The difficulty of finding a path toward ending the war with Iran should not dissuade us from looking for one. In terms of the goals the Trump administration set out for the attack, there is little reason to continue the conflict. At the same time, the political and, in particular, economic costs of the conflict have grown. President Donald Trump’s Truth Social post on Monday, combined with media reports, indicates some interest in ending the war on his part, but a serious diplomatic push would take several weeks at least. This article sketches a framework for ending the war. It is, by its nature, a simplification, and will elide important details. But the place to start is at the beginning.
On March 2, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth laid out four goals for the U.S. military campaign: preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, destroying Iran’s navy, destroying its ballistic missile arsenal, and destroying its ability to produce ballistic missiles. By any measure, and whatever one thinks of the goals, all four have been achieved. Iran remains a long way from a nuclear weapons capability; its navy and its ballistic missile arsenal have been severely degraded; and in the words of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Iran has “no ability to produce ballistic missiles.”
At the same time, the costs of the conflict have piled up. On the campaign trail, Trump promised to slash energy prices by “at least half.” Since the conflict began, oil prices have skyrocketed by roughly 50 percent. The disruptions to the liquefied natural gas market have been similar. Moreover, the damage cannot be undone in the short term. Supplies of oil and natural gas cannot be turned back on like a light switch. A recent Economist assessment judged that even if the war ended today, “energy markets will be living with the war’s fallout well into northern winter.”
The logic of the war at present offers a stark choice: either expand the mission to regime change—which will entail the use of large numbers of ground troops for an extended period of time—or else pocket the tactical gains achieved today and pursue an off-ramp. In light of the costs and with the war’s stated goals secure, Trump should work to end the conflict and reestablish the stable flow of oil and natural gas onto world markets, shoring up the U.S. and global economies.
Caution is called for: However hard the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program were, talks to end the war are likely to be harder. Both sides will need to ignore things they want, stop doing things they want to keep doing, and restrain potential spoilers.
The Israeli strike on the South Pars gas field, and the Iranians hitting Qatari gas in response, show that when both sides peer into the abyss, they can take a step back together. Trump denied knowing that Israel was attacking the gas field (although Israel says it informed him) and assured Iran publicly that it would not happen again, but said that if Iran struck the Qatari gas again, the United States would destroy the entire field itself. At this time of writing, both sides have refrained from running these plays again.
The first move of a diplomatic push to end the war would aim at dealing with the other side’s greatest fears. For now, Iran’s is that the United States is pursuing regime change, or that Israel is and Washington cannot or will not restrain it. Accordingly, Trump could announce publicly that the United States is not seeking regime change in Iran, and that targeting of Iranian leadership will cease immediately. The main goal would be to commit the United States to this position publicly, both limiting its own efforts as well as making clear to Netanyahu that the United States would oppose continued efforts at regime change.
In exchange for this, Iran would commit not to leave the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty for five years. This would be relatively easy for Iran to do, since Iran’s 60 percent enriched uranium is mostly underground at this point. Further, bringing the discussion back to the Iranian nuclear program puts the most important—and most tractable—issue back at the center of the discussion. The United States would not have targeted Iran’s navy or missiles in the first place without the nuclear issue as the animating problem.
With the first stage having taken up smaller issues and established a thin reed of trust, the second phase could move on to much more consequential ones: getting the Gulf’s energy out of the Middle East and onto world markets, and ending the conflict altogether. Here third parties could play a useful role. In particular, Indian foreign minister S. Jaishankar is trusted as a neutral intermediary, telling the Financial Times last week that his own diplomacy getting two Indian-flagged tankers out of the Gulf had “yielded some results” and that “India and Iran have a relationship. And this is a conflict that we regard as something very unfortunate.” Since India would be unlikely to get involved in diplomacy if it doubted Washington’s interest in ending the war, its involvement should help signal to Tehran that the United States is serious about ending the war.
In this second phase, the Trump administration could follow through on a policy it has already dallied with: the relaxation of sanctions on Iranian oil. Iran desires this because it would remove or diminish the discount at which Iran has been forced to sell its oil under sanctions. The president could do this without congressional interference because current politics make Congress unlikely to assert itself. Because the lever would be sanctions enforcement, rather than the removal of sanctions, Congress’s jurisdiction is already limited—current sanctions laws dealing with Iran give the president broad latitude in imposing and enforcing sanctions. Moving alongside a gradual relaxation of sanctions, India would lead discussions on reopening the Strait of Hormuz, with the two axes moving in tandem.
