A diplomatic endgame in the US-Iran war is in sight, but the path to it runs through a minefield. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Tuesday that talks over a formal ceasefire extension and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz are progressing and that a deal could be finalized within “a few days.” Hours after he spoke, the US military launched fresh strikes against Iranian targets in southern Iran, Tehran declared the attacks a breach of good faith, and the already fragile negotiating process entered its most uncertain phase yet. The Times of Israel reported Tuesday night that the Trump administration remains committed to reaching an agreement despite the continued military activity.
The contradiction embedded in that situation, a superpower negotiating peace while simultaneously striking the counterparty, is not lost on either side. American officials characterized Monday night’s operations in southern Iran as purely defensive, targeting missile launch sites and minelaying boats that posed an ongoing threat to US naval assets operating in and near the Persian Gulf. Pentagon spokespeople emphasized that the military acted with restraint given weeks of active hostilities and that the strikes were narrowly scoped to remove specific threats rather than to expand the conflict. Iran’s foreign ministry rejected that framing entirely, calling the attacks an act of bad faith that demonstrated Washington’s unreliability as a negotiating partner and warning that Tehran would hold the United States responsible for all consequences.
What Is Still Being Negotiated
Despite the overnight strikes, Rubio confirmed that substantive talks are continuing and that both sides have not walked away from the table. The specific sticking points are significant. Chief among them is the language governing the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s seaborne oil and liquefied natural gas flows. Iran closed the strait when the conflict began, triggering what the International Energy Agency has described as the largest oil supply disruption in modern history. Reopening that corridor is not just a bilateral concern but a global economic imperative, and it is the dimension of the deal that energy markets are watching most closely.
A second unresolved issue is Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium. The United States is pressing for verifiable limits on what Iran retains and where it is stored, while Iranian negotiators are pushing back on any arrangement that would require third-party inspectors to access sensitive facilities. The gap between those positions has narrowed, according to Rubio, but has not closed. A third track involves frozen Iranian assets held in financial institutions around the world, and the presence of Iran’s central bank governor at a recent negotiating session underscores how central the economic dimension is to Tehran’s calculus.
The Strategic Logic of Striking While Talking
From Israel’s perspective, the United States adopting a posture of negotiating from strength rather than from weakness is exactly the right approach when dealing with Tehran. Israeli officials have long argued that any agreement reached while maintaining active military pressure yields a more durable outcome than one reached through concession alone. Every day Iran’s military infrastructure remains capable of threatening the region represents a continued danger not just to Israel but to broader stability.
The overnight strikes targeted facilities that Israel and the United States have flagged as active dangers: launch platforms capable of hitting allied naval assets and vessels laying mines inside one of the world’s most critical shipping lanes. That these targets were struck during a period of diplomatic activity rather than diplomatic failure reflects the Trump administration’s stated commitment to not allowing the negotiating process to serve as a shield for ongoing Iranian military operations.
Israel’s own threat environment has not diminished during the ceasefire period. Hezbollah continued firing rockets into northern Israel during the period covered by these negotiations, Lebanon’s southern districts remain active fronts for the IDF, and the Israeli military has had to maintain a full multi-front operational posture while providing intelligence support to American negotiators. For the Israeli defense establishment, the message from Washington’s overnight strikes is clear: the United States is not treating diplomacy as a reason to stand down militarily, and that is consistent with what Jerusalem has been urging throughout the conflict.
Tehran’s Calculation and Leverage Tactics
Iran’s response to the strikes has been more theatrical than operational so far. The government’s declaration that Washington bears responsibility for all consequences is the kind of formulaic warning that has preceded escalation before, but Iranian decision-makers also understand they are operating from a position of compounding weakness. The conflict has crippled their economy, disrupted their energy sector, degraded their air defenses, and isolated them from most of their traditional diplomatic partners. A renewed full-scale confrontation with the United States is not a realistic option.
What Iran is attempting to do, analysts note, is manufacture leverage by claiming grievance. By framing the Monday strikes as a ceasefire violation, Tehran creates a diplomatic commodity it can trade for additional concessions on sanctions relief, asset releases, or the scope of any inspection regime that might be imposed on its nuclear facilities. The tactic is familiar: Iran used similar approaches during the original JCPOA negotiations in 2015 and in subsequent rounds of engagement with European powers. Whether it succeeds depends on how much the Trump team is willing to pay to close the deal quickly versus how willing it is to let the pressure continue working.
