The war has cost at least $47 billion without producing Iranian capitulation, while Democrats prepare to challenge funding. A limited deal easing the blockade and restoring Hormuz traffic offers Trump an endpoint, but the 2015 accord’s collapse shows durable bipartisan support is essential.
Why Trump Now Needs the Iran Nuclear Deal
Eight months after launching the war alongside Israel, Trump has yet to explain what an American victory would look like or how much longer the United States must keep fighting to achieve it. While Americans opted to vote for the Democratic Party, which is preparing to challenge the logic of the war, Trump retains much executive power to stay in the war. Going forward, this means the political risks for him and his party will be high.
This predicament could explain the sudden surge in diplomacy. For their part, Qatar, Türkiye, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other regional governments are involved in efforts to bring the two sides closer together. For the first time since the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding was signed in June (which the US effectively walked away from), there are compelling political reasons on both sides to wrap up the war. The question is whether the US and Iran can turn that recognition into a compromise, or continue the status quo which oscillates between sporadic kinetic attacks and diplomacy.
With the Democrats taking control of both chambers of Congress in January, they will have substantially greater influence over the direction of US foreign policy. While Congress cannot simply order Trump to end military operations, it can investigate the administration’s decisions, challenge its requests for additional military funding, and use the budget process to make continued operations increasingly difficult.
For Republicans looking at the 2028 presidential election calendar, the war is increasingly problematic. For his part, US Vice President JD Vance has explicitly blamed the conflict for Republican losses. His growing involvement in negotiations with Iran reflects a belief that the US needs a political off-ramp rather than another inconclusive military campaign.
Trump, too, has reasons to pull out the brakes. The war has already cost the Pentagon at least an estimated $47bn, while military deployments, the naval blockade, and the need to replenish depleted weapons inventories continue to impose substantial and yet unknown costs. Meanwhile, the confrontation in and around the Strait of Hormuz has contributed to higher energy prices and broader economic uncertainty.
Military Deadlock Meets Fiscal Scrutiny
Trump can still order another major attack, but the fundamental military problem remains unchanged. While US forces can inflict enormous additional damage on Iran, including its energy infrastructure, nuclear facilities, and missile capabilities, they have not demonstrated an ability to make Tehran capitulate to its political demands.
For Trump, therefore, diplomacy offers a possible way to claim that American military pressure has achieved its purpose while avoiding another costly escalation. A nuclear agreement, combined with the reopening of Hormuz, could be presented as a major diplomatic achievement. It might even offer him something that another round of bombing cannot deliver: a concrete endpoint.
Does Tehran Still Believe Resistance Works?
In Tehran, equally important calculations are taking place. Iranian leaders initially interpreted the Republican defeat as evidence that their strategy of resistance had worked. But this is a dangerous interpretation because a weaker US president is not necessarily a more accommodating one. Trump could conclude that another display of military force is the best way to recover his political standing.
A growing number of Iranian officials and former leaders are warning against this very assumption. For his part, President Masoud Pezeshkian has repeatedly argued that the country cannot stay in limbo between war and peace indefinitely, because the economic costs are becoming increasingly difficult to manage. Former Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, former President Hassan Rouhani, and veteran diplomat Ali Akbar Salehi have also questioned the wisdom of continued confrontation, with the latter warning that another major war could set Iran back by decades. Their shared concern is that standing firm on the Islamic Republic’s ideological position cannot come at the expense of Iran’s economic future.
These arguments have not necessarily persuaded the security establishment to accept the concessions Washington demands. But they demonstrate that the debate inside Iran is no longer simply about how much punishment the country can withstand. It is increasingly about what continued resistance can realistically achieve.
For Tehran, diplomacy could therefore offer a way to preserve its remaining military leverage while ending an economic confrontation that is becoming increasingly unbearable. For Washington, it could offer an exit from a war whose continuation has become politically more difficult to justify. The incentives might be beginning to converge. Whether the negotiating positions will follow is another matter.
Cue the spoilers
The greatest obstacle to an agreement may not be the absence of diplomatic proposals, but the number of political actors who would regard compromise as a defeat.
Inside Iran, the divisions cannot be neatly simplified into two opposing camps of moderates and hardliners. The June Islamabad understanding exposed profound disagreements within the hardline establishment itself. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a former Revolutionary Guards commander and parliament speaker, supported negotiations, while figures associated with Saeed Jalili and the Paydari Front attacked the agreement as a betrayal. For opponents of accommodation with the US, the question is not merely whether Iran can secure better terms. Their political identity rests heavily on standing up to Washington.
