Why the US-Iran ceasefire is no path to peace

The two-week ceasefire between the United States, Israel, and Iran has already been publicly framed as a step toward de-escalation and a diplomatic opening. In reality, it is better understood as an improvised pause after six weeks of war, which failed to force Iranian capitulation but succeeded in turning the Strait of Hormuz into the conflict’s true centre of gravity.

Washington may present the truce as evidence that pressure worked. But the ceasefire emerged because escalation had become too costly to sustain for the US, while, from Tehran’s perspective, the pause also appeared to register Iran’s new leverage through the Strait of Hormuz.

When pressure failed

The opening logic of the war was clear enough. The US and Israel wagered that sustained bombardment and the decapitation of Iran’s leadership would force Tehran into surrender on terms set by Trump.

The aim was not simply to degrade Iran militarily, but to make continued resistance politically untenable. But Iran neither collapsed nor capitulated. Instead, Tehran shifted the centre of gravity of the conflict by demonstrating its capacity to impose wider regional and global costs beyond the battlefield.

Once the confrontation spilt into the arteries of global trade and energy, Washington’s problem was no longer simply how to intensify pressure on Iran. It was how to avoid a wider economic and regional crisis that would hit its allies, unsettle markets, and expose the absence of any credible political endgame.

This is where Hormuz became decisive. Around a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas trade passes through the strait, and during the war, maritime traffic through it fell sharply. Even after the ceasefire, major shipping companies remained cautious, vessels still required Iranian coordination to pass, and full normalisation looked more likely to take weeks than days.

The truce, then, did not restore the status quo ante. It created only a narrow and conditional space in which the world economy might begin to breathe again. That, in turn, helps explain the ceasefire’s real function: Washington’s immediate objective had narrowed from compelling surrender to reopening a sea lane that had been open before the war began.

At the same time, from Tehran’s perspective, the centrality of Hormuz to the ceasefire indicated that the US could no longer ignore the leverage Iran had acquired through its capacity to threaten the strait.

This also explains why the diplomacy took the form it did. The White House pushed for a temporary truce and leaned on Pakistan to serve as the principal intermediary. Pakistan then worked frantically with Washington, Tehran, Saudi Arabia, and others to prevent the talks from collapsing.

What emerged was not a path to settlement grounded in even a minimal shared political horizon, let alone strategic clarity, but a fragile pause stitched together through crisis mediation as the costs of the war became harder for its architects to contain.

Why the ceasefire is fragile

Given this, the fragility of the ceasefire was visible almost immediately. The parties do not even agree on what the truce covers. Iran and Pakistan have insisted that Lebanon is part of the arrangement. The United States and Israel have said otherwise.

Israel’s strikes on Beirut within hours of the announcement exposed that contradiction in the starkest possible way. So too did the responses from Tehran and from some European governments, insisting that Lebanon must be included if any ceasefire is to have credibility. A truce cannot hold for long when its most basic terms are disputed from the outset. Here, ambiguity was not a flaw in implementation. It was built into the agreement from the start.

Nor is there any meaningful convergence on the substance of a longer-term deal. The two sides remain far apart even on the basic framework for negotiations. Iran’s proposal and Washington’s demands are not separated by bargaining theatre alone, but by fundamentally incompatible political aims.

The US continues to press maximalist demands on enrichment, missiles, and regional alliances. Iran, for its part, is seeking to preserve enrichment rights, defend its regional posture, and convert its wartime leverage in Hormuz into political capital at the negotiating table. These are not minor differences that diplomacy can easily bridge. The outcome of the weekend negotiations in Islamabad made that clear once again.

While the ceasefire may create space for negotiations, the gap between the two sides remains too wide for it to open a credible path to peace by itself.

There is another difficulty as well. Even where Washington and Tel Aviv remain broadly aligned strategically, they are not necessarily aligned tactically. Reuters has reported that Israel initially opposed the truce and preferred continued military pressure before ultimately deferring to Washington. That does not indicate a rupture between the two. It points to something narrower but still significant: the US needed a pause from a spiralling regional and economic crisis, while Israel appears more willing to continue escalation, especially through Lebanon, in pursuit of a broader doctrine of permanent pressure.

That divergence in method alone makes the truce vulnerable. A ceasefire can survive mutual hostility. It struggles to survive when one of the principal military actors sees escalation itself as the preferred instrument.

A pause

The ceasefire is best understood not as the beginning of peace, but as an arrangement each side entered for different reasons. The US did not get the capitulation it sought. Iran, meanwhile, appears to have accepted the pause because, from Tehran’s perspective, it reflected a tacit American acknowledgement of Iran’s new leverage through the Strait of Hormuz.

Even indirect recognition of that fact may, in Tehran’s view, have been enough to make a temporary ceasefire worthwhile. The pause reflected a new strategic reality: Washington could not easily press on, while Tehran believed it had leverage to carry into the next phase.

Trump’s order for a new naval blockade of Iran after the collapse of the Islamabad talks does not resolve the problem that forced Washington into a pause in the first place; it reproduces it by raising the economic costs of the conflict for US allies and the wider global economy.

That is also why the likelihood of renewed war remains high. The underlying structure has not changed: contested terms, disputed geography, incompatible war aims, and a regional theatre in which Lebanon and the Gulf states remain exposed to decisions made elsewhere.

The most sobering reading of the moment is also the simplest. This is not what a path to peace looks like. It is what an improvised pause looks like when a war fails to secure capitulation but succeeds in making the cost of continuing dangerously high.

Kayhan Valadbaygi is a Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam and CEO of Middle East Risk & Reform Advisory.

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.