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After the most recent round of direct military confrontation between the United States and Iran de-escalated, a curious public spectacle emerged: Washington declared its mission a success, Tehran claimed its own victory, and Israel reaffirmed it retained full autonomy to launch strikes against Lebanese Hezbollah. Competing claims over whether Lebanese de-escalation was a formal part of the agreement have left many outside observers writing off the deal as a confused, bad-faith arrangement already teetering toward collapse. But for scholars of war termination and peace durability who have spent decades studying how conflicts end, these apparent contradictions are not a red flag — they are evidence that negotiations are working as intended. The real threat to long-term peace is not competing narratives, but what the Trump-brokered ceasefire leaves unaddressed.

Diplomacy is never a single negotiation between two parties. Political scientist Robert Putnam famously framed international statecraft as a “two-level game,” where leaders must simultaneously strike a deal abroad and sell that agreement to domestic political audiences. No international agreement survives unless it can win buy-in at home. The U.S.-Iran deal is far more complex: it functions as a five-level negotiating game. Washington must satisfy not only Iran, but also its closest regional ally Israel, a divided U.S. Congress, skeptical Gulf Arab partners, and wary European allies. For Tehran, the domestic and international constraints are equally daunting: leaders must win approval from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s most powerful military institution, contain widespread public anger over crippling economic sanctions that could spill over into mass unrest, and maintain the support of its key global backers Russia and China.

Every concession and gain negotiated at the international table has to be packaged for stakeholders who were never present for the talks. This inherent dynamic is exactly what produces the contradictory public messaging that confuses outside observers. Each side is not speaking to its negotiating rival — it is speaking to its own domestic audience. Washington frames sanctions relief as a temporary, reversible move to appease hardline critics at home, while Tehran emphasizes its uncompromised national sovereignty to rally its public. Israel, meanwhile, underscores its unrestricted right to strike to satisfy its own domestic political base. This is not bad faith; it is standard diplomatic practice, with roots stretching back thousands of years.

The earliest recorded peace treaty in human history, struck between Egypt and the Hittite Empire after the 13th century BCE Battle of Kadesh, follows this exact pattern. Two distinct versions of the treaty survive, each carved into stone for a domestic audience, with framing that serves each side’s narrative. Peace between the two great powers endured not because they agreed on a single public story, but because each could sell the outcome to their own people. The cost of compromise varies by context: in Washington, it may come in the form of electoral backlash, while in Tehran, hardline factions have a long history of extracting severe political costs from leaders who negotiate with the West, as former President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif learned after the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal.

Contradictory public messaging is not the core problem with this latest deal. The real flaw is that the same multilevel negotiating pressures that produce messy public narratives also shape what negotiators are willing to include in the final text. Each side fights hard to secure visible, immediate rewards they can showcase to their domestic audiences, and pushes back hard against binding enforcement penalties that would force them to answer for noncompliance down the line. The result is a deal that is heavy on immediate benefits for all sides, and almost entirely lacking in credible enforcement mechanisms.

Research on conflict resolution bears out this risk. In research for the 2009 book *Securing the Peace*, it was found that negotiated settlements ending civil wars break down at roughly twice the rate of conflicts that end in clear military victory. While the research focused on internal conflicts, the core lesson applies broadly to all war settlements: agreements fail not because of conflicting public narratives, but because they lack credible enforcement once implementation begins. This weakness is hidden at the time of signing, when all parties are still collecting the immediate benefits the deal promises. It only emerges later, once those rewards are exhausted, and there are no penalties left to deter parties from defecting.

The 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty illustrates the alternative path to durable peace. The deal endured not simply because Egypt regained the Sinai Peninsula and Israel earned formal international recognition, but because those gains were embedded in a robust enforcement structure. Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai was phased and tied directly to ongoing compliance, the U.S. committed to long-term economic and military assistance for both nations, and the Multinational Force and Observers was deployed in 1981 to monitor demilitarization. More than four decades later, the treaty remains intact, proving the value of built-in enforcement.

For the U.S.-Iran deal, this lesson is clear: lasting peace depends not just on what parties gain immediately, but on the institutions and incentives built to enforce compliance long after the signing ceremony ends. Measured by that standard, the current agreement is built on unstable ground. It offers generous immediate rewards: the U.S. lifts economic blockades, issues oil export waivers, releases billions in frozen Iranian assets, and promises over $300 billion in reconstruction support. In exchange, Iran reopens the Strait of Hormuz and agrees to dilute its enriched uranium stockpile on domestic soil, while retaining all the infrastructure to ramp up enrichment again in the future. Almost every step delivers immediate benefit to one side or the other, and almost no step imposes meaningful costs on a party that chooses to walk away from the deal.

