Who was forced to make peace: how the US war aims in Iran shifted from eliminating its nuclear capabilities to "opening” the Strait of Hormuz? This is the third part of the "Geopolitics in Simple Terms” series on the US war with Iran and its consequences.
Read Part I of the series: America's military machine in Iran war
From 'Bad Obama Deal' to Trump's War
The history of the current conflict began long before the first missiles were launched. In 2015, the administration of Barack Obama, together with other world powers, concluded a nuclear agreement with Iran — the JCPOA, which restricted Iran's nuclear programme and, in particular, set a uranium-enrichment cap of 3.67%.
Read Part II of the series: How Iran struck 15 US military sites across Middle East
Donald Trump called the agreement one of the worst deals ever concluded by the United States from the very beginning. In May 2018, he withdrew the US from the JCPOA, restored sanctions and promised to secure a much more advantageous and tougher agreement from Tehran. He later said repeatedly that Iran would eventually return to the negotiating table and conclude a "good deal.”
Things turned out somewhat differently.
After the US withdrew from the agreement, the JCPOA restrictions gradually broke down, while Iran began increasing both its enrichment level and its stockpile of enriched uranium. As a result, the issue was no longer simply Iran exceeding the 3.67% limit established under the Obama agreement. By June 2025, according to an IAEA assessment, Iran had accumulated around 440.9 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60% — a level just one technical step away from the approximately 90% required for weapons-grade material. Under the IAEA's calculation criteria, that amount could have been enough, after further enrichment, to produce weapons-grade material for roughly ten nuclear bombs.
There is a rather unpleasant historical irony here for Trump. He destroyed the Obama agreement while promising to replace it with a much better deal — only to find himself several years later facing the same problem, but with a considerably more advanced Iranian nuclear programme and a virtually ready nuclear bomb.
That is why, after returning to the White House, Trump once again formulated the old demand in extremely simple terms: Iran must not have nuclear weapons. The bar was then raised even higher: the administration began insisting, in effect, on zero uranium enrichment inside Iran. Trump himself publicly stated: "no enrichment and no nuclear weapons,” while Marco Rubio explained that Tehran could import ready-made fuel for peaceful nuclear power and had no need for its own enrichment capability.
And this is where the arithmetic of the original demands begins.
Immediately before the war, the central subject of negotiations remained the nuclear programme. On February 25, Marco Rubio said directly that the next round of talks would focus primarily on that issue. The American position effectively came down to the argument that a mere promise to "not build a bomb” was not enough: Washington wanted Iran to stop enriching uranium independently. At the same time, the administration took an increasingly tougher stance on ballistic missiles, with Rubio stressing that Iran's refusal to discuss its missile programme was a serious problem for the United States.
In other words, before the war began, the dispute already consisted of more than one point. It can be reduced to three basic demands:
Nuclear programme: Iran must not acquire nuclear weapons and must end its own uranium enrichment.
Ballistic missiles: The threat to American bases and regional allies must be limited.
Regional military system: Iran must reduce its ability to support armed groups and project power beyond its own territory. These areas had already been incorporated into America's policy of "maximum pressure.”
Once negotiations turned into war, these demands became the official military objectives of Operation "Epic Fury,” which began on February 28.
It is worth noting that one month into the fighting, on April 1, the White House stressed that the objectives of Operation "Epic Fury” remained "clear and unchanged”: to destroy Iran's missile capabilities and missile production, defeat the Iranian navy, cut off support for regional proxies and prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Moreover, the Trump administration deliberately repeated these formulations almost every day to demonstrate that America was not being dragged into yet another endless Middle Eastern war, but was carrying out a predefined military mission.
And then the most interesting thing happened.
On April 8, the White House announced that these objectives had effectively been achieved after 38 days and that Iran had agreed to a ceasefire. But alongside the previous objectives, a new formula appeared — one that had not existed at the beginning of the war: the resumption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Washington said the ceasefire would be accompanied by the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, while a broader peace agreement still remained to be negotiated.
But there is one simple point worth recalling here: before the war, Hormuz was already open. Iran had imposed no special conditions on shipping, and enormous volumes of oil passed through the strait every day, supplying a significant share of the global market. In other words, one of the war's main "victories” turned out to be a return to the situation that had existed before the war began.
But this should not be oversimplified. Formally, the White House did not say: "We have changed the objectives of the war.” On the contrary, the official version was that the original military objectives had supposedly already been achieved. What changed was the practical formula for ending the war. That is a fundamental distinction.
