Every government fears a settlement that benefits its rivals, leaving ordinary Iranians trapped between an unfinished war and a peace that may change nothing.
Mohammad Marandi, an unofficial spokesperson for the Islamic Republic, mocks Donald Trump for always backing down on Sundays. After Trump once again retreated from his threat to destroy Iran’s infrastructure, Marandi posted a picture of a taco on X—a reference to the phrase “Trump Always Chickens Out,” whose initials spell TACO.
But the “missiles made of letters and words” are not aimed only at Trump and the White House. Masoud Pezeshkian and his foreign-policy team are also targets of the same faction within the establishment.
On Monday, August 3, the presiding board of the Assembly of Experts issued a statement declaring any understanding or agreement with the United States futile. It described “whispers of surrender in the name of defending peace” as an “unforgivable betrayal.”
The statement came only one day after Pezeshkian posted that the Islamabad memorandum of understanding with the American side had resulted from the “collective judgment” of the country’s leadership and would become “the centre of gravity of our foreign relations in the future.”
This attempt to sketch a horizon of peace and prudence did not please an Assembly of Experts whose real stage managers are not elderly clerics but military officials. Attacking those inside the establishment who seek to end the war and reach an agreement with the United States, the Assembly declared:
“At this sensitive historical moment, whispers of surrender by alarmists and conspirators under the pretext of defending peace constitute an unforgivable betrayal. Confronting such actions through legal means is the unquestionable duty of the relevant authorities.”
Which “relevant authority” is supposed to investigate Pezeshkian’s “unforgivable betrayal” of seeking peace?
The question matters. But it is only one expression of a larger and more complicated problem—one that is not confined to Iran and its disordered political landscape. The picture is hardly more coherent in the United States, Israel or the Arab states.
The conflict has moved beyond a war of words. A strange situation has emerged in which maintaining a rhythm of one day of war followed by one day of respite appears easier than making peace.
Full-scale war is a nightmare for every party involved. Yet for the governments directly and indirectly entangled in the conflict, peace may be an even greater nightmare. Ordinary people, meanwhile, have no say. They pay for this deadlocked war with their blood, their mental well-being and their livelihoods.
The Fear of What Comes After
The principal obstacle in the current war is not the fighting itself. It is the moment that follows.
The parties do not lack possible routes towards a ceasefire. The problem is that each sees in peace something potentially less tolerable than the continuation of war.
The US–Israeli war against Iran, particularly after it moved beyond its thirty-eighth day, ceased to be merely a conflict over Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes, its regional allies or the Strait of Hormuz.
It became a vessel into which every unresolved crisis was poured: the succession crisis in Tehran, the prestige of the American empire, Trump’s ego, Israel’s future, the position of the Gulf Arab states, energy markets and the possibility of constructing a new regional order.
Under such conditions, silencing the guns would not by itself constitute peace. Reaching a settlement would mean reopening the files that war has temporarily buried and finding solutions that the parties could actually implement.
Why, then, has peace become so costly that the governments involved prefer a permanent state of semi-war to embracing it?
Each actor views the conflict from its own position.
For the Islamic Republic, Peace Means Accountability
For the Islamic Republic, with its leader hidden from public view, peace could be a dangerous moment.
As long as the war continues, almost everything can be explained through the language of an “emergency situation”: economic crisis, repression, water and electricity cuts, rising prices, death, corruption, incompetence and even the inability to make decisions.
War gives the “sacred system” a language of justification grounded in crisis and urgency. Every protest can be described as weakening the domestic front or serving the enemy’s plans. Every demand can become treason; every doubt, an act of alignment with the adversary.
But what happens when the war stops?
Will people not ask: What now? What happened to our livelihoods? Where is the leader? What future remains? Why was there so much destruction? Why were such enormous costs imposed—and, most importantly, who is responsible?
This is what makes peace more dangerous than war for the Islamic Republic.
However costly it may be, war produces a form of emergency cohesion. Peace eats away at that cohesion and places the bill for all its costs on the table.
A political system that has lived through permanent crisis for decades does not necessarily know how to survive normality. Indeed, normal conditions may be more threatening to it than a state of emergency. Under ordinary circumstances, every disaster cannot be blamed on the enemy, infiltration or war.
Peace gives society an opportunity to breathe. And once a society can breathe normally again, it begins to remember its questions.
Washington’s Impossible Settlement
The predicament is not exclusive to the Islamic Republic. Peace is also difficult for the United States.
