After a relatively calm May 2026, the US-Iran confrontation has escalated once again. Since start of June 2026, exchanges of fire between the two sides have resumed. Israeli actions in Lebanon have further jeopardised negotiations. Reports suggest Donald Trump's phone call with Benjamin Netanyahu became heated, with the US president using expletives to express disapproval of Israeli moves that threatened to derail the talks.
Many observers now fear a wider war. Yet wars often generate their most intense diplomacy when neither side is ready to stop fighting. The battlefield is secondary. The real story is the collision of three clocks, all ticking simultaneously toward different deadlines for a potential settlement.
The first clock ends in November 2026.
The Republican Party entered the 2026 mid-term election cycle expecting a difficult campaign. The war with Iran has added a new risk: higher energy prices, rising economic anxiety and growing voter uncertainty.
A deal, even an incomplete one, provides a political victory that can be presented to voters. A prolonged stalemate heading into November 2026 does the opposite. The political clock therefore creates pressure for agreement before Americans vote. The timeline is therefore tightly bound to electoral incentives in Washington.
The second clock may expire sooner.
Despite surging energy prices, the full economic impact of the US-Iran conflict has not yet been absorbed. Governments are currently relying on strategic petroleum reserves.
The US has released 172 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as part of a coordinated International Energy Agency (IEA) effort to stabilise markets. These releases help stabilise prices but do not create new supply, they merely replace disrupted supply temporarily.
Even temporary price stability masks structural vulnerability. Shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz remain exposed to disruption, meaning risk premiums persist even when markets appear calm.
Analysts project that commercial inventories could face significant stress by July 2026, with reserves approaching operational constraints if disruptions continue. Once emergency buffers begin to disappear, oil prices become far more dependent on events in the Gulf than on government intervention.
At that point, policymakers lose much of their ability to shield consumers from the economic consequences of an extended conflict. The economic clock is therefore ticking the fastest.
The third clock is the slowest. What is being negotiated is not a peace agreement but a framework for one.
Washington and Tehran have discussed a preliminary understanding extending a ceasefire for 60 days while formal negotiations begin. Even if this framework holds, negotiators must still resolve uranium enrichment, sanctions relief, frozen assets and regional security architecture. Neither side currently views compromise as a concession rather than a necessity, which complicates sequencing.
Historical experience suggests these issues are unlikely to be resolved within a short window. The diplomatic clock therefore points toward a longer timeline than the political or economic clocks.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was negotiated between November 2013 and July 2015. Even with sustained diplomatic engagement, detailed technical negotiations and strong international backing, reaching a comprehensive agreement required roughly twenty months.
The issues under discussion in 2026 are at least as difficult as those addressed during the JCPOA process. That timeline reflects not just technical complexity but also political reversals that typically accompany US-Iran negotiations.
If current negotiations follow a similar path, a durable settlement would likely not emerge before 2028.
At the opposite end of the spectrum lies the Dayton model. The Dayton Accords ended the Bosnian War in 1995 after negotiations that moved from active conflict to a signed agreement in less than two months.
Dayton succeeded because three conditions existed simultaneously: the US acted as a neutral broker, the belligerents were exhausted after years of war, and no major actor possessed both the ability and incentive to derail the process.
Those conditions do not clearly exist today. Washington is a direct participant in the conflict, neither side appears convinced it has been defeated, and actors such as Israel retain the capacity to derail any settlement.
A rapid comprehensive settlement therefore appears unlikely.
The Minsk Agreements demonstrated that ceasefire frameworks can freeze conflicts without resolving them.
Such arrangements reduce violence while leaving underlying disputes unresolved. For Iran and the US, the danger is not failure but temporary success that unravels later just like it happened between Russia and Ukraine.
Most likely, the outcome is not peace but pause. In the optimistic scenario, a ceasefire holds, energy markets stabilise pending the economic clock and disputes are deferred beyond November 2026 through temporary understandings.
In the realistic scenario, negotiations follow a JCPOA-like path of prolonged technical bargaining, repeated crises and eventual partial agreement before final agreement. In the pessimistic scenario, the conflict freezes while diplomacy continues, until a future crisis re-emerges later, sort of a repeat of Russian invasion of Ukraine.
History offers a simple lesson: ceasefires stop shooting, not wars.
Washington and Tehran are therefore negotiating an intermission rather than an ending. Three clocks are ticking simultaneously: political, economic and diplomatic. The question is which clock dictates the US-Iran affairs not which clock reaches midnight first.
This is an opinion article. The views expressed belong to the author.
