strikes while Iran and the U.S. consider ceasefire negotiations.

I recently spoke by phone with Ali Vaez, the director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what concessions Iran would want in any negotiations to end the war, whether the U.S. and Israel have the same objectives in Iran, and why an off-ramp—let alone a permanent peace—may be so hard to find.

From the perspective of the Iranian regime and its new leadership, what do you think their interests are in any potential deal to end the war with the United States and Israel?

Look, the primary objective in any negotiation would be a deal that would insure the Islamic Republic’s survival. That has several requirements. One is, of course, that the hostilities against Iran would stop and that they would not start again—because Iran doesn’t want to end up being another country, like Lebanon or Gaza or Syria, that Israel or the United States can decide to bomb at will. This concept of the U.S. or Israel scheduling a Google Calendar reminder to bomb Iran every six months is not a situation that the Islamic Republic can tolerate, or believes that it would be able to survive, in the medium to long run. So the primary objective is to basically create the conditions under which Israel and the United States are deterred from committing an act of aggression against Iran ever again.

But, at this point, just that is not enough, because Iran has been living with economic warfare against it for several decades. And, after this war, it would have to reconstruct in order to survive. And this is why it would need economic incentives that are real, not just promised and never delivered. So it also needs some sort of arrangement in which it would be able to secure economic reprieve. And that means that if the hot war ends, but Iran ends up in another cold war, that would be as fatal to the regime as the continuation of the hot war. And this is why Iran will impose difficult conditions for accepting a ceasefire.

I have heard you say in the past that there were some ways in which the heavy sanctions on Iran, the economic warfare that you’re talking about, were beneficial to members of the regime and that the people who thought those sanctions would bring the government down were misguided. But now you seem to be saying that you think it’s important for the economic warfare against Iran to stop, not just for the welfare of the Iranian people, obviously, who’ve been suffering under sanctions, but for the regime itself. Why is that?

So these are different issues. Before the war, when the regime was able to govern, even ineffectively or with a lot of mismanagement and corruption, it could still keep the economy afloat. And, yes, there were regime élites who were benefitting from sanctions and were being enriched, and they were secure in their position because they had enough to sustain their power. But, if you look at what happened to the Assad regime, at a certain point Bashar al-Assad couldn’t even afford to pay his security forces anymore. And this war has basically rendered Iran ungovernable unless it can undergo serious reconstruction. This isn’t just about sanctions relief. The Iranian regime needs money for reconstruction. It’s really as simple as that. There is no agreement in which it would accept American promises because it’s been burned by the U.S. too many times. And, in the absence of sanctions relief, the regime knows it would die on the vine.

So you’re saying that Iran needs some real guarantees. What do you think the Americans might plausibly offer now?

I think at this moment, the two sides’ positions are too divergent to be amenable to an agreement. The American demands are as maximalist as they have been throughout the Trump Administration, both in the first term and in the past year or so. And the Iranian position has now hardened. So the U.S. wants Iran to completely dismantle its nuclear program and abandon any ambition of doing enrichment on its soil ever again. It also wants Iran’s enriched uranium to be accounted for and handed over to the International Atomic Energy Agency. It also wants Iran to stop supporting its partners and proxies in the region, and eventually also accept limits on its ballistic-missile program. These are all conditions that Iran has refused to accept in the past, and now Iran believes that it’s in a position of strength, and it has even less incentive to accept those conditions.

Iranians, in return, are asking the U.S. for reparations. They may ask for recognition of the right to enrichment, and they want not a ceasefire but an end to the war—not just against themselves but also against Hezbollah in Lebanon. They want an arrangement for the control of the Strait of Hormuz that would allow them to charge transit fees. And they also want guarantees that the U.S. and Israel would not attack them again. So you put these two sets of conditions from both sides together, and we’re nowhere close to any kind of understanding, which means that the parties have only two options. Those are either to continue apace or to escalate. Continuation of this conflict—I don’t think it’s realistically possible without escalation because, at a certain point, in order to inflict more pain on each other, the two sides would have to cross new red lines, and that means escalation. And escalation is going to increase the risks of this conflict.

