As the war with Iran rages on and gets more costly by the day, rumblings about a potential cease-fire have emerged from Washington. After threatening to bomb Iran’s power plants if it did not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. President Donald Trump climbed down from his moment of rage and agreed to a short grace period, now extended to April 6, to see whether a negotiated solution could be found. The Trump administration sent Iran a 15-point plan for a cease-fire via Pakistani intermediaries, the reported terms of which basically amount to asking for unconditional surrender.
This is not the first time that Trump has ordered attacks on Iran nor the first time he has tried to quickly wind down hostilities on his own terms. In June 2025, after 12 days of intense bombing of the country, Trump announced an immediate cease-fire. He claimed victory and said that the United States had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. That cease-fire required no genuine negotiations: Washington communicated to Tehran that it would stop bombing and would rein in Israel, and Iran agreed to stop shooting back.
But ending the current war is not going to be simple. Although Trump may think he can determine when this war stops, Washington is not dealing with the same type of conflict or the same type of leadership in Tehran that it did in June. Iran has already dismissed Trump’s 15-point plan and issued its own counterproposals. Now, unless both sides make concessions, the deadlock will continue, and the United States could even be drawn into a dangerous ground invasion—the prospect of which is growing as Washington deploys thousands of marines to the Middle East.
To end this mutually destructive war, America’s friends need to help it extricate itself before it is too late. The international community—and especially a mediating coalition led by countries that carry influence with both Trump and Tehran—must redouble its efforts to bring about an urgently needed cease-fire that, unlike the one announced in June, is seriously negotiated and can hold.
NO EASY OUT
When Trump ordered surgical strikes on Iran in June 2025, they were carried out over a short period of time and focused solely on depleting the country’s nuclear program. The message from Washington to Tehran was relatively clear: the White House was unwillingly pulled into the war by a surprise Israeli attack on Iran, and to end the conflict, Trump ordered U.S. bombers to destroy key Iranian nuclear sites. This was an in-and-out operation by the United States. Iran responded with a strike against the United States’ largest military base in the region, in Qatar, but it was carefully calibrated to avoid causing American fatalities and to preserve Tehran’s relationships with its neighbors.
But in this war, the United States and Israel have been working together from the start. In Trump’s initial announcement on February 28 that the attacks on Iran had begun, he encouraged Iranians to “take over” their government, suggesting that regime change was at least part of the goal. Faced with an existential threat, Iran’s response has been far more forceful. It has sent drones and missiles to attack targets inside Israel as well as military and civilian infrastructure in neighboring states. Most important, Iran has imposed a de facto blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by threatening and in some cases attacking ships in transit. These actions have triggered a surge in global energy prices, unleashed a regional war, choked vital economic gateways, and threatened to pull NATO countries such as Turkey directly into the conflict.
Iran is also expanding the number of actors fighting on its behalf. Unlike in the June war, it is using allied armed groups across the Middle East to escalate the war on multiple fronts. Iran is running joint operations in Lebanon with Hezbollah, which has demonstrated formidable ongoing capabilities despite Israel’s bombing campaigns and ground offensives. Iranian-backed armed resistance groups in Iraq are likely behind recent attacks on dissident Kurdish groups in the border region, with the apparent aim of deterring them from launching a land offensive inside Iran. And Iran may request that the Houthis in Yemen close the Bab el Mandeb Strait, an important maritime gateway between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden on which Saudi Arabia relies.
As the conflict expands to involve new actors with their own interests, a cease-fire will be increasingly difficult to impose and sustain. Even if Iran and the United States agreed to a truce that would stave off a global energy crisis and calm markets, the war in Lebanon is likely to continue as another theater in which Israel and Iran fight each other. A deepening war in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah could undercut any wider diplomatic process between Iran and the United States.
Unless both sides make concessions, the deadlock will continue.
The U.S. and Israeli killing spree of high-level Iranian officials also makes a cease-fire more challenging than it was in the June war. Although Israel has consistently hoped for regime change in Iran, this war has led to the rise of a more hard-line military and security elite in the Islamic Republic. The assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has elevated his son Mojtaba, who is closely aligned with parts of Iran’s security apparatus that take a more confrontational stance toward the United States. In his first two public statements since taking charge, he has been defiant and made no mention of ending the war. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a close ally of the new supreme leader and a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), announced recently on X, “We believe the aggressor must be punished and taught a lesson that will deter them from attacking Iran again.”
Israel’s assassination of Ali Larijani, Iran’s security chief, further reduces the likelihood of a quick cease-fire. Larijani was known for bridging the divide between political and military factions inside the system and advocated more moderate leadership and deal-making, albeit on tough terms, with the United States. He has been replaced by a far more hard-line IRGC ex-commander. Larijani could have been a crucial figure in reaching a deal with Trump, which may have played into Israel’s decision to target him as part of an effort to derail diplomacy.