If Washington reaches an agreement after so many attacks, threats and military deployments—an agreement under which the Islamic Republic survives, retains the Strait of Hormuz as a source of leverage, and does not entirely relinquish its missile programme or regional networks—it will have to explain what the war was for.
The Trump administration may call such a settlement a “historic agreement.” But in American foreign policy, attaching grand and impressive names to political decisions is not always enough.
A peace that weakens Iran without destroying the Islamic Republic would be regarded by influential hawkish forces in Washington as an absolute defeat.
The United States faces a familiar contradiction. It wants to weaken the Islamic Republic sufficiently that it can no longer disrupt Washington’s preferred regional and global order—but not at the cost of devastating blows against its Middle Eastern allies.
It wants the Strait of Hormuz open but does not want Iran to extract political recognition in return for keeping it open. It wants negotiations but does not want those negotiations to imply that the Islamic Republic must be accepted as an indispensable participant in any future regional order.
Peace, under these conditions, means Trump walking a tightrope strung between two high towers.
Israel Between Incomplete Victory and Uncontrollable War
For the Israeli government, peace is even more complicated.
It sees the war as an opportunity to resolve the “problem of the Islamic Republic” once and for all. An early peace would therefore mean stopping the train before it reaches its final station.
From the perspective of the Israeli leadership, a wounded but surviving Islamic Republic may be more dangerous than it was before the war. It would have a desire for revenge, the experience of direct warfare, a narrative of victimhood and instruments capable of making the global economy pay for any future confrontation.
Israel does not want a settlement that gives Iran time to rebuild. Yet Israel is not omnipotent, and it cannot live in a state of war indefinitely.
The longer the conflict continues, the greater the likelihood that it will spread across energy markets, the Gulf states, US military forces, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.
Israel has the advantage in rapid wars, precision strikes and intelligence operations. But once the conflict expands into global markets, maritime chokepoints and fragile regional alliances, the field becomes larger than Israel’s capacity to control it.
The Israeli government therefore fears peace, but it also fears a prolonged war. Its preferred position lies somewhere between the two: neither full peace nor all-out war, but the preservation of crushing pressure on Iran while keeping the route to renewed attacks open for when the moment appears right.
The Gulf States Fear Both Outcomes
The Arab states of the region are caught in a similar contradiction.
Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Doha and Manama do not want the Islamic Republic to emerge victorious. But a collapsed Iran would also be a nightmare.
They fear leaving control of the Strait of Hormuz in Tehran’s hands, but they are equally afraid of the war that would be required to wrest it away.
For years, they have sold a vision of their future through the language of investment, tourism, technology, smart cities, clean energy and stability. The war with Iran has reminded them that beneath this gleaming façade still lie oil, military bases, missiles and the strait.
For the Gulf Arab states, a hasty peace could be dangerous. If an agreement recognises Iran as a guarantor or partner in the security of the Strait of Hormuz and the wider regional order, they may conclude that Washington has ultimately reached a bargain with Tehran by trading away their security.
Yet if there is no agreement and the war continues, their economies, development projects and international image will suffer.
They would welcome a contained Iran but dread the war required to contain it. At the same time, they fear an Iran formally recognised by the United States and consider such recognition intolerable.
Peace as the Construction of a New Order
For any peace agreement to be both real and effective, it cannot simply be signed by Tehran and Washington.
It must offer Israel a tolerable horizon, reassure the Arab states, calm energy markets, reopen maritime routes, give the Islamic Republic something it can sell domestically, and provide Washington with something it can present at home and abroad.
This is no longer merely peace. It is the engineering of a new regional order.
And where is this order to be engineered? In a Middle East where the architects of order begin with beautiful maps and too often finish by multiplying the ruins and filling the cemeteries.
For ordinary Iranians, moreover, peace cannot mean only an agreement between states. It would have to mean an end to bombardment and repression, restored livelihoods, accountability for destruction, and the possibility of deciding the country’s future.
Yet the people most affected remain absent from the negotiations. Governments bargain over security, prestige, borders and waterways while society bears the costs.
The central problem of the current war is therefore not the war itself, but what comes after it.
Every party knows that, sooner or later, it must speak about peace. Yet each fears a peace from which its adversary might benefit.
The Islamic Republic fears that peace could mark the exhaustion of its ideological-security order. The United States fears that peace could recognise an Iranian veto over regional affairs. Israel fears that peace would give Iran an opportunity to rebuild. The Arab states fear that the settlement ending the war could leave Iran more powerful in their immediate neighbourhood. And the people of Iran may have the greatest fear of all: that the war will never fully end—and that peace, when it comes, will change nothing.