At the beginning of March, the United States explained the need for war in terms of Iranian missiles, the navy, proxies and the threat of nuclear weapons. By early April, however, securing the passage of vessels through the Strait of Hormuz had become an immediate condition for the ceasefire. Reuters reported that Trump agreed to a two-week ceasefire less than two hours before his own ultimatum to Iran expired — an ultimatum demanding that Tehran open the strait or face new large-scale strikes.
In other words, a rather curious political transition took place within just a few weeks: from "Iran must be stripped of its ability to threaten the region” to "Iran must open Hormuz.”
This is precisely where we should ask, for the first time, the question that will run through this entire piece: if the original objectives had already been achieved, why was it still necessary to negotiate anything with an Iran that had supposedly been defeated?
Military Victory Is Not Yet a Political Outcome
From the American military perspective, there were indeed grounds for declaring victory. By the end of March, US leadership was reporting the effective destruction of the Iranian navy, the suppression of its air force and air defences, severe damage to its missile industry, and the loss of Iran's ability to project conventional military power beyond its borders. By that point, even the administration's language had become increasingly categorical: "the fleet is destroyed,” "the air force is largely destroyed,” and "missile capabilities are being systematically eliminated.”
But there is a very large distance between two statements: "we destroyed a military target” and "we forced the enemy to accept our political conditions.”
We ended the second article in our series precisely on this paradox. Iran failed to stop American aircraft or preserve the previous structure of its armed forces. Yet it managed to retain the ability to inflict economic and political damage on the United States and its allies. And the main instrument of that ability was no longer an aircraft, a tank or even a ballistic missile. It was geography.
By the time of the first ceasefire, the Strait of Hormuz had transformed from one of the theatres of the war into Iran's main negotiating asset.
The statement by US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth on April 8 was particularly revealing. Announcing the ceasefire, he simultaneously said that American forces would remain in the region and would be ready to resume strikes immediately if Iran failed to comply with the agreement. Speaking about the strait, he separately highlighted the agreement under which Iran was to allow vessels to pass.
This produced a rather unusual arrangement. America said it had defeated its opponent. America said it had accomplished its military objectives. America claimed that Iran itself had requested a ceasefire. Yet Iran was still the party that had to open the most important maritime artery of the global economy — under a separate agreement.
But if we examine the first memorandum not through White House statements about "forcing Iran to make peace,” but through its actual content, the picture becomes considerably more interesting.
In the June memorandum, the nuclear issue was not finally resolved. The general principle that Iran must not possess nuclear weapons was recorded, but the fate of its stockpile of enriched uranium, the inspection regime and specific restrictions on its nuclear programme were deferred to subsequent negotiations, for which up to 60 days were allotted. In other words, the war began under the slogan of eliminating the nuclear threat, but the decision was made to end it before the parties had agreed on what exactly should be done with the nuclear programme itself.
By contrast, the Strait of Hormuz moved to the forefront in the first, practical part of the agreement. Iran was to ensure the safe passage of vessels, but the United States also assumed reciprocal obligations: lifting the blockade of Iranian ports, beginning to ease restrictions on Iranian oil exports and discussing the unfreezing of Iranian assets. In other words, this was no longer a matter of the defeated side unconditionally complying with the victor's demands, but a concrete exchange of concessions.
The fate of the second original demand — ballistic missiles — was even more revealing. Restricting the missile programme did not become an immediate condition for the ceasefire. Moreover, Tehran continued to state publicly that its ballistic missiles were not subject to negotiation at all. By June, Trump himself was already allowing for Iran to retain a certain missile capability — in "relative proportion” to the capabilities of neighbouring Gulf states.
But the most curious metamorphosis concerned the third objective — Iranian proxies. At the beginning of the war, Washington intended to deprive Iran of its ability to arm and support regional groups. In the memorandum, however, an entirely different arrangement appeared: the cessation of hostilities was to apply across all fronts, including the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, even though neither Israel, nor Hezbollah, nor the Lebanese government were parties to the US-Iran agreement at all.
Tehran quickly took advantage of this formula. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that a complete end to the regional war was impossible without an end to the fighting in Lebanon and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the territories they occupied there. He went further and explicitly warned that new Israeli strikes on Lebanon or the continued presence of Israeli troops would be considered by Iran a violation of the US-Iran memorandum.