Iran’s apparent logic is that it needs to wreak enough havoc to force Israel and the United States to conclude that it will not capitulate. Tehran is also wary of allowing its adversaries to regroup and rearm. Iranian leaders are thus likely to refuse a cease-fire akin to those in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, which allowed Israel to return and strike again. Unless an agreement provides Tehran with some security guarantees and economic incentives, it is likely to keep prolonging the conflict and drag Trump into a war of attrition.
GETTING TO YES
An emergent coalition of mediators led by Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey must mobilize to pressure Iran and the United States to expedite a cease-fire agreement. One pathway for doing so would be to leverage the shared global need to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and bring soaring energy prices under control. More than 30 countries have already stated a desire for measures that enable the freedom of navigation through the strait. The coalition should offer Trump full assistance in ensuring that the passage remains open—clearing mines, for example, and providing a naval escort for commercial ships—but only after a sustainable cease-fire is achieved.
This mediating coalition will also need to convince Tehran to significantly scale back attacks on its neighbors to pave the way for a cease-fire. The troika of countries at the head of the coalition can use their shared identity as Islamic-majority states to collectively press Iran’s leaders to cooperate. China, which purchases approximately 90 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports, could also leverage its economic weight to push Tehran to de-escalate. Beijing previously mediated a deal to improve relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and the prospect of a prolonged war could encourage it to reactivate its diplomatic efforts to help bring about a cease-fire.
The coalition should then press both Washington and Tehran to be realistic about the conditions they could set in an agreement to end the fighting. The White House is already making a mistake by tying cease-fire negotiations to a grand bargain. The U.S. proposal is reported to cover a wide array of issues, including zero nuclear enrichment, missile restrictions, and an end to Iran’s support for regional armed groups. But the detailed negotiations required to settle bigger disputes must unfold after the bombs stop falling, not as a precondition.
Tehran is wary of allowing its adversaries to regroup and rearm.
The United States must also acknowledge that a sustainable cease-fire requires a genuine negotiation process; it cannot be unilaterally imposed on maximalist terms. It is fantasy to think that Iran will agree to restrict its missile capability during a war in which such weapons have proven to be its main tool of retaliation. Tehran needs to be realistic in its demands, too. It must accept that it will need to fully remove military threats against traffic in the Strait of Hormuz and abandon demands for reparations for the ongoing war. Because Tehran has inflicted huge damage to civilian infrastructure in neighboring countries, it will likely find that those states demand to be compensated first. Iran will also be unable to force the United States to reduce its military presence or shut down its bases in the region; these are decisions to be made in Arab capitals, not in Washington.
A compromise, however, could include a withdrawal of the troops and warships that Washington has been massing on Iran’s doorstep since January. Iran is unlikely to trust any guarantee that the United States will not attack again, and Trump is in any case unlikely to provide one. But if other major powers, including China, Russia, and the European Union endorsed a cease-fire, it would add an element of credibility to the deal.
Tehran will also be looking for economic incentives to help it rebuild after the war. Although the United States is unlikely to offer major sanctions relief to Iran, it could provide some economic breathing room. Just as Trump permitted new waivers for the purchase of Iranian oil during the war to ease U.S. and global energy prices, Washington could continue doing so as part of a cease-fire to keep the peace. It could also permit Iran to access frozen assets abroad to reconstruct its energy sector through a special mechanism overseen by the U.S. Treasury. In his first term, Trump agreed to a similar mechanism in Switzerland to work around the unintended financial obstacles to humanitarian trade with Iran caused by U.S. sanctions.
The White House is making a mistake by tying cease-fire negotiations to a grand bargain.
A transit tax for ships traveling through the Strait of Hormuz may have to be part of an agreement, too. Iran has already begun to impose such fees, just as Egypt taxes traffic along the Suez Canal. The United States could consider allowing Oman and Iran (which jointly claim control of the Strait of Hormuz) to operate a formal tollbooth on the condition that the funds are placed in a special account earmarked for regional reconstruction of civilian sites damaged in this war.
A U.S. military withdrawal and the provision of economic incentives, along with the full reopening of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran, could be accomplished in phases to build confidence that both sides are upholding their end of the bargain. As a first step, Iran could create a humanitarian corridor to allow trapped ships and their crew members, as well as necessary goods such as food and fertilizer, to pass through the strait. The United Nations and the European Union are already supporting such an initiative.
Ultimately, a cease-fire needs to lead to longer-term negotiations between the United States and Iran. The mediating coalition must commit itself to securing a more lasting accord that would deny Iran a pathway to obtaining nuclear weapons and pave the way to ending the enmity between the two countries. In the last hours of their ill-fated negotiations in February, Tehran and Washington seemed to be on the verge of a political breakthrough. This process needs to be revived. Absent a diplomatic track to bring about a lasting nonaggression pact, a cease-fire would only serve as a reprieve before the United States got sucked into another war with Iran.
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