Enforcement is left to a hypothetical United Nations Security Council resolution that has not even been drafted, and the most contentious issue — long-term uranium enrichment limits — has been kicked down the road to a final agreement that may never be negotiated. An even deeper structural flaw is that the most powerful actors capable of derailing the deal are not bound by its terms at all. Israel, Hezbollah, and the broad network of Iranian-backed militias across the Middle East were never signatories to the agreement. They gain little from complying with its terms, and risk nothing if they choose to defect, leaving the deal with no mechanism to impose costs on spoilers that break the peace.

None of this means the deal is destined for immediate collapse. The history of peacemaking, from the Battle of Kadesh to the Dayton Accords that ended the Bosnian War to the Belfast Agreement that resolved Northern Ireland’s decades-long sectarian conflict, shows that public disputes and threats to walk away are normal growing pains, not proof of imminent failure. But surviving early turbulence is not the same as lasting for the long term. History shows that setbacks are inevitable; the question is whether parties will build robust institutions to deter defection before the immediate rewards are exhausted and the incentives to comply disappear.

The core task for negotiators moving forward is not what most analysts are focused on: it is not reconciling competing public narratives. It is building automatic, meaningful consequences for any actor that returns to violence — including the powerful regional actors that never took a seat at the negotiating table.

This analysis is by Monica Duffy Toft, Professor of International Politics and Director of the Center for Strategic Studies at The Fletcher School, Tufts University, republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

