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.