Here, and moving to the final round of negotiations concerning security in the region more broadly, the Trump administration should also consider the good offices of Oman, which hosted the nuclear negotiations and whose foreign minister recently asked a pertinent rhetorical question: “The question for friends of America is simple. What can we do to extricate the superpower from this unwanted entanglement?” From an American point of view, the question should be broadened even further: What can the Trump administration do to extricate the United States from the region entirely?
The move from the second to the third round of issues would be the trickiest, because the issues involved are larger and more difficult to solve—questions about the broader security order in the region. If the United States could end the war at all, something that would happen in the second stage, that itself would be an accomplishment, and would open the door to a broader slate of policy options.
The main spoilers are Netanyahu, the Iranian regime itself, and parts of the Iranian regime that may not obey orders from Tehran, whatever is agreed to via diplomacy. The war has weakened the Iranian state and its command and control of its own forces. It is not difficult to imagine rogue actors improvising in the field, even disobeying their commanders. Washington announcing it was not pursuing regime change should marginally help with this problem, because it would diminish some ambiguity about who was likely to be in command in the future. But the prospect of rogue or semi-rogue actors violating an agreement is a real one, and should be expected.
The Iranian regime itself is also a major potential spoiler. The scale of the attacks thus far on Iran, and the damage they have done, are influencing Iranian decisionmaking. News reports have suggested that in addition to his father, airstrikes on Iran killed the new supreme leader’s wife and at least one of his children. Further, Iran has been bombed twice in the span of less than a year during negotiations over its nuclear program. Iran is likely to approach negotiations with the United States like the mouse would approach negotiations with the cat. Tehran probably believes the regime’s survival is at stake, and that it needs to inflict more pain on the United States and its regional partners in order to buy back any prospect of deterrence. Trust will be scarce to nonexistent, and Iran’s demands up front are likely to be very high.
Netanyahu is a final spoiler. In comments Monday, Trump announced there were talks underway with Iran, but he couldn’t name the U.S. government’s interlocutor “because I don’t want him to be killed.” Although the reference could have been to hardliners in Tehran, it could just as well have been to the Israelis, who have relentlessly killed members of the Iranian leadership, including people who would have been central to any U.S.–Iran negotiations, like Ali Larijani. Netanyahu has been a passionate advocate of regime change in Iran and an opponent of diplomacy with the Islamic Republic for decades. The war likely has raised his hope for regime change further. Distinguishing American war aims from those of Israel, a U.S. official made clear that “regime change is one of theirs.”
Still, Trump has shown an ability to constrain Netanyahu in the past. At the conclusion of the 12-Day War last year, Trump famously announced on social media that another wave of Israeli attacks would not be forthcoming, because “all planes will turn around and head home… the Ceasefire is in effect!” Trump has successfully pressured Netanyahu on matters closer to home as well, including the Gaza ceasefire, formal annexation of parts of the West Bank, and other issues. It can be done. Trump could easily argue that Iran has been eliminated as a serious threat to Israel for the coming years, and that Netanyahu should support U.S. diplomacy or risk losing U.S. support in short order.
Ending this conflict will be difficult, and there will be twists and turns along the way. A business analogy may be apt: Trump’s various companies have declared bankruptcy a number of times. This was mostly an attack line during the presidential debates, but Trump’s response made sense:
I take advantage of the laws of the nation because I’m running a company. My obligation right now is to do well for myself, my family, my employees, for my companies. And that’s what I do.
As president, Trump’s obligation is to pursue the national interest of the United States. And just as a businessman uses all the tools available to him, a statesman should use all the tools available to him, including painful, serious diplomacy. Diplomacy is a political instrument just as much as military power is. And as Carl von Clausewitz admonished us to remember, “the political view is the object, war is the means, and the means must always include the object in our conception.”
The rough outline of a plan above is a simplification of reality, but should serve as a framework for finding a way out of the conflict. Those who disagree with its proposals should feel free to offer their own.
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