For the United States, there are only two possibilities in terms of escalation. One is a ground invasion of a Persian Gulf island or the southern shore of Iran, which could result in a very high number of American casualties, and obviously would deepen the conflict and make it even more complicated to solve. And the other option is to target Iranian energy infrastructure, which could result in Iran retaliating against the Gulf states and torching the entire regional infrastructure.

Which is perhaps why Trump backed down a little bit from his recent threat of targeting Iranian power plants, because he came to the conclusion that that would be the type of escalation he might not want right now, right?

Yeah, correct.

When you laid out what the Americans want, listing things like limits on Iranian uranium enrichment and an end to support for proxies in the region, and so on and so forth, that struck me as what someone at an American think tank would want. I don’t mean that as a criticism exactly. It’s not clear to me that that’s what Donald Trump cares about. I don’t think he is staying up late at night because Iran is funding Hezbollah in Lebanon. So I do wonder if there’s a way to make a deal here that does not fulfill the American demands but does fulfill Trump’s demands. I assume his demands right now are, one, to not look foolish and, two, to get the strait open so that the world economy can get back on its axis.

No, you’re absolutely right. If it were up to Trump, I think he would accept a less-than-ideal agreement, but he has repeatedly demonstrated, and this is not a new phenomenon, that he lets negotiations be conducted by people who believe in those maximum estimates. What Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have reportedly put on the table is almost a mirror image of Mike Pompeo’s twelve demands in Trump’s first term in office. And these are basically Israeli demands. So I don’t think Trump is acting independently here. These are a set of demands that have been in the circles that are close to him for many years, and they have become a kind of orthodoxy that I don’t think he can abandon, even if he doesn’t personally believe in them. So he’s stuck with them.

And now the problem, even if Trump wants to step aside from the maximalism of the current demands—the Iranians have demands that will be very difficult for him to meet. So I have a hard time really seeing how we can get to a diplomatic agreement anytime soon.

What role are America’s allies in the region, other than Israel, playing here? There’s been reporting in the past few days that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has been encouraging Trump to continue the war.

I don’t think there is a single view among U.S. allies in the Gulf. There are a range of perspectives. There are those, like Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait, who would be happy with this war stopping immediately and some sort of mutually beneficial solution being presented. But for Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia I think the situation is different. They do not want this war to end with an Iran that can still project power beyond its borders and threaten their interests again by controlling the strait. The problem is that they don’t have a clear concept of what defanging Iran really means because Iran is threatening these countries by basically firing drones and missiles toward them. And, as we have seen in the war in Ukraine, in order to completely destroy Iran’s ability to produce these cheap drones, which can be made easily in any basement, the U.S. would basically have to invade the entire country, which is just not on the cards. And, as we have seen in the case of Yemen, you can completely destroy a country’s infrastructure, its economy, and you still can’t stem its ability to produce projectiles that could disrupt the Gulf’s economy.

So this is why I think that all the Gulf countries want Iran weakened, but I don’t think the ones who want Iran vanquished have a clear definition of what vanquished really means. And if the U.S. is to go all the way, go for broke, and dismantle the Iranian state or turn it into a failed state, the Gulf countries would be the ones who would then be paying for the consequences. They would have a giant failed state of some ninety-three million people right next door to them, which would cast a shadow over all the prosperity plans that they have been planning for the next generation.

I think the Gulf states are just angry because they didn’t expect Iran to target them. They thought that the degree of détente that they had engaged in over the past few years was sufficient to deter Iran from attacking them. And now that it has happened they don’t have a clear strategy for how to bring this to some sort of soft landing. Other countries have experienced similar situations, like Germany in Europe and Japan in East Asia after 1945. But in those cases there was the total defeat of a state that had hegemonic ambitions, and then there was reintegration. In this case, it’s very hard to imagine either of those scenarios. As I said, totally defeating the Islamic Republic would require the kind of investment in blood and treasure that America is unlikely to have the appetite for. And reintegration is also something that there is no plan for in the region. So this is why I’m saying that the way this is going it is just going to create a more dangerous region, not a region in which the Gulf countries can go back to business as usual.

