Pause welcome but path ahead forbidding: Five key minefields amid US-Iran chasm

Demonstrators chant slogans after the announcement of a two-week ceasefire in the war with the United States and Israel, at the Enqelab-e-Eslami, or Islamic Revolution, Square, in Tehran, Iran, Wednesday, April 8, 2026.

Pessimists worry the pause may prove only a brief interlude in a contest that has stretched across five decades—ever since the 1979 revolution recast Iran’s relations with the West and the region and set the stage for a long, bitter rivalry.

As US-Iran talks open Friday in Islamabad, there is enough room for both hope and despair. That both sides have declared victory points to the prospect of successful talks. But the massive divergence between the declared positions of the two sides–Washington’s 15‑point proposal and Tehran’s 10-point counter – frames the challenge ahead.

These are not technical differences that can be finessed by clever drafting. They reflect fundamentally opposed worldviews and incompatible readings of the sources of their conflict.

Whether Islamabad produces a framework for peace or merely sets the stage for renewed confrontation will depend on how the two sides navigate five entrenched contradictions.

The first concerns Iran’s nuclear and missile questions

At the heart of the American plan is the demand for the complete dismantling of Iran’s national enrichment programme—the core of what Washington sees as Tehran’s latent nuclear weapons capability. Iran’s counter‑proposal insists on its inalienable right to enrichment for peaceful purposes under the Nuclear Non‑Proliferation Treaty.

Here is the bad news. In a social media post Wednesday, Trump reaffirmed his tough position that there will be “no enrichment of uranium” in Iran and insisted that the two sides will work together to remove the existing stockpile. But the good news is that these issues have been negotiated for years, and just before the current hostilities, a compromise seemed within reach.

The missile question, however, is far more intractable. Washington seeks limits on Iran’s ballistic missile programme—the one conventional deterrent Tehran has consistently refused to place on the negotiating table. For Iran, the massive missile arsenal is central to its strategy of deterrence.  For the US and its regional allies, they are the most dangerous threat. That proposition has been evident in Tehran’s relentless missile attacks on Israel and Arab neighbours.

The second contradiction lies in the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s ceasefire announcement demanded the “complete, immediate, and safe opening” of the strait—language that implies a return to the pre‑war status quo of free international navigation. Tehran’s acceptance of talks did not concede this point. Iran has instead described the arrangement as “safe passage” under the “coordination of Iran’s Armed Forces.” Underlying this position is Tehran’s ambition to bring the international waterway under its national control. But Trump has also mused about a joint US-Iran toll booth in the strait to make money and exercise leverage over rival powers.

In the last few days, Iranian officials have floated the idea of charging a transit fee—reportedly around $2 million per vessel—with proceeds shared with Oman. Institutionalising such a fee would effectively transform one of the world’s most critical maritime commons into an Iranian‑regulated toll corridor. Given that a fifth of global oil supplies pass through the strait, this would be unacceptable to much of the international community, including Delhi.

In welcoming the peace talks on Wednesday, India underlined its expectation that “unimpeded freedom of navigation” would prevail in the Strait.

The third issue is economic. Iran demands the lifting of all US primary and secondary sanctions—four decades of accumulated economic pressure—as well as the termination of multilateral sanctions regimes. Tehran sees sanctions relief as the essential first step in any settlement. Washington, however, treats sanctions relief as the final reward for Iranian compliance across all fronts. The question of sequencing—whether relief precedes or follows Iranian concessions—will be one of the trickiest issues in the Islamabad talks.

The fourth contradiction concerns Iran’s network of regional allies—often labelled “proxies” in Washington. The US sees these groups as a core security threat and demands that Tehran cease support for Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, halt their cross‑border operations, and stop providing them with military capabilities. Tehran, in contrast, sees these relationships as essential instruments of deterrence and regional influence.

Iran’s ten‑point proposal emphasises an end to Israeli and US attacks on Hezbollah and other allies as a precondition for peace. Israel has been ambivalent about ending these attacks.

The fifth and most consequential contradiction concerns the regional security architecture. Iran is calling for the full withdrawal of US combat forces from all bases and positions across the region—a demand that would dismantle the American security system in the Gulf built since 1991. This, when it was Iran’s regional domination that in the first place led the Gulf states and Israel to rely on the US security presence in the region.

Over the longer term, it is conceivable that a new regional security architecture could be negotiated—one in which Iran pledges support for regional status quo and non‑interference in the internal affairs of its Arab neighbours, and the US and other major powers provide broader security guarantees to all. But constructing such an ambitious framework is impractical in the near term. Yet without addressing these structural questions, peace will remain fragile.

Any attempt to finesse these contradictions will require not only bridging the gap between Washington and Tehran but also navigating divisions within each capital, and between the US and its regional allies. There is already much grumbling in Israel and the UAE about the terms of the pause that Trump has agreed to. Put simply, there are many constituencies that will be threatened by any peace that is seen as favouring Iran. Similarly, there will be sections of the Iranian establishment that will wonder if their leadership is giving away too much.

Yet optimists insist that negotiations can open unexpected possibilities. Some argue that Trump’s “flexible realism”—his ability to swing between radically opposed positions—might, paradoxically, help. On Tuesday morning, he declared that he could destroy Iran’s ancient civilisation in one night. By evening, he had announced the pause and was speaking of a potential “golden age” of cooperation in the Middle East.

The political distance between those two positions is vast. Whether Trump’s famed “art of the deal” can bridge that distance in Islamabad, or even take a crucial step towards that, remains to be seen. Similarly the gap between Tehran’s bold proclamations of anti-American defiance and the imperatives of peace and economic reconstruction is large.

(C. Raja Mohan is a contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express)