With both sides having now tabled their proposals, the outlines of what a genuine settlement between the United States and Iran might require are beginning to emerge — and the distance between them is sobering. The US wants Iran to dismantle its nuclear programme, accept restrictions on its missile capabilities, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and accept other conditions that would fundamentally constrain its strategic position. Iran wants an end to attacks, security guarantees, reparations for the conflict, and retained sovereignty over the Strait. Finding ground that both sides can accept as a win is the central diplomatic challenge.
On the nuclear question, some form of international monitoring and limitation is likely to be a minimum American requirement. Iran’s previous willingness to accept restrictions in exchange for sanctions relief provided a potential template. But the US attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities during the conflict made Tehran significantly less willing to accept any arrangement it could not enforce or walk away from quickly. A deal that left Iran with some form of civil nuclear capability while providing verifiable limits on weapons development might be achievable, but trust-building measures would need to accompany any agreement.
The Strait of Hormuz issue is perhaps the hardest to resolve. A formula that acknowledged Iranian influence over the Strait while guaranteeing freedom of navigation for international shipping might thread the needle, but it would require creative diplomatic language that satisfied both parties’ domestic audiences. Iran would need to be able to claim it retained sovereign rights; the US would need to be able to claim the strait was open. Finding that language, and making it stick, would be an enormous diplomatic achievement.
The reparations demand is likely to be the easiest concession to finesse, perhaps through an indirect mechanism — aid, investment guarantees, or reconstruction support channelled through a third party — that allowed both sides to describe the arrangement differently. Security guarantees are more complex, requiring some form of binding commitment that the US would not attack Iran in the future, even as it maintained its right to respond to Iranian provocations. Making such a guarantee credible, given the history, would be extraordinarily difficult.
Ultimately, a real deal would require both sides to accept outcomes they could not publicly describe as victories. That is the essence of diplomatic compromise in a conflict where both parties have paid an enormous price. Whether the political systems of both countries — American democracy with its upcoming electoral pressures and the Iranian theocracy with its hardliners and its assassinated moderates — could actually accept and sustain such a compromise was the deepest uncertainty of all.