What you have laid out seems bad for the Gulf and the world and the people of Iran, but it doesn’t completely contradict something that we’ve read about in terms of Israel’s aims, which is that a weakened or unstable Iran may actually be what the Netanyahu government prefers. And it does suggest to me that Israel may then have some interest in keeping this war going for a long time. Which means, if Trump is going to come to any sort of deal with the Iranians, he needs to make a real effort to rein in the Israelis.

Yeah. So whenever Trump decides to stop the war Israel has no choice but to fall in line. The problem is that there is no unilateral ceasefire that Trump can impose because the Iranians agreed to a ceasefire last time, and in their view it only invited another aggression.

After the Twelve-Day War?

Yeah, exactly. And so that option of Trump getting tired of this and leaving is just not possible because the Iranians will keep fighting. And then it’s a question of whether Trump would be able to end this war without opening the strait, because now I think the goalposts have moved in a way that the conflict is no longer really about degrading Iran’s military capabilities or decapitating the system or destroying its infrastructure. It’s really about reopening the strait. And, again, that is not possible without escalation and continuation of this war.

You are right that not reopening the strait is something that Israel is comfortable with because it doesn’t need to necessarily deal with the consequences of it. If Iran and the Gulf states destroy one another’s sources of wealth, if Iran turns into another failed state, if there’s chaos throughout the region, Israel would reign over all of it in a militarized fortress.

And so I think Israel is totally fine with it, but Trump, at this point, even if he wants to come down off the high horse and put aside some of the maximalist demands of Israel, would still have to make concessions to the Iranians that would be very uncomfortable for him, I think, at a personal level. And this is why I think that, although Israel did start this war and dragged the U.S. into it, ending it is really no longer dependent on Israel. It’s dependent on Iran and Trump. And, as I said, those two have positions that are totally incompatible at this moment.

Can you say more about your belief that Netanyahu dragged Trump into the war? Netanyahu needs Trump for his reëlection campaign. He needs Trump to keep pressuring the Israeli President to pardon him. Trump could have said no to the war. And as you were saying, if Trump wants to call this off, he can get Bibi to call it off. So, if Israel dragged Trump into this, it’s only because Trump seemed unwilling to use the power that he had, no?

I agree with that. I’m not saying that he didn’t know what he was doing. I’m just saying that I think Trump believed some of the things that we now know Bibi told him before the war, including the idea that the regime was so brittle that killing the Supreme Leader would result in people coming to the streets again and taking over government institutions. And, yes, Trump made the decision to go in. Israel didn’t make that decision for him, but I don’t think we can ignore that Israel created a context for him to believe this would be an easy undertaking.

I think the success of the Venezuela operation probably played into that a little bit, too. I don’t know if Trump would have done this the same way if Venezuela had gone off the rails.

Yeah. Look, there are a lot of other factors as well, including Iran’s reaction to Qasem Soleimani’s killing, and Iran’s reaction to the U.S. bombing of Iran during the Twelve-Day War. After those successful operations, Trump had concluded that war with Iran is cost-free, and changing that perception is precisely the objective of the Iranians in this war. And I think they have managed to achieve that, maybe not fully but to a certain extent. And the question at the end of the day is: Who’s going to blink first?

Some of the things that Trump is saying, honestly, don’t make sense to me. I no longer really understand what he’s trying to do, but to my knowledge there are no serious talks between the U.S. and Iran, and the Iranians would not engage in high-level meetings with the U.S. until and unless they know that he’s going to make major concessions to them. And again, at this moment, I don’t see any evidence of it. ♦