ANALYSIS || On the verge of a peace agreement that resolves the entire situation in the Middle East, the question arises about where we will be in 60 days
A 60-day deadline for Iran to close a nuclear deal, while the threat of the use of force by the United States hangs in the air. US President Donald Trump says he expects an agreement, even with the Iranian leadership adopting an aggressive speech and Israel pressing for more military action.
Sound familiar? Although déjà vu is technically an illusion, the above scenario has been repeated. It is the reality of the Middle East today and it was also in April 2025, in the weeks leading up to the first Israeli attacks on Iran the previous year and the American attack on its nuclear facilities. The past year may seem like a cycle in US-Iran relations, always returning to the same point, but the trajectory has been downward, both for the US and the region as a whole.
To recap: Trump wrote to then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in March 2025, suggesting a two-month deadline for a nuclear deal, under penalty of use of force.
His envoy, Steve Witkoff, traveled to Oman in April 2025 to foster diplomacy. The entire project fell apart when Israel’s “Operation Rising Lion” imposed force as the way forward on June 13. A 12-day war ensued, in which Israel destroyed much of Iran’s security apparatus and claimed to have damaged its missile capabilities. The US then attacked – and claimed to have “annihilated” – Iran’s nuclear program.
After thousands of lives lost in the last three months – more than 3,000 in Iran, about half of them civilians, according to monitoring groups, and more than 3,600 in Lebanon, many of them also civilians, according to the Ministry of Health – trying to replicate what happened in June last year seems brutally, if not senselessly, repetitive.
Passengers walk across a bridge near a building with an iconic anti-US mural in Tehran on June 22, 2025 (AFP/Getty Images)
But Trump literally tried the same thing twice. And on both occasions he was led into military action by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump walked away from both military campaigns claiming success and extensive damage in Iran, something some members of his own intelligence community dispute. However, the nature of the latest 60-day deadline – apparently part of the memorandum of understanding – suggests the cycle may repeat itself.
Two crucial questions remain for this White House: What has been gained from the last year of violence in the Middle East, and has each cycle of violence made Iran more or less likely to develop a nuclear weapon?
The second question is easier to answer. Iran would certainly want a nuclear weapon more than ever after the assassination of its supreme leader and much of its senior security cabinet, along with the attack on its conventional arsenal. But it is likely to be further out of reach than in April 2025, when uranium enrichment in Iran was at its peak, the facilities intact and most of the scientific experts still alive. Any bomb would now have to be hastily assembled under intense US and Israeli scrutiny, with enriched material or equipment recovered from the rubble. It is important to remember that Iran’s capabilities were underestimated before the US and Israeli attacks on February 28. But building a bomb requires a completely new level of sophistication, and it would be unlikely, although not impossible, for Tehran to be able to do so in its current moment of crisis and tension.
The first, broader question is more complex, but its answer offers little comfort to this White House.
Fumo is seen as Iran carried out a missile attack against the headquarters of the US Navy 5th Fleet in Manama, in retaliation for the Israeli-American attacks, in Bahrain, on February 28, 2026 (Anadolu/Getty Images)
Trump now faces the surviving heirs, or successors, of his dead enemies, and needs to hope that the violence and grief have made them more amenable to a deal. Supreme leader Mujtaba Khamenei – whose injury in the attack that killed his father, wife and son is often mentioned disparagingly by Trump – seems an unlikely candidate for a quick reconciliation. The United States faced the same problem in Afghanistan, where the incessant nightly attacks on Taliban leaders left angry, revenge-hungry young men in charge and fewer moderate leaders available when it came time to negotiate.
The lesson of the decapitation attacks was not learned in the February and March operations: Israel and the United States either did not know who would replace the leaders they killed, or did not care, or actively preferred to eliminate moderates. The succession process has arguably left Iran with more hardliners in power – or at least able to exert influence in the chaos and anxiety of security measures that the Iranian leadership depends on just to survive. The humiliating and intermittent announcements of a partial agreement are proof of this. Trump had to admit that the Iranian chain of command is chaotic, and that made the negotiator’s agreement on the deal the subject of about 40 statements about how close it is to being reached.
Iran was harmed, without a doubt. Their leaders must be tense, filled with sadness, sleeping poorly and punished by sanctions and air strikes. But the United States was also harmed, in four main ways.
First, US military deterrence appears less impactful than it did four months ago. More than 13 thousand targets were hit, according to Central Command (Centcom). But still, Iran’s ability to wreak havoc with drones, mines and missiles is something the United States and its allies palpably fear: less for the material damage than for the economic damage caused by high hydrocarbon prices and a global energy recession. The US’s limited tolerance for suffering has been exposed: it can’t really withstand more months of high gas prices. Iran’s hardliners, on the other hand, are willing to consider resuming aerial bombings and the possibility of being targeted by precision munitions.
Second, the United States’ relationship with a key regional ally, Israel, has been severely affected. Netanyahu began, apparently in February, to convince Trump of the idea of a quick attack. According to news from Axios in June, he ends up receiving calls full of profanity, in which Trump claims that the Israeli leader would be in prison without his help. The United States, widely criticized under Biden’s presidency for not containing the brutal Israeli excesses in Gaza, is now trying to restrict Israel’s actions in facing the even more existential security challenge to the north, with Hezbollah. This is a surprising turn of events in itself.
Rescue teams search for survivors in the rubble after an attack in southern Tehran, Iran, on March 13, 2026 (Sajjad Safari/AP)
Third, Iran extended its security shield to its ally Hezbollah in Lebanon, after it retaliated against Israel on June 7 in response to an Israeli attack on the suburb of Dahieh, south of Beirut, an area controlled by Hezbollah. Analysts noted that it was the first time Iran targeted Israel for an attack on another country. The idea of Iran being a protector may seem laughable to many Lebanese, given that Lebanon was drawn into the conflict by the rash actions of the allied militia when it joined Iran’s war against Israel in March. But the June 7 Iranian attack demonstrated the height of strategic confidence in Tehran — when, in fact, that confidence should have been at an all-time low.
Fourth is the damage to Trump’s personal reputation. He started a war of his own choosing, which eroded the support of his MAGA political base, hit American coffers hard in the run-up to the midterm elections, eliminated his ability to present himself as the Nobel-winning peacemaker, and left him looking desperate to regain Iranian consent to diplomacy, which he twice interrupted with bombings.
There is no doubt that the US still retains military power. The question – as we enter, perhaps, the same 60-day cycle of negotiations before military action – is whether his policy of repeating strategies is correct, or has it made the Middle East, Israel and the United States less secure, requiring a radical overhaul.
