Next Century Foundation Research Officer Alfie Shaw argues for a six month moratorium on restrictions on shipping through the Straits of Hormuz whilst negotiations on Lebanon and the Nuclear Deal take place. The Next Century Foundation’s contacts in Tehran seem to indicate this might be acceptable. Alfie asks why this is not happening right now whilst the oncoming Mid Terms still make it a priority for the White House?
On the 9th of March 2026, President Donald Trump called the war with Iran “very complete, pretty much”. Seven months on, President Trump’s war with Iran, is neither complete nor contained and its stated aims have shifted as the war has evolved. For now, American bombs have stopped falling on Iran, with Washington promising to hold fire until after the November 3rd midterm elections. This break may be the best opening for peace since the June deal collapsed.
A War neither side is winning
What began on 28 February with US and Israeli attacks on Iran’s military and government sites has become a struggle over the Strait of Hormuz. Washington now spends much of its effort seemingly undoing a crisis its own war initiated. Operation Epic Fury comes at a mounting cost. The Pentagon’s own inspector general reported in September that the campaign cost an estimated $33.4 billion and has caused a “strategic inventory shortfalls”, while the Congressional Research Service notes that 81 American aircraft, helicopters and drones have been lost or damaged. Twenty one US service members have died and more than 800 have been wounded.
What force has not produced is a political outcome. President Trump has stated that he expected the campaign to last six to eight weeks, it is now entering its eighth month. Killing Iran’s supreme leader did not collapse the state and Iran continues to retain enough capability to strike ships transiting through the Strait of Hormuz at will. American strikes on Iranian soil have largely halted for weeks and President Trump has promised not to attack before the midterms. Each side believes time is on its side. Washington because Iran’s economy is buckling under sanctions and Tehran because the world cannot continue to tolerate a contested Hormuz for the forceable future. Neither side can now win outright, which is precisely why these weeks leading up to the November midterm elections are so crucial for implementing a deal.
Who else is paying the price?
The heaviest burden has fallen on people with no say in the war’s direction. The human rights group HRANA has recorded 1,701 civilians deaths and more than 32,314 injured in Iran, among them at least 170 people were killed in strikes on a girls’ primary school in Minab. On the 12th March, the UNHCR estimated that up to 3.2 million people had been temporally displaced in Iran and warned that this figure would likely rise if hostilities persisted. They have now persisted for seven months. Meanwhile, the UN reports a sharp spike in executions in Iran since the US-Israeli bombing campaign began and warns that the death penalty is being used to “suppress dissent”.
The suffering does not stop at Iran’s borders. In early September the Iran-backed offensive by the government of North Yemen that seized the Bab el-Mandeb has, as NCF’s Aliya Hersi writes, displaced more than 130,000 people. Saudi Arabia has also accused the North Yemen government of killing 12 people and wounding 300 at Riyadh international airport. In Lebanon, Iranian-backed armed group Hezbollah has seen three major military attacks by the Israeli military in wars against the group in the last two decades alone. In Lebanon, Israel launched a fresh military intervention in March, after the Iranian-backed Hezbollah fired missiles into Israel following the killing of the Iranian supreme leader. Israeli troops still occupy a self-declared security zone in southern Lebanon, hundreds and thousands of Lebanese remain displaced and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that about 22 per cent of farmland has been damaged. In Syria, barely out of a decade of civil war, an unexpected government decree pushed diesel prices up by 40 per cent and petrol by 28 percent overnight sparking its most widespread protests since the fall of former president Bashar al Assad. A war sold as a way to make the Middles East more stable is now shaking the region’s most fragile recoveries.
The economic shock reaches far beyond the region. Before the war, around a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas was transported through the Strait of Hormuz, which is now caught between two blockades: Iran unleashes munitions on ships it says cross without permission, whilst the United States blockade stops any ships linked to Iran. Washington insists that the strait is open and Middle East oil exports have recovered to more than 90% of prewar levels via escorted lanes, transfers to different vessels and pipelines. However, on the 11th of October the UK Maritime Trade Operations reported several incidents of military action in the Strait of Hormuz. Brent crude still hovers near $100 a barrel compared to around $72 before the conflict started, as insurers and crews price in the risks. Shipping executives put the odds of a vessel being hit at one in twenty. Any deal will therefore have to prove itself at sea, not just on paper.
Is a deal still within reach?
Beneath the rhetoric, the distance between the two sides has quietly narrowed. At the UN General Assembly in late September, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, proposed the reopening of Hormuz within seven days and the resuming of nuclear talks if conditions were met. Trump publicly rejected the plan, yet a formal American response followed, indicating that the disagreement concerned sequencing rather than substance. On the 6th of October, Vice President JD Vance called for a meaningful reduction in Iran’s enrichment capacity and to demonstrate its commitment to not developing a nuclear weapon, demands which are a notable step back and softening of Washington’s demand on the eve of the war that Tehran should abandon enrichment altogether.
There is evidently recognisable negotiating space and the obstacle is order. Tehran wants the blockade lifted before nuclear talks begin, whilst Washington wants Hormuz open and nuclear concessions before it eases the economic pressure that the Treasury calls Operation Economic Outcast. Both sides fear that moving first will surrender their greatest source of leverage, leaving each waiting for the other to blink.
What would a durable settlement look like?
The case for acting now is strong. For the first time in months, Washington has publicly committed to holding fire, which gives negotiators something close to a ceasefire without anyone having to call it one. Both sides are paying the price for delaying, the United States is depleted in munitions and facing growing global pressure to reduce soaring fuel prices and Iran’s economy is in a state, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio has described as “in total and complete freefall”. Once the votes are counted, the political incentive for restraint may disappear and the alternative is already taking shape. President Trump has called new strikes after the midterms possible, while the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrying a Marine unit of more than 2,000 is heading for the Middle East, in the biggest US military buildup in the region since 2003.
The answer therefore, is not to rush a grand bargain but to buy time for one. Reopening the strait and settling the nuclear question move at very different speeds. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal took around 20 months of formal, intensive negotiations following an interim agreement, while the June memorandum of understanding gave negotiators just 60 days, a deadline which was never met. Washington and Iran should therefore agree a six-month moratorium on hostilities in the strait, under which Iran halts attacks on shipping and the United States suspends the blockade on Iranian-linked vessels. Such an arrangement must learn from June’s MOU’s central failure: the lack of technical detail regarding how ships would operate in Hormuz. This time, a durable arrangement would need agreed routes, clear rules for handling incidents at sea and a monitoring body drawn from Oman and other Gulf states, with each concession dependent on the other side’s conduct, since no concession can rest on trust alone.
That is especially true for Tehran, Iran watched the United States abandon the 2015 nuclear deal in 2018 and the war has only deepened its mistrust. President Pezeshkian has publicly stated that “every time we come to the negotiating table, war is immediately imposed on us”. The complaint is grounded in experience. The United States bombed Iran during the April ceasefire and again just days after the June memorandum, each time citing threats to shipping. With further attacks still on the cards, Iran is unlikely to move first without credible guarantees that any deal will be honoured.
Six months could, however, be enough to turn a fragile pause into the foundations for lasting peace. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency could return to establish what remains of Iran’s uranium enriched to 60 percent, economic sanctions relief could be matched step by step to verified limits on enrichment and Gulf states that have absorbed Iranian missiles could be drawn into wider talks on regional security. However, the window for peace is short, if it is not used before November 3rd, the question may no longer be how can we finally end this war, but how far will it continue to spread.
