President Trump is celebrating a two-week ceasefire with Iran in a loose agreement brokered by Pakistani officials, and further diplomatic talks are slated to begin in Islamabad later this week. But already there are signs the ceasefire is fragile, as ground-level Iranian units continued to launch attacks, Israel stepped up attacks against Iranian proxies in Lebanon, and it is unclear if Iran has fully opened shipping lanes running through the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have said the U.S.’s 38-day bombardment of Iran achieved its military objectives by debilitating Iran’s navy and ballistic missile industry and damaging its nuclear program. But Iran’s fissile material is still in the country and Iran has not agreed to give up its nuclear ambitions. Iran has also not agreed to stop supporting militant proxies in the region.
And most notably, Iran gained valuable leverage in the conflict by threatening merchant oil vessels moving out of the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz, effectively bottling up 20 percent of the world’s oil supply and driving up oil prices.
Iran is now demanding that vessels notify its military before sailing through the Strait of Hormuz. “That is something the Iranians did not have before the war started,” said Daniel Fried, a former U.S. ambassador who ran the State Department’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs during the Bush administration and sanctions policy under the Obama administration. “So we are already starting out from behind. That's a problem. If your principal objective is to restore the status quo, you're not winning.”
There are many questions about what comes next. We asked three experts—Fried, the former diplomat; former Navy Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, a fellow at Foundation for Defense of Democracies; and Brandan Buck, a former intelligence officer with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency who is now a foreign policy expert at the Cato Institute—to assess the ceasefire and describe where they see things going from here.
Their answers have been condensed and edited for clarity.
Is this a durable ceasefire?
Fried: I don't know, because this war was not going the way [Trump] expected. And Iran may want to cease fire because they've been badly hurt. They don't feel as if they're in a weak position. So from their perspective, it may be advantageous to agree to the ceasefire and then negotiate from a very advantageous starting point—which is their 10 points—what seems to be a U.S. acquiescence to some sort of Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz.
Again, this is changeable. So everything I said is written in pencil, right? But this does not look great. And this is certainly nothing like what Trump promised the nation as recently as last Wednesday.
Montgomery: It's highly likely that there'll be a lot of contentious moments in the follow on discussions on the ceasefire. One of the things we tend to do pretty well is work over an adversary's [communications] systems. So we need to wait 24, 48 hours—and then you have to see if things are coordinated across regions. But isolated things for the next 24, 48 hours would be excusable under the circumstances.
Buck: A ceasefire between who? I think it could be durable between the United States and Iran, but as far as a larger region, it's not looking that way thus far. I think we forget that Iran devolved its command-and-control authority down to the lowest levels throughout the course of this war. If this thing is going to hold, it's probably going to take some time and order for those orders to filter down to the various levels in Iran.
And then again, Israel is its own state. It has its own interests. Will the president be able to restrain Israel in Lebanon? I think that's gonna be a far bigger risk politically than trying to restrain them on Iran.
It gave Trump an off-ramp for his own escalation—to reset the narrative from the really chilling ultimatum that he gave yesterday. But I think fundamentally, the asks of the two parties are still pretty far apart. You know, last night, there were reports that the president was going to negotiate along the lines that Iran put forward, but then now some things have come out, so that's been denied. So it's still not clear under what conditions these three sides are going to negotiate, and therefore how this ceasefire will be put into place—so I think as time goes on, it's understandable to be even more pessimistic.
What are the most likely pitfalls going forward?
Fried: Will the ceasefire hold? Will the Strait of Hormouz open? And then, if it does, will it open because the Iranians permit it, and that becomes the new baseline? Will there be any meaningful controls on Iran's nuclear program or ballistic missile program? Will the United States remove sanctions on Iran, and if so, in return for what? If we remove the sanctions imposed because of Iranian support for terrorism, will that support end? I have questions about all of that.
Montgomery: The idea that somehow that Iran had the right to toll shipping going through the Strait—that principle, we should be opposed to it based on international law. However, we have a President who doesn't care about that. He's actually commented that he doesn't care about that. That worries me. I think there's going to be a problem between the United States and its Arab partners. Trump doesn't want to give up the peace over something like that, something he doesn't care about. This is a guy’s a real estate builder, right? There’ s a fee for everything, legal or not.
Buck: Iran's not going to surrender its ability to establish deterrence, especially if that deterrence got them to this point in which the U.S. might stop. Say whatever you will about the regime, and its human rights records and its internal characteristics, states are not going to willfully give up their ability to resist outside coercion.
Where does this leave the Strait of Hormuz?
Fried: It depends on what we accept, right? Iranian control, really? Does that mean fees that the Europeans pay? They’re not gonna be happy about that. It gives Iran leverage and they could arguably come out in a marginally better place which would be an indictment of the administration’s policy.
Montgomery: This is why you had to ensure that it was opened by the U.S. military at least for a short period of time, so that we could say, look, we’ve opened it before, we’ll open it again, if you get in our way. So for now, we have to negotiate the right answer as opposed to impose it. And that’s going to be much harder than Trump understands.
Buck: It’s looking like some kind of toll regime is arising. That's gonna be embarrassing for the United States strategically, and that's gonna be a tough pill to swallow. But economically, if the oil starts flowing and the prices start dropping, that is probably something they can just sort of narrativize away, oddly enough.
The United States since World War II has sold itself as being the guarantor of maritime security and trade. This is one of the central arguments for American hegemony after World War II. So, if this war ends and the United States acquiesces to some sort of toll regime on the part of Iran, even if it is somewhat legitimized—that's a fundamentally different situation than when we went into the war. And so I think critics, both in the United States, and the West, and outside can say—not unreasonably—that one of the central arguments for American naval power, or geopolitical power in the postwar world has been undermined.
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