America Has the Upper Hand in Iran Negotiations

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, April 08, 2026

 

For several days, Donald Trump has warned that Iran would face a rain of destruction unlike anything it has experienced so far unless it agreed to a cease-fire and voluntarily withdrew its threat to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Those threats grew increasingly unhinged as the deadline approached, culminating in a prodigious freakout among his critics, some of whom concluded that America would lose more than it would gain from such a course of action. But when Iran agreed at the last minute to a cease-fire and a relaxation of tensions in the strait, that, too, was cast as an unmitigated strategic loss for the United States.

 

Neat trick! Heads, Iran wins. Tails, Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu lose.

 

The terms that produced a two-week cessation of hostilities (on paper, at least — the region is still alive with missiles and drones as of this writing) are more cryptic than the commentary class lets on.

 

If the war establishes a new status quo around the conditions that appear to prevail at this hour, that would caveat America’s and Israel’s battlefield successes. Iran would enjoy more control over the strait than it had at the outset of the war. Its so-called “toll booth” strategy, in which Iran would charge rents to traverse the strait, is unsustainable. But the United States opted against a fraught military operation to open it up through force. The lesson Iran and every other revisionist power on earth will draw from that experience is that even a modest application of force to a contested waterway is enough to close it off. Such an outcome would all but guarantee that China will attempt a soft or even violent attempt to cut Taiwan off from the globe. Beyond that, the regime has endured the fighting. And while its long-term survival remains in doubt, its resiliency is not.

 

At least, that’s the conventional wisdom among foreign policy greybeards and social media hecklers. That outlook takes as a given that the U.S. has acquiesced to Iran’s entirely unacceptable demands. They include: a commitment to nonaggression from the U.S., acknowledged Iranian control over the strait, the legitimization of Iran’s indigenous nuclear enrichment capabilities, full sanctions relief, the unfreezing of all Iranian assets around the world, and the total withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Middle East, among other asks.

 

It’s safe to assume that the United States would not agree to these terms. Critics of Trump’s handling of this war may not concede that, but they also seem to understand that America’s demands on Iran are just as onerous. The Islamic Republic is unlikely to agree to end its ballistic missile program, for example. Nor will it cut off its terrorist proxies, dismantle what’s left of its nuclear program, or hand over its enriched uranium to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

 

But save for America’s acceptance of a 15-day cease-fire over a proposed 30-day pause in the fighting, Washington’s demands on Iran are the same as they were two weeks ago. Iran’s, by contrast, evolved. Two weeks ago, it sought a permanent cease-fire, a nonaggression agreement ratified by Congress, and reparations for the damage it absorbed during the war.

 

Iran’s position shifted. America’s (and Israel’s) did not. And why should it have?

 

Iran’s central nervous system has been severed, as indicated by the Islamic Republic’s field commanders’ attacks on Gulf targets long after the cease-fire was announced. Its command-and-control, intelligence, and domestic security apparatuses have been severely degraded. Its navy and air force are gone. Its air defense network and nuclear weapons programs — two pricey sources of regime prestige — are in ruins. Its petrochemical and steel industries have been badly damaged, truncating two major sources of foreign revenue that sustain the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Gulf states, through which Iran evaded sanctions via an elaborate network of shell companies, are now ensconced in Washington’s orbit. America’s adversaries in Beijing and Moscow did not much alter the balance in Iran’s favor, though they certainly tried. Tehran’s defense industrial base is a smoldering wreck, limiting Iran’s ability to replenish its missile and drone stockpiles and compelling Iran’s proxy militia network to husband their arsenals with the understanding that they won’t be replenished anytime soon. And its stores of long- and short-range missiles, drones, and the launchers to use them are dramatically depleted.

 

The final hours of this phase of the war featured the most impressive Iranian tactical gain of this war: the American loss of an A-10 Warthog and an F-15E fighter plane to enemy fire. But that achievement begat the most impressive American tactical success of this war: an impressive rescue operation that showed the United States could establish a forward-operating base deep in Iran — indeed, just 30 miles outside Iran’s third-largest city — from which U.S. ground forces could execute objectives while holding off an onslaught of Iranian soldiers.

 

Many will ask you to conclude that the cease-fire amounts to an unmitigated disaster for the United States and Israel. Don’t believe them.

 

There is much to be settled at the negotiating table, and a resumption of hostilities is far from out of the question. And yet, it wasn’t Washington that sacrificed its leverage over Iran. Its forces in the region have not been withdrawn and the will to use them persists. Rather, it was Iran that put its last point of leverage over the West — its limited closure of the strait — up for negotiation. Its “toll booth” strategy is fanciful. The regime sacrificed whatever remained of its domestic legitimacy in the slaughter of its civilians in January, and it will confront another uprising at some point (as it did in 2001, 2009–10, 2017–18, 2019–20, 2022–23, and 2025–26). When the people come for their tormentors again, they will do so knowing the state terror apparatus that has haunted them for generations is a shell of what it once was. And neither Israel nor the United States has abandoned its plan to foment an insurrectionary rebellion after combat operations concluded. Indeed, we’ve seen indications that such operations were ongoing even during the fighting.

 

Any objective assessment should lead observers to conclude that the United States has the upper hand in forthcoming negotiations with Iran — negotiations that may yet collapse into continued aggression. Those who were convinced that the war was a disaster from the outset have not budged from that position, even as the inputs they used to render that evaluation were impossibly dynamic.

 

If Iran were to reconstitute itself rapidly and compel the planet to acquiesce to its extortion racket, even in the absence of any compelling mechanism to enforce compliance, that would be a huge setback for the United States. And if the United States gave up on the objectives that resulted in the war in the first place, America would suffer a strategic loss. Those who believed that the war was a disaster from the outset seem convinced that those outcomes are inevitable, and the unstable peace that broke out last night will endure unchanged indefinitely. That’s not analysis. It’s faith.