The situation became almost paradoxical. America had started the war by demanding that Iran be deprived of its ability to support Hezbollah. Several months later, Iran was using negotiations with America to raise the issue of Israel's actions against Hezbollah. As Reuters reported, Hezbollah received assurances from Tehran that Israeli actions in Lebanon would affect further US-Iran negotiations.
At the same time, Israel did not change its position. It insisted on its right to defend its citizens independently and strike Hezbollah whenever it considered the group's actions a threat, despite pressure from Washington to halt the fighting. Netanyahu also stressed that Israel retained the right to respond to threats on all fronts, including Lebanon and Iran itself. In May, following a conversation with Trump, he explicitly said that Israel retained that right, while in June Israel again carried out strikes despite American calls for restraint.
Thus, Tehran attempted to incorporate the Israeli-Lebanese front into the US-Iran negotiating package, but Israel refused to tie its own security to the terms of Washington's agreement with Iran. What role Israel ultimately played in the war, how closely its objectives coincided with those of the United States, and why its understanding of "victory” proved different will be examined separately in one of the next installments of the series.
Was Iran Forced to Make Peace?
Iran did suffer a colossal military defeat. But at the negotiating table, it was no longer simply accepting the victor's terms — it began presenting its own bill. Tehran demanded the lifting of the American blockade, an easing of oil sanctions, linked the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to concessions from Washington, and sought to extend the terms of the settlement even to Israeli actions against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Moreover, an almost inverted situation emerged compared with the usual logic of war: the state Washington had declared defeated and forced into peace secured the inclusion in the memorandum of a provision for a recovery and economic development programme for Iran worth at least $300 billion, which the United States was supposed to develop together with regional partners.
Later, Tehran went even further and began openly demanding compensation for the damage caused by American and Israeli strikes, linking the issue, among other things, to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. In other words, after the war America had declared a victory, the discussion was no longer limited to what defeated Iran had to do. It also involved how much the victors and their allies would have to invest in rebuilding the defeated country.
Thus, Trump's declared military defeat of Iran did not turn into its unconditional surrender. On the contrary, as the war moved towards negotiations, Tehran began setting its own conditions for ending it.
Very little of the original set of American demands remained by the end of this phase of the war. The nuclear programme was deferred to subsequent negotiations. Uranium enrichment ceased to be a condition for an immediate ceasefire. Ballistic missiles disappeared entirely from the practical agenda. So did the demand to deprive Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and other armed groups linked to Tehran of Iranian military and financial support. The Strait of Hormuz moved to the top of the agenda — reopen shipping and prevent a new oil crisis.
Only recently, Trump had almost daily promised new strikes and the final defeat of Iran. Then Washington's tone began to change. In a short interview with Barak Ravid, the US president was already talking not about an imminent military solution, but about his preference for reaching an agreement with Tehran, even if the deal turned out to be far from perfect.
The delay in reopening Hormuz also appeared to provoke less of the previous belligerence. "We're just half-negotiating with them. We're just watching,” Trump explained, adding that Iran was in a difficult economic situation and that "everything will work out.” Yesterday it was "Epic Fury.” Today it is a game of chess.
Meanwhile, Iran not only failed to capitulate but continued to raise the stakes. Its demands for sanctions to be lifted, frozen assets to be released and the American naval blockade to end were joined by demands for guarantees against new threats and strikes on Iran itself and its allies in Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen and Iraq. Among the demands was one particularly unusual for a "defeated side”: compensation for wartime damage.
And this is perhaps the most revealing point of all.
According to reports in the Israeli media, Washington is now seeking to have Israel end or freeze military operations on three fronts at once — Iran, Lebanon and Gaza. The pause is expected to last at least until the US midterm elections in November, after which the administration will reassess the situation.
This produces a rather strange picture of victory. Iran has been defeated, yet it continues to set conditions. The original objectives of the war are disappearing one after another. The White House's main task has now become not the destruction of Iranian missiles or the fate of its nuclear programme, but the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which was already open before the war — and, most importantly, a "request” for several months of relative calm.
And so the question now sounds different. It is not only who was forced to make peace, but why the United States suddenly needed peace right now. The answer may lie neither in Tehran nor in the Strait of Hormuz. It may lie in America.
Why the war was put on hold until the elections, and what price Donald Trump himself may have to pay for it — that will be examined in the next part of Geopolitics in Simple Terms.
