Should Trump just end the Iran War without a deal?

Last week, there were genuine signs that the United States and Iran might be edging toward an agreement to formalize the ceasefire that has tenuously held since April 7. Then, the U.S. launched a new round of attacks on Iran and the week ended with the White House saying there would be no final determination on an agreement.

Talks last June and then in February collapsed when Israel and the U.S. launched attacks against Iran, a move that critics argue was aimed at disrupting ongoing diplomatic efforts. In April, within hours of a U.S. delegation leaving talks in Islamabad, Trump announced a counter-blockade in the Strait of Hormuz. Then, when a diplomatic solution seemed near last week, pro-war voices in the media and think tanks began to openly criticize it, and Trump responded by launching new attacks.

This familiar cycle — progress on talks met with outrage from hawkish voices, followed by further escalation — has led some anti-war voices to wonder whether the pursuit of a comprehensive agreement risks making things worse. If every moment of diplomatic progress triggers a hawkish freakout, and those who oppose diplomacy will never find any agreement satisfactory, then forcing the war to end in a broad negotiation may be handing the war's architects the leverage they want.

With an agreement once again seemingly close, the upshot for some restrainers is that Trump should either strike a narrow deal or simply walk away.

“I don't want to hear [Trump] say, ‘It's either a deal or we go back to war.’ Because that framing redounds to the benefit of the Iran hawks,” Andrew Day, senior editor at the American Conservative magazine, told Responsible Statecraft.

“The pro-Israeli Iran hawks get very agitated during diplomacy. So whenever Trump seems to be making progress, they freak out. They criticize him, they ramp up the pressure. They push for unreasonable demands,” Day added, saying that this cycle has recently led to the U.S. inserting poison pills into the negotiations.

As a result, Day tells RS, “continuing with diplomacy makes a war more likely,” so the U.S. should simply end the military conflict without a larger agreement that includes addressing the nuclear issue or, as Trump has suggested more recently, expanding the Abraham Accords.

Day and other skeptics of continued diplomacy do not rule out a more narrow deal that could formalize the ceasefire, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and provide some sanctions relief to the Iranians. But they say that pushing for another round of talks aimed at solving bigger questions beyond the current war could distract from the more immediate issue.

“Trying to get a settlement now that includes anything on nuclear weapons is a huge impediment to just getting the war over with,” Ben Friedman, policy director at Defense Priorities, told RS. “We don't need any deal at all. I think that's the underrated option.”

Others see the current moment, with both sides economically damaged and perhaps cognizant of both the limits and consequences of war, as the kind of opening that makes a larger deal possible. They argue that walking away from that opportunity without a comprehensive agreement simply delays future military confrontations.

This group emphasizes that a smaller, cleaner exit isn’t necessarily stable, either. It’s true that, in the years before and after the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Washington and Tehran managed to reduce tensions without resolving their underlying antagonism, and without going to war. But that era is over, according to Trita Parsi, the executive vice president at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. As he told RS, a “small deal” would simply punt on major issues while doing little to prevent a new round of escalation.

Parsi agrees that any effort to make a resumption of war less likely will face intense pushback from Iran hawks in Trump’s orbit and in Israel, who will not see any kind of agreement with Tehran as satisfactory. But he contends that “[Trump] is going to be more inclined to break with them if there is a big deal on the table that really fits his persona and his desire to do big historic things.”

Reaching any kind of comprehensive agreement will certainly not be easy. For one, both supporters and skeptics of pursuing further talks with Iran note that any momentum toward ending the war could be complicated by Israel playing spoiler and would require Trump to be willing to meaningfully break with Israeli war aims.

In addition, the gaps on the nuclear file remain wide, and the domestic politics on both sides complicate compromise. Vali Nasr, a professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins, says a deal between the U.S. and Iran is “eminently possible” in theory, but he hasn’t seen Trump display any real appetite for dealmaking in this situation.

“Since the war has started, he has still asserted maximal goals while offering minimal returns,” Nasr told RS. “He's essentially demanding that Iran surrender at the nuclear front. And Iran is balking at that. A serious attempt at a negotiated diplomatic negotiation means a serious attempt at diplomatic negotiation, not essentially insisting on surrender.”

Iran's performance in the conflict, including the regime’s ability to close the strait and inflict global economic pain, means that Iran may now believe that it has more reason to hold out for better terms in any future negotiations. A history of unpleasant diplomatic experiences with Trump, dating from his unilateral withdrawal from the original nuclear deal through the surprise attacks in February, could also make Iran wary of any agreement.

“It seems like there's almost insurmountable trust problems that will hang over any kind of deal,” says Friedman.

That trust deficit is compounded by different factions in the U.S. government pushing for different outcomes, and the lack of a clearly articulated strategy since the start of the war, adds Sumantra Maitra, director of research and outreach at the American Ideas Institute.

“There is no coherence in their thought process. If I was an Iranian, and I was negotiating with the U.S. administration, I'd listen to American negotiators, and I don't really know what they want and what they even know about the nuclear [issue],” he told RS. “For the Iranians to trust any American guarantee is difficult.”

Nasr agrees that trust may be the largest variable blocking any successful negotiation. He says that a step-by-step process of trust-building measures, such as both sides removing their respective blockades of the Strait of Hormuz or the United States beginning to remove some of its troops from the region, could open the door for a larger agreement.

Events from the past few weeks have shown that building the necessary trust even for a smaller deal is not straightforward. But Parsi argues that getting to a bigger deal may not be as difficult as it seems.

Any agreement that ends the war and reopens the strait already requires a significant degree of trust between two parties that just fought each other. If that trust can be secured, it becomes the foundation for something more durable rather than just a pause. "We're already talking about a deal that is, at its minimum level, rather large," he says. "The additional trust that is needed to get to a more significant deal is not really that significant."