Market and Energy Implications
Oil prices, which had surged past $130 per barrel during the most intense phase of the conflict and then pulled back sharply as ceasefire talks progressed, remain sensitive to every headline from the negotiating table. The broader Strait of Hormuz oil crisis has already reshaped global energy flows in ways that will take years to fully reverse, even after a formal reopening. Shipping insurance rates for Gulf transits remain elevated. Several major carriers have not returned to pre-conflict routing. Refinery operators in Asia and Europe have been accelerating investments in diversified supply chains that reduce dependence on Gulf passage.
The IRGC’s repeated threats of regional escalation during the early phases of the conflict pushed many of those structural adjustments past a point of no return. Even a successful deal this week would not restore the pre-war energy architecture overnight. That reality is one reason the pressure on Rubio’s team to deliver something quickly is intense: every additional week of uncertainty costs the global economy tens of billions of dollars and makes the eventual reconstruction of normal energy flows harder to accomplish.
What a Deal Would Actually Look Like
Based on what Rubio has disclosed and what has been reported from the negotiating sessions, a near-term agreement is likely to be structured in phases. The first phase would formalize the existing ceasefire, establish a timeline for reopening the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping, and secure the release of frozen Iranian assets in exchange for a commitment to halt active military operations against US and allied vessels. The second phase, which would likely take months or years to negotiate, would address the harder questions: Iran’s nuclear program, its support for regional proxies including Hezbollah and the Houthis, and the longer-term architecture of a Middle East security arrangement.
Whether a second phase is achievable at all is an open question. Israel has been explicit that any deal acceptable to Washington must include verifiable constraints on Iran’s nuclear activities, and has signaled it will not be bound by any arrangement that leaves Iran’s enrichment capacity meaningfully intact. The analysis of the JCPOA 2.0 framework that circulated in Washington earlier this month made clear that the gap between what Israel would accept and what Iran would agree to on the nuclear question remains substantial. Rubio, for his part, appears focused on what is achievable in the immediate term: getting the strait open, stopping the active shooting, and securing the economic benefits that come with oil price stabilization.
The Detained Americans Dimension
One aspect of the negotiations that has received less public attention is the status of American and allied nationals detained in Iran. Several US citizens and dual nationals have been held in Iranian detention facilities throughout the conflict, and their release is a stated American priority. The presence of Iran’s central bank governor at recent sessions, focused on frozen asset releases, suggests that the financial package being assembled includes elements tied to humanitarian commitments, potentially including detainee releases timed to coincide with any formal agreement signing.
Israel has tracked these developments closely, both because of the precedent they set for Hamas hostage negotiations in Gaza and because American detainees who emerge from Iranian custody could provide valuable intelligence about conditions inside Iranian military and security facilities. The operational lessons from past prisoner exchanges inform how both American and Israeli planners are approaching the sequencing of any humanitarian elements in the current talks.
The Weeks Ahead
If Rubio’s timeline holds, the world could be looking at a formal ceasefire document before the end of the week. That would be a major geopolitical development, though not the end of the story. Iran’s relationships with its regional proxies, its nuclear ambitions, and its fundamental strategic hostility toward Israel will not be resolved by an agreement that reopens a shipping lane. What a deal would accomplish is the cessation of the most acute phase of a conflict that has caused enormous suffering and economic disruption, creating space for the harder work of building something more durable.
Israel’s interest in that outcome is clear. It needs the United States to remain engaged in the region, needs energy markets to stabilize so that global economic pressures do not erode support for Israel’s security posture, and needs the diplomatic bandwidth to address its own security challenges without the backdrop of an active superpower war next door. The Monday strikes, whatever Iran chooses to say about them publicly, were consistent with those interests. Strength at the negotiating table has historically produced better outcomes with Iran than accommodation, and the willingness to maintain military operations while talking is, from Jerusalem’s perspective, exactly the approach this moment requires.
