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Iran’s delegation to the first round of post-ceasefire talks with the US in Islamabad arrived on a plane named Minab 168 after the people – mostly young schoolgirls – killed in a US bombing early in the war. The name signalled both grievance and resolve, framing the talks as part of a conflict in which Tehran has already absorbed immense costs.
That framing helps explain how Iranian officials approached the talks and how they view the current impasse. Rather than negotiation from a position of weakness or urgency, they see diplomacy as an extension of a battle they believe they endured without losing their core advantages. With the ceasefire set to expire on Wednesday and no diplomatic breakthrough in sight, the risk of a return to war is sharply rising.
From the Iranian vantage point, military pressure did not break their position. Their main leverage remains: stockpiles of enriched uranium, the disruption of the strait of Hormuz and its global economic ramifications, and a wartime record of absorbing sustained US and Israeli strikes over more than 40 days while continuing to strike back across the region with missiles, drones, and allied forces in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen.
This stands in sharp contrast to prevailing assumptions in Washington, where the focus has been on how pressure might accelerate Iranian concessions. Iran, however, appears more willing to bide its time, hold on to its core leverage, and pursue a broader strategic settlement that links its development and prosperity to that of the Gulf and, by extension, the global economy.
That divergence reflects a deeper mismatch in how each side understands the trajectory of the conflict. For US policymakers, the central question is what combination of military and economic tools can compel movement on far-reaching demands, including curbs on Iran’s nuclear programme, missile capabilities and regional alliances. For Iranian decision-makers, the question is whether those demands require trading away what they see as core pillars of security.
That concern has only hardened in the aftermath of the war. More than ever, Iran’s ability to disrupt Hormuz, alongside its nuclear threshold capability, missiles and regional alliance network, are treated in Tehran not as negotiable assets but as foundational sources of power and security. In this view, US sanctions relief is reversible, while Iran relinquishing its leverage risks inviting more pressure, escalation and war. The aim, then, is less about what concessions Iran can offer than about securing recognition as a legitimate security actor in a reshaped regional order.
Kian Abdollahi, editor-in-chief of the Tasnim news agency, which is affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, framed Iran’s reading of the US approach in stark terms. “When we can go and fight a war with Iran and make it surrender, what need is there to negotiate?” he said, arguing that any agreement “contains a form of recognition” of the Islamic Republic, which Washington sought to avoid by achieving its aims through war.
In Abdollahi’s telling, Washington entered the war expecting military force to dismantle Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities, seize its enriched uranium stockpiles and either drive regime change or compel Tehran to accept its “unconditional surrender” terms outright. Negotiations, if they followed, would come only after Iran had been reduced to accepting those terms.
Recent signals from Washington have given Iranian officials little reason to think that assessment was wrong or has necessarily shifted. After the first round of talks in Islamabad failed to produce a deal, Donald Trump made it clear he was not seeking compromise. “I don’t want 90%, I don’t want 95%,” he said. “I want everything.”
Regardless, members of the Iranian delegation in Islamabad describe entering the talks from a position of perceived strength. In their view, the war failed to produce the decisive shift Washington had anticipated, instead reinforcing a belief that Iran can absorb nearly everything the US and Israel can throw at it short of a ground invasion, while preserving its core leverage – and that any agreement must reflect that balance rather than overturn it.
What kind of deal Iran may be willing to accept remains unclear. Securing recognition of what it sees as its right under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to enrich uranium has long been a central red line and there is little indication Tehran is prepared to relinquish it. At most, it may accept a de facto moratorium for several years as it rebuilds its nuclear infrastructure, potentially alongside a regional consortium model to produce nuclear fuel in Iran for itself and neighbouring countries.
In this context, Majid Shakeri, an adviser to parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who led the Iranian delegation in the Islamabad talks, described the first round in Islamabad as primarily evaluative, with each side testing the other rather than moving toward immediate compromise.
He pointed to a core problem on the US side: the delegation lacked clear goals and the authority to make decisions, even as, in his telling, workable solutions existed. Vice-president JD Vance’s admission that the US team had to consult Trump upwards of a dozen times during the daylong talks appears to support that view, while the Iranian side claims it had full negotiating authority. Shakeri’s overall assessment was sober: the first round of talks in Islamabad was neither a clear failure nor a success, and no one expected an immediate breakthrough.
Yet after the talks, Trump moved to escalate, announcing a naval blockade of Iran’s ports. In the days that followed, the dynamic only grew more volatile. After a ceasefire in Lebanon, Iran moved to partially reopen the strait of Hormuz, in line with its earlier position that access would be tied to a broader regional ceasefire. But Washington refused to lift its own blockade, and Tehran quickly reversed course, reclosing the strait. While US enforcement of its blockade has been uneven, with some Iran-linked tankers continuing to move, the US seizure of an Iranian cargo vessel marked a major escalation, one Tehran has threatened to respond to. Iran has yet to confirm whether it will return for another round of talks in Islamabad, underscoring how fragile, and reversible, the current pause in fighting remains.
On this issue of the US blockade, Tehran appears confident it can outlast the pressure. Iranian analysts such as Shakeri point to oil still being sold from floating storage, ample onshore storage capacity, and alternative routes prepared over years.
More importantly, the blockade exposes a strategic paradox for the US. To counter Iran’s disruption of the strait of Hormuz, which drives up global energy prices, Washington is now targeting Iranian oil as well, tightening markets and reinforcing the very dynamic that underpins Iran’s leverage.
From Washington, this may look like an effort to increase pressure – or at least signal resolve from Trump. In Tehran, it is read differently. Iran believes it can better absorb the pressure that even a fully enforced blockade would impose, while the global economic fallout, especially when compounded by disruption in the strait of Hormuz, will mount more quickly for the US and its partners.
More broadly, the move reinforces doubts in Tehran about whether Washington is seeking a negotiated middle ground at all, or simply escalating in the absence of better options. In this view, Trump is caught between restarting a costly war and pursuing negotiations that may yield little. With time, and with the risk of renewed war extending to the Red Sea and broader Gulf energy infrastructure, Iranian officials believe their position will only strengthen.
Having fought what they see as an existential war with the US and Israel and held their ground, Iranian officials see little reason to rush into major concessions. The priority is not a sweeping deal, but reducing the risk of war while preserving core sources of power, from Hormuz to its nuclear programme. In the short term, that may simply mean extending the ceasefire rather than reaching a substantive agreement. Beyond that, the likelier outcome is an interim arrangement, or a broad memorandum-of-understanding-style framework that defers key details, rather than a decisive breakthrough.
In this view, the conflict is not being resolved but managed – and with time, Iran believes its position will strengthen as the global fallout from energy disruption makes renewed escalation a cost no one is willing to bear. The broader aim, crystallised through the war, is a lasting exit from isolation, built on what Tehran sought to demonstrate in the conflict: that neither the Gulf nor the global economy can be stable without Iran’s own stability and integration.
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Sina Toossi is a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy, where his work focuses on US-Iran relations, US policy toward the Middle East and nuclear issues