In a historic legal challenge that tests the boundaries of executive power and the rule of law, three sitting International Criminal Court (ICC) judges have secured a court summons for former US President Donald Trump, forcing his administration to defend sweeping sanctions imposed over the tribunal’s investigations into alleged actions by US and Israeli nationals. The summons, issued Thursday by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, gives the administration 60 days to respond to the complaint filed one day prior by the three jurists: Kimberly Prost from Canada, Solomy Balungi Bossa from Uganda, and Reine Alapini-Gansou from Benin. Alongside Trump, the suit names Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (which manages the sanctions list), and OFAC director Bradley Smith as co-defendants. This marks the first time that sitting ICC judges have personally taken legal action to contest their designation under Executive Order 14203, the directive Trump signed into law on February 6, 2025. The order invoked a purported national emergency triggered by the ICC’s probes into US and Israeli citizens to authorize asset freezes and travel bans against foreign officials participating in or supporting those investigations. The three judges are not alone in facing penalties: they are among eight ICC-affiliated individuals sanctioned under the order, which has also targeted ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, his two deputies, the United Nations special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, and three Palestinian human rights organizations. Each of the three plaintiffs sits on judicial panels overseeing high-stakes investigations: Prost and Bossa work on the Afghanistan probe, while Alapini-Gansou handles the file on alleged crimes in Palestinian territories. James Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative and co-counsel for Prost, has denounced the sanctions as “an unprecedented attack on judicial independence and the rule of law.” The measures, Goldston confirmed, have inflicted severe tangible harm on judges who have done nothing more than fulfill their official, oath-bound duties. The complaint itself describes the sanctions as “tantamount to the financial death penalty.” According to Goldston, speaking to independent outlet Middle East Eye, Prost’s personal US bank accounts have been frozen, she has lost access to conventional credit card services, and her accounts with major US-based tech and consumer firms including Amazon, Google and Expedia have been restricted or terminated entirely. Worse, Prost has effectively lost access to health coverage after her existing provider refused to process her medical claims, and no other insurer will agree to underwrite a policy for her. Before joining the ICC in 2018, Prost built a career focused on international sanctions regimes: she served as a federal prosecutor for Canada’s Department of Justice, and later as ombudsperson for the UN Security Council’s al-Qaeda sanctions committee, overseeing the exact type of punitive measures that are now being used against her. “She knows a great deal about sanctions, and in some ways it is rather extraordinary that she is now being subjected to these severe sanctions, really solely for undertaking her job as a judge seriously and professionally,” Goldston noted. The legal team has laid out three core constitutional and statutory arguments for why the executive order must be struck down entirely by the court. First, the plaintiffs argue the order far exceeds the authority Congress delegated to the president under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), the legislation Trump relied on to impose the sanctions. They further contend that the penalties contradict a separate federal law, the 2002 American Service-Members’ Protection Act (ASPA), which was drafted specifically to address the risk of the ICC opening investigations into US or allied nationals who are not parties to the Rome Statute. Goldston explained that ASPA only permits the president to respond to such investigations through narrow, specific measures: providing legal representation for US citizens, submitting exculpatory evidence to the court, and defending US interests through official diplomatic and legal channels. The law does not grant any authority to impose punitive sanctions on ICC personnel. Even in the extreme scenario that an American citizen is taken into ICC custody, Goldston added, ASPA explicitly bars the executive branch from using financial or personal “inducements” to pressure the court into changing its rulings. The sanctions imposed under Executive Order 14203, he argued, fit exactly that prohibited definition. “They are trying to induce judges to refrain from deciding on the basis of facts and law, and instead take into account their own personal interests, that is, the threats to their own financial and personal well-being imposed by these sanctions,” he said. The plaintiffs also reject the administration’s claim of a national emergency justifying the order. IEEPA can only be invoked to respond to an “unusual and extraordinary” threat to US national security, but Washington’s opposition to the ICC’s exercise of jurisdiction over non-party nationals dates back nearly 30 years. President Bill Clinton first raised the same objection when he signed the Rome Statute in 2000, and earlier this year a senior US official confirmed to the United Nations that none of the concerns cited in the 2025 executive order are new, with Washington having reiterated the same position for almost three decades. Legal observers note that both Afghanistan and Palestine are ICC member states, and the Rome Statute has long enshrined the principle that the court can exercise jurisdiction over crimes committed on a member state’s territory, regardless of the nationality of the perpetrator. The second core argument centers on constitutional protections for property: the asset freeze imposed on Prost and Bossa, who both hold US-based assets, violates the Fifth Amendment in two distinct ways—by depriving them of private property without due process of law, and by seizing private property without just compensation. The third argument holds that the designation of the judges violates the Administrative Procedure Act, because the penalties are “arbitrary, capricious and an abuse of discretion.” The complaint notes that the Trump administration has failed to produce any specific, concrete evidence justifying the sanctions against the individual judges, and also neglected to weigh the severe damage the measures inflict on international accountability efforts—including ICC investigations that the US itself openly supports, such as the probes into alleged war crimes in Sudan, Libya, and Ukraine. Goldston emphasized that all three arguments revolve around the same core violation: the sanctions pressure judges to prioritize their own personal and financial security over their oath to impartially adjudicate cases based on law and facts. “The sanctions seek to compel these judges to refrain from their sworn oath, to decide cases on the basis of an impartial assessment of the facts and the law,” he said. “That is a fundamental threat to the rule of law.” This lawsuit is the fifth legal challenge to Executive Order 14203 to date. In four earlier cases challenging the order, US courts have already ruled that the directive is unconstitutional, finding it imposes unlawful restrictions on the free speech rights of individuals and organizations that cooperate with the ICC. One of those earlier successful challenges was brought on behalf of Francesca Albanese, the sanctioned UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories. This current suit, however, is the first to directly challenge the designation of sitting ICC judges. The Open Society Justice Initiative leads representation for Prost, with international law firm Foley Hoag serving as co-counsel. When asked about the prospects of the suit succeeding, Goldston said his team is confident in the strength of their arguments, but noted that the judicial process will ultimately determine the outcome. “We are hopeful that these arguments will be persuasive, but that is what the judicial process is for. We will see what the outcome is,” he said.

A public dispute has erupted between Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte over the nature of Italy’s role in the U.S.-led conflict against Iran, opening a new rift in already strained transatlantic relations amid heightened tensions in the Middle East.

Speaking to Fox News this Thursday, Rutte pushed back against recent criticisms from U.S. President Donald Trump, who had accused multiple European Union allies of refusing to back the U.S.-Israeli military campaign codenamed Epic Fury. The NATO chief claimed that a large number of allied nations had opened their military bases to support the operation, estimating that between 4,000 and 5,000 aircraft had departed from European bases for strike missions. Specifically, he highlighted that 500 U.S. warplanes had taken off from U.S. bases hosted on Italian territory to support Epic Fury, calling the level of European involvement “massive.”