The problem is particularly acute for Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei. He inherited a political system whose security institutions have been emboldened by the war, but he does not necessarily possess the personal authority of his predecessors to impose a painful compromise. Any agreement that appears to reward US military pressure could generate resistance from those who believe Iran should use its surviving capabilities to demand more.
Washington and Israel Resist the Deal
Washington faces its own divisions. Vance’s preference for a diplomatic solution is not necessarily shared by other senior administration officials. Rubio has dismissed Iran’s latest demands as unrealistic, while Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has maintained a much more confrontational position.
Israel remains another potential spoiler. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long advocated a much more fundamental weakening of Iran’s military capabilities and political system. A limited American agreement that leaves the Islamic Republic in place, retains parts of its missile arsenal, and offers sanctions relief would fall well short of Israel’s preferred outcome.
Yemen and Lebanon Can Reopen the War
Iran’s regional partners add another layer of complication. Developments in Yemen, Lebanon, and Iraq could undermine a ceasefire even if Washington and Tehran reach an understanding. A new Houthi attack on Saudi energy infrastructure, an Israeli strike against Hezbollah, or an exchange involving American forces and Iraqi militias could rapidly reopen the wider confrontation.
The danger is that the political opportunity created by the midterm elections will be squandered over the same issue that has repeatedly derailed negotiations: neither side wants to surrender its principal source of leverage before receiving something tangible in return.
Most plausible scenario
The most plausible outcome of the current diplomatic efforts is not a comprehensive reconciliation but a limited arrangement designed to stop the fighting and restore maritime traffic.
Such an agreement could be negotiated relatively quickly if both sides accept carefully sequenced and verifiable commitments. Washington would ease its blockade and provide initial sanctions relief. Tehran would restore freedom of navigation through Hormuz and allow international inspectors to resume agreed nuclear verification activities. More difficult questions concerning enriched uranium, enrichment capacity, and longer-term sanctions relief would follow.
A subsequent nuclear agreement could give Trump a claim of success and Iran a path toward economic recovery. Regional governments would welcome the reduction in military tensions and the restoration of more predictable energy supplies. But even in this best-case scenario, the underlying political problem would remain.
Iran Nuclear Deal Needs Durable Politics
The experience of the 2015 nuclear agreement should be instructive. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action demonstrated that Iran and the United States could negotiate detailed technical commitments and establish an international verification framework. For a time, the agreement functioned as intended. But it never developed into a broader political understanding between Washington and Tehran.
The two governments continued treating each other as strategic adversaries. Sanctions disputes, regional rivalries, Iranian missile development, and disagreements over Israel and American military deployments remained unresolved. Opponents of the agreement in both countries exploited those tensions, while the deal itself never acquired durable bipartisan support in Washington. Trump’s decision to withdraw from the JCPOA in 2018 ultimately exposed its political vulnerability.
The lesson is not that a future agreement must solve every dispute at once. Such an ambition would probably make negotiations impossible. Rather, a nuclear settlement should be accompanied by a broader political process that gives both governments an interest in preserving it. That means beginning a conversation about the kind of relationship the two countries are prepared to accept.
Iran is unlikely to abandon its ideological opposition to American influence overnight, and Washington will not suddenly accept Tehran’s regional policies. Formal diplomatic normalisation may remain out of reach. But the two countries could establish a more predictable form of coexistence, with direct channels for crisis management, agreed limits on military escalation, reciprocal economic commitments, and a continuing discussion about regional security.
The new Democratic majority in Congress could also play a constructive role. If Washington negotiates another agreement that survives only through the discretionary decisions of one president, it will remain vulnerable to the next change of administration. A more durable arrangement would require a degree of political support beyond the White House, particularly when sanctions relief and longer-term economic commitments are involved.
None of this requires friendship between Iran and the United States. It requires both governments to accept that their rivalry cannot be settled through military force and that preventing another war is itself a legitimate political objective.
That is the real third option beyond the familiar choice between escalation and a fragile ceasefire: a managed relationship in which the two countries remain adversaries but establish enough common interests and accepted rules to prevent every disagreement from becoming a military crisis.
The midterm elections have created a new opportunity for such a change. Trump has stronger political reasons to end the war, while Tehran has a reason to grasp the moment and lessen the economic pains it is suffering due to the confrontation.