The Trump admin­is­tra­tion and Iran­ian lead­ers reach­ing a com­pre­hen­sive and last­ing peace deal, is about as like­ly as pair of pyro­ma­ni­acs agree­ing to design and pay for a new fire station. 

But no one with expe­ri­ence or exper­tise in the Mid­dle East has expressed the opin­ion that either side can “win” the war militarily.
Iran can hold out because the regime doesn’t care what con­di­tion the coun­try and its peo­ple are in, as long as they’re the ones in charge.
Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s patho­log­i­cal fear of being seen as, or labeled a ”los­er”, puts him and his slav­ish back­ers in Con­gress in the same tent.
Exe­crably, that puts the con­flict on the same res­o­lu­tion lev­el as the Israeli-Pales­tin­ian gore-fest, which a retired Mossad offi­cer once told me “will nev­er be resolved as long as there is a  mutu­al­ly accept­able lev­el of  atroc­i­ty.”
On the plus side, the U.S.-Iran war has stalled on the point where the odds between the sta­tus quo of tit-for-tat strikes and  some form of nego­ti­at­ed solu­tion are fifty-fifty, which ought to have been an obvi­ous out­come before the metaphor­i­cal dice were rolled.
Now the trick, if that’s not too face­tious a word, is con­coct­ing a sce­nario in which both sides stop shoot­ing, with­out giv­ing the impres­sion  of hav­ing capitulated.
Trump would boast the result was due to his mas­tery of “the art of the deal”.That’s because he doesn’t under­stand or prac­tice diplo­ma­cy, my favourite def­i­n­i­tion of which is “the art of telling some­one to go to Hell in a way that makes them look for­ward to the trip.”
Whether the end result is a clear­ly enun­ci­at­ed, com­pre­hen­sive, anno­tat­ed, signed and sealed treaty, or mere­ly a nod to san­i­ty and a stand down, is not paramount.
Achiev­ing either will require a stu­dious blend­ing of patience, knowl­edge and under­stand­ing of a mul­ti­plic­i­ty of variables,
The list includes his­to­ry, cul­tur­al dif­fer­ences and sim­i­lar­i­ties, geog­ra­phy, the domes­tic pol­i­tics of the antag­o­nists, the nuances of lan­guage, world view, egos in play and on and on.
Instead, Wash­ing­ton has opt­ed to go up against nego­tia­tors from a cul­ture that pret­ty much invent­ed the tech­nique of hag­gling with­out blink­ing, with a pair of rank ama­teurs — Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kush­n­er and spe­cial envoy Steve Witkoff.
Con­sid­er­ing who their boss is, and that their back­grounds are lim­it­ed to real estate and wheel­ing and deal­ing, the report that Vice-Pres­i­dent JD Vance was told by the Ira­ni­ans that the pair were more inter­est­ed in exploit­ing insid­er knowl­edge of the cease­fire nego­ti­a­tions for poten­tial prof­it, than they were in reach­ing a peace deal, was treat­ed as less than earthshaking.
The White House denied the allegation.
True or not, the admin­is­tra­tion seems to rel­ish giv­ing the impression
it sees bombs and mis­siles as pre­ferred nego­ti­a­tion tools.
Except in the end, they don’t bring an end.

                    HISTORY SPEAKS VOLUMES

The catch­line of the 1960s anti-war hit “Where Have All the Flow­ers Gone” was “when will they ever learn?”
Britain’s Impe­r­i­al War Muse­um has cal­cu­lat­ed that: “Con­flict took place in every year of the 20th Cen­tu­ry; … It has been esti­mat­ed that 187 mil­lion peo­ple died as a result of war from 1900 to the present. The actu­al num­ber is like­ly far higher.”
Accord­ing to the Upp­sala Con­flict Data Pro­gram, a lead­ing source of infor­ma­tion on vio­lence world­wide, there were 65 active con­flicts in 2025, and the num­ber of con­flicts  between states was the high­est since 1946.
None of the wars I’ve cov­ered were black and white. They were at best a dirty shade of gray.
Dur­ing the break up of the for­mer Yugoslavia in the 1990s, a UN offi­cial worn down by the effort of medi­at­ing among the war­ring fac­tions told me over a drink: “I’m begin­ning to think the only solu­tion is to build a fifty foot wall around the place, go away for five years and then talk to whoever’s left standing.”
One of the many great pities of drone and mis­sile war­fare is that it can­not be penned in, because if the team prin­ci­pals could be the ones inside the wall,  the idea has a def­i­nite appeal.
The ide­o­logues who con­sid­er squan­der­ing uncount­able bil­lions on death and destruc­tion as the way to resolve inter­na­tion­al dif­fer­ences would be well-served to con­sid­er this from the British philoso­pher Bertrand Rus­sell: “War does not deter­mine who is right — only who is left.”
Whether you admire or loathe the late Hen­ry Kissinger as a nego­tia­tor, he got this right: “A sta­ble social struc­ture thrives not on tri­umphs but on reconciliations.”
Nei­ther the U.S. and its allies nor the Ira­ni­ans are ever going to admit they didn’t win, which makes it incum­bent for them to con­coct the accept­able com­pro­mise, and then tack­le the daunt­ing task of not pos­tur­ing, gloat­ing or re-start­ing the fire.

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