Meloni, who is already facing intense backlash from domestic political opponents over accusations that she has hidden the true extent of Italy’s involvement in the conflict from the public, swiftly rejected Rutte’s framing during a Franco-Italian summit held in southern France. She dismissed the NATO chief’s comments as an oversimplified and overly enthusiastic misrepresentation that blurred key distinctions between different categories of authorized flight activity. The Italian leader stressed that Rome had not taken part in active combat operations against Iran, noting that Rutte’s account directly contradicted Trump’s repeated public complaints that European allies have failed to contribute sufficiently to the conflict. “If we had participated in the Iran conflict, there would be no explanation for this disappointment that the US president keeps reiterating very often,” Meloni told reporters. She clarified that Italian bases were only used for logistical support activities, not for offensive combat sorties.

The disagreement comes against a backdrop of growing friction between Rome and Washington, sparked by a series of hostile comments from Trump targeting Italy and its leadership. Just weeks before the NATO chief’s remarks, Trump drew fierce condemnation from Italian officials after he falsely claimed Meloni had “begged” him for a photo during a side meeting at the G7 summit. Meloni hit back at the accusation on social media, saying she could not understand why the U.S. president repeatedly takes such aggressive stances against his own allies. She added that it was disappointing that Trump shows far more leniency toward the leaders of Western and American adversaries than he does to close partners like Italy. In response to Trump’s “serious and offensive words,” Italy’s foreign minister also announced he would scrap a planned official trip to Washington, further escalating the diplomatic row.

Iran has also weighed in on the dispute, with Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal and International Affairs Kazem Gharibabadi pointing to international law to back a critical stance. In a post on the social platform X, Gharibabadi noted that United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3314 clearly defines the act of a state permitting its territory to be used by a third country to launch attacks on another sovereign nation as a form of aggression.

This report was originally published by Middle East Eye, an outlet that provides independent, in-depth coverage of the Middle East, North Africa and surrounding regions.

When former U.S. President Donald Trump formalized a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to end open hostilities with Iran on June 17, global markets and policymakers breathed a collective sigh of relief. But just days after the deal was signed in Versailles on June 18, that cautious optimism has curdled into widespread concern: far from resolving long-simmering tensions between Washington and Tehran, the agreement has merely kicked a growing crisis down the road, with its underlying contradictions already emerging to destabilize the arrangement.

The catalyst that pushed Trump to the negotiating table was Iran’s four-month closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global chokepoint for oil shipments launched in February. The move triggered one of the most severe energy supply disruptions in modern history, sending inflation soaring across Western economies and leaving American motorists facing skyrocketing gasoline prices that eroded public support for Trump’s handling of the conflict. Facing growing domestic pressure ahead of November’s midterm elections, Trump had little choice but to enter talks to end the blockade.

Yet the tangible benefits of the deal for the United States remain murky at best. Former President Barack Obama, who negotiated the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, has already cast doubt on the agreement, noting it is unlikely to deliver meaningful improvements over the framework he oversaw. Tehran used its closure of the strait to leverage major concessions from Trump – concessions that experts say go beyond the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal – without offering any new concessions on Iran’s nuclear program beyond the proposals it put forward in Geneva just before open hostilities began in February. Even prominent senior Republicans, including Senator Bill Cassidy, have criticized the deal for granting substantial financial incentives to the Iranian regime that they argue undermine U.S. strategic interests.

Within just 72 hours of the MoU being signed, Iran’s military command announced it had reclosed the Strait of Hormuz, a move that came as little surprise to analysts. The swift action underscores a critical shift in the regional balance of power: the Trump deal has inadvertently emboldened Tehran, granting it new leverage to hold the global economy hostage to advance its strategic goals. Despite absorbing massive damage to its military infrastructure, political leadership, and economy over four months of conflict, Iran has emerged from the fighting in a position to dictate ceasefire terms, holding the constant threat of renewed energy disruptions over Washington to force concessions. This outcome signals a major loss of strategic control for both the United States and its closest regional ally, Israel.

Iran framed its closure of the strait as a response to Israeli strikes against Iranian-backed Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, a justification that lays bare the fundamental structural flaw in Trump’s approach to diplomacy. Iranian officials have openly stated that preventing further Israeli strikes in Lebanon is the top priority for their negotiating team. This sets up an inescapable vicious cycle: every time Israel exercises its right and political obligation to retaliate against Hezbollah attacks on its territory, Iran can threaten to close the strait again, triggering new energy price shocks and U.S. inflation.

