Every proposed ceasefire between hostile powers carries with it the same unspoken question: can this moment of calm deliver on the long-held promise of lasting peace? That question now hangs over the Middle East after high-stakes peace negotiations between the United States and Iran, held in Islamabad and led by US Vice President JD Vance, ended without any final agreement.
Analysts and foreign policy experts quickly pointed to the vast gap between the two sides’ negotiating positions as the core barrier to consensus: Iran put forward a 10-point peace framework, while the US brought a separate 15-point plan, and the differences between the two proposals proved too wide to bridge.
This outcome is far from unprecedented, however. Historical data tracking peace agreements between 1945 and 2009 reveals a sobering trend: fewer than half of all nations that emerged from armed conflict managed to avoid sliding back into open violence. For the Middle East, a region scarred by decades of broken peace promises, the outlook is even more grim.
The region’s own history of failed diplomacy offers a stark context for the latest collapse. The 1978 Camp David Accords did deliver a durable peace between Egypt and Israel, but Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated for the deal, and Egypt was expelled from the Arab League by neighboring Arab states for years. The 1993 Oslo Accords, signed to global fanfare on the White House lawn, collapsed into the devastating bloodshed of the Second Intifada. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal with Iran survived barely three years before former US President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the agreement. Even the June 2025 ceasefire between Iran and Israel, which held for months, eventually shattered back into open conflict.
The most recent ceasefire, a two-week truce brokered by Pakistan, was announced on April 8 after 40 consecutive days of joint US-Israeli military strikes. The months-long conflict had already sent global energy markets into chaos after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint for 20% of the world’s daily oil supplies, and left large swathes of Lebanon under relentless Israeli bombardment.
Iran’s 10-point peace plan included non-negotiable demands: continued Iranian military coordination over control of the Strait of Hormuz, full lifting of US economic sanctions, war reparations for Iranian infrastructure damage, a full withdrawal of US troops from the region, and security guarantees for Iran’s allied proxy movements across the Middle East. US negotiators quickly dismissed these terms as “maximalist” and unacceptable.
Within hours of the talks collapsing, the US announced a full naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a move that drastically escalates regional tensions and threatens to deepen the global energy crisis.
Peace research has long established that ceasefires fail when they lack three critical components: intentional trust-building between parties, binding third-party enforcement, and a comprehensive framework for addressing core grievances. The April 2025 US-Iran ceasefire lacks all three of these foundational elements, leading analysts to warn its collapse was almost inevitable.
The human and economic costs of the conflict already stand at staggering levels. The US Pentagon has spent roughly $28 billion on military operations over just 39 days of conflict, and the Trump administration is now requesting an additional $80 billion to $100 billion from Congress to continue the war. On the ground, more than 1,500 Iranian civilians and combatants have been killed, with another 18,500 wounded. Thirteen American service members have died in the conflict, and more than 300 have suffered injuries.
Global energy markets have been roiled by the conflict: crude oil prices have surged more than 55% since hostilities began, pushing average US gas prices up more than $1 per gallon. For fragile import-dependent economies including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal, this sudden energy shock has pushed already teetering governments to the brink of collapse.
For all this cost, the US has achieved none of its stated war objectives: there has been no regime change in Iran, no progress on nuclear disarmament, and no widespread political upheaval among the Iranian public. Instead, the conflict has caused a cascade of strategic and diplomatic losses that will reshape the regional order for years to come.
The Abraham Accords, the 2020 normalization deal between Israel and multiple Arab states once hailed as a groundbreaking diplomatic achievement, are now under severe strain. Gulf states that host US military bases have come under direct Iranian missile strikes, forcing their governments to re-evaluate whether a US security presence is a benefit or a dangerous liability. Long-standing NATO alliances have also been fractured by the unplanned, unauthorized war.
Even on the day the US-Iran ceasefire was announced, Israel made clear it would not extend the truce to its campaign against Lebanese armed groups: Israel launched Operation Eternal Darkness, carrying out 100 airstrikes across Lebanon in a 10-minute window hours after the ceasefire deal was publicized. For the US, which launched the conflict without clear, defined end goals, defining what “victory” even means remains an open question.
Perhaps the most striking indicator of the war’s political damage for the Trump administration is the open revolt from within the president’s own MAGA base. Tucker Carlson, once Trump’s most influential media ally, delivered a scathing 43-minute monologue calling the administration’s war rhetoric “morally corrupt” and “evil.” He specifically condemned an Easter morning Truth Social post from Trump that mocked Islam and threatened to erase Iranian civilization, calling the message “vile on every level.” Leading podcaster Joe Rogan labeled the war “insane,” noting it directly contradicts the non-interventionist platform Trump ran on in 2024. Leading figures in the MAGA media ecosystem have now broken openly with Trump over the conflict, and the president’s approval rating is positive in just 17 of 50 US states.
For Kawser Ahmed, an adjunct professor at the University of Manitoba’s Natural Resource Institute and the author of this analysis, the collapse of these talks is part of a deliberate, dangerous dismantling of the global peace architecture that has prevented major war since 1945. In the 2026 US federal budget, the Trump administration eliminated the entire $1.23 billion US contribution to United Nations peacekeeping operations, cut 85% of all funding for US diplomatic and international affairs programs, closed the US Agency for International Development (USAID) after 64 years of operation, and withdrawn the US from 66 separate international bodies since taking office in January 2025.
These cuts have forced the United Nations to reduce its global peacekeeping force by 25%, reducing the UN’s presence in conflict hotspots including Lebanon, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan at the exact moment that international monitoring and mediation is most needed.
The conflict has also upended the traditional global security order. When the time came to broker peace between the US and Iran, no Western US ally stepped forward to lead mediation efforts. Instead, Pakistan – a nation that grapples with its own ongoing border tensions with India and Afghanistan – took on the role of lead mediator, working alongside Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, with quiet diplomatic support from China. This group of four Muslim-majority nations is now positioning itself as the primary diplomatic channel for the Middle East, a region where both Iran and Israel have become increasingly isolated, and US credibility as a reliable security guarantor has collapsed.
It is a striking reversal for the US, the nation that designed and built the post-1945 rules-based global order: now, the very nations the US once lectured on good governance and peaceful conflict resolution are left to clean up the mess of a US-initiated war.
Ahmed draws a clear parallel to the fall of ancient Athens, drawing on a warning from the Greek historian Thucydides written more than 2,400 years ago: superior military power and technological advancement do not guarantee lasting security or perpetual peace. Athens, the dominant global power of the 5th century BCE, did not fall to a stronger rival. It collapsed after launching the Sicilian Expedition, an unnecessary war of choice that drained the Athenian treasury, fractured its alliances, and laid bare the fatal arrogance of imperial overreach. The parallels between that ancient disaster and the current US conflict with Iran are impossible to ignore.
Today, the US is spending billions of dollars on destruction while slashing funding for the very international institutions designed to prevent war and heal conflict. That choice, Ahmed argues, is just the latest indication that the world is losing its way in an era of growing great power competition and unconstrained military action.