This puts Israel in an impossible position. No sovereign state can permanently surrender its right to self-defense as a condition of a U.S.-brokered diplomatic agreement, and it is highly unlikely that Israel’s security cabinet will accept a framework that allows Iranian-backed militias to attack Israeli territory with impunity. As Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir emphasized, “Israel is not subject to the United States, and we are an independent and sovereign nation.” The deal, critics argue, is not a sustainable strategy of deterrence – it is blatant coercion disguised as diplomatic progress.

For Trump, the domestic political calculus of the deal is equally unstable. While the former president claims the agreement delivers on all its stated goals, he acknowledged at the recent G7 summit in France that he acted to avoid an “economic catastrophe” driven by sustained high energy prices. Skyrocketing gasoline prices have already made the conflict deeply unpopular with American voters, and continued volatility would severely damage his party’s prospects in the upcoming November midterms. Trump’s decision to enter the ceasefire was not a deliberate strategic choice: it stemmed from a recognition that continued military pressure was producing diminishing domestic political returns, leaving him with little room to continue open hostilities.

Worse still, the deal fails to restore meaningful U.S. strategic agency in the region. Iran has now demonstrated to the world, its regional allies, and its own population that it can act aggressively against U.S. and Israeli interests and still negotiate from a position of strength. Nothing that has occurred over the past four months has pushed Tehran to revise its long-held core worldview, shaped by revolutionary ideology, deep-seated mistrust of the United States, and its self-conception as a regional protector of Shia communities across the Middle East. If anything, the outcome of the conflict has reinforced Tehran’s commitment to its aggressive regional posture.

Today, the entire agreement hinges on developments in Lebanon, the new fault line for U.S.-Iran-Israeli tensions. While Israel recognized this reality from the start, the Trump administration has only just begun to grasp the stakes. Trump’s recent incendiary threat to “blow the shit out of them” if Iran fails to comply with the terms of the deal already signals that his patience with his own agreement is wearing thin.

In the end, the Trump-Iran MoU is nothing more than a ceasefire with a built-in detonator. As both Trump’s domestic political base and Israeli leadership increasingly conclude that diplomatic restraint no longer serves their core interests, further escalation will stop being a choice – and will become the only available outcome.

Amid shifting military and political dynamics across the Middle East, the United States is actively evaluating a major restructuring of its military footprint in the Gulf region, with a potential relocation of some key assets to Israel following a series of damaging Iranian retaliatory strikes earlier this year, according to a recent exclusive report from The Wall Street Journal.

Under the proposal being discussed, the US would revamp its long-standing naval base in Bahrain, while drawing down its permanent military presence in both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Two anonymous senior officials cited in the WSJ investigation confirmed that shifting a portion of Gulf-based operations to Israeli territory is a core option under consideration.

The discussion of this major strategic shift comes in direct response to escalating regional hostilities that unfolded earlier this year. On February 28, the US and Israel launched a coordinated military offensive against Iran, framed by US leadership as a necessary action to eliminate what former President Donald Trump described as imminent threats posed by the Iranian regime. The primary public objectives of the campaign included the complete destruction of Iran’s nuclear program and key military infrastructure.

In retaliation for the joint attack, Iran launched targeted strikes against American military assets across the Gulf region between late February and June. The US Navy’s central base in Bahrain, a critical hub for American naval operations in the Middle East, was hit repeatedly. The WSJ documented extensive damage to the site, including severe harm to the base’s command headquarters and at least a dozen other supporting structures. To date, the Pentagon has declined to publicly confirm the full scale of destruction caused by the strikes.

Parallel to these military deliberations, shifting public opinion within the United States has emerged as a major political factor, following the signing of the 60-day Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding between Washington and Tehran. The ceasefire pact paused active hostilities to allow space for negotiations on a permanent end to the conflict, and has coincided with a sharp turn in public sentiment against the war, new polling data shows.

A national public opinion survey conducted by Quinnipiac University finds that 60 percent of registered American voters now view the US military campaign against Iran as “not worth it.” The poll also reveals that the temporary ceasefire has eroded public confidence in the US’s ability to achieve its core war goals: 61 percent of respondents believe it remains likely that Iran will eventually develop nuclear weapons, despite the joint offensive.

Notably, this skepticism crosses traditional partisan lines in American politics. Majorities of both Democratic and Republican voters agree that Iran is still either somewhat or very likely to pursue a nuclear weapons program, marking a rare point of consensus between the two major political camps on a divisive foreign policy issue.

This reporting is part of independent coverage of the Middle East, North Africa and broader global affairs from Middle East Eye, an outlet focused on original, on-the-ground analysis of the region.