This is an opinion article. The views expressed belong to the author.
The second round of US-Iran talks never happened. Iran's Foreign Minister Araghchi arrived in Islamabad, delivered Tehran's demands, and left before the American delegation even boarded. Donald Trump then cancelled the trip saying, "We have all the cards". Islamabad turned out to be the third attempt for a deal after earlier efforts brokered by Qatar and Oman. The pattern is getting familiar: talks, movement, no agreement.
Much of the commentary revolves around trust deficit between the US and Iran to explain the lack of a deal. But focusing only on trust risks missing a more fundamental question: would the US be politically ready to sustain a deal? Before diplomacy reaches agreement, it must pass through political willingness. That is the first constraint.
The Iranian position is shaped by experience. The 2015 deal was negotiated with the P5+1, carried full multilateral backing, and was designed to outlast any single administration. It still collapsed. Trump's 2018 withdrawal proved that even a multilateral agreement cannot survive a domestic political shift. Iran's demand for guarantees for a deal is rooted directly in that experience. Any deal today can still be undone by a future president via executive order.
Few note that structuring any new accord as a Congressional-Executive Agreement could help. It requires approval from both houses, carries the force of law and raises the cost of reversal significantly. But even this is not absolute. The obstacle is not only across the table. It is also at home.
With US midterm elections looming, the room for manoeuvre is narrowing. Political polarisation is deeply entrenched and major agreements are no longer judged on strategic merit alone. Concessions can be recast as capitulation. The question is not simply whether a deal is possible, but whether it is politically viable.
If Iran does not budge on core demands, it leaves little room for the current US administration to manoeuvre, particularly with midterm elections approaching. Any concession risks being framed domestically as weakness. Trump's base has historically viewed engagement with Iran as capitulation rather than statecraft. A deal requiring concessions on sanctions or civilian nuclear rights will be a difficult sell in the US.
The electoral arithmetic makes this harder still. A House that flips in the midterms would dramatically alter Trump's trajectory, and congressional opponents are already sharpening their impeachment arguments. The administration is thus negotiating on two fronts: Islamabad and at home. The domestic front may prove harder.
This dynamic is not new. The Paris Peace Talks during the Vietnam War offer a striking parallel. By 1968, negotiations between the US and North Vietnam had reached a point where settlement was conceivable. President Lyndon B. Johnson was pushing hard for a deal, while his vice president and Democratic nominee for 1968 elections, Hubert Humphrey, had aligned himself with a negotiated end to the war.
Robert Nixon, the Republican nominee, campaigned on "peace with honour", opposing what he framed as a rushed settlement. Declassified documents later revealed his campaign allegedly used back channels to convince South Vietnam to boycott the talks entirely, which later came to be known as the Chennault Affair. The result was that Humphrey was cast as soft on Vietnam issue and went on to lose the 1968 election.
This effectively reset the process and a new administration started from scratch.
An agreement was eventually reached in 1973, after Nixon secured re-election in 1972, lifting the electoral pressure. The terms were largely similar to those available in 1968. What had changed, though, was not the substance but the political cost of signing a deal. The intervening five years cost thousands of lives and ended in the humiliation of Saigon.
The same logic applies in Islamabad. The slogan has changed from "peace with honour" under Nixon to "peace through strength" under Trump, more assertive in tone, yet the underlying dynamic is unchanged. Nixon delayed because the electoral calendar made concession politically costly. Trump faces the same constraint, dressed in different language. In both cases, the negotiating table was never really the problem. The problem was always what waited back home.
Every durable peace agreement has required both sides to return home claiming victory. Camp David succeeded because Anwar as-Sadat could present it as recovering Egyptian sovereignty. The Good Friday Agreement held because both unionists and nationalists could find something to claim. None succeeded by asking one side to publicly surrender. Iran cannot be seen to have capitulated. Trump cannot be seen to have conceded. Any deal that does not build this face-saving architecture in from the start will be difficult to sell to the domestic audience.
The trust deficit is real, but it is not the only barrier. Trust can be rebuilt over time. Political alignment is less flexible. In effect, the sequencing is reversed from how it is often presented. It is not that trust must first be restored before agreement becomes possible. Rather, meaningful trust is more likely to emerge once domestic conditions allow a deal to hold.
From Paris to Islamabad, the lesson is consistent: peace is shaped as much by domestic politics as by what happens at the negotiating table. Nixon eventually found his moment when electoral pressure lifted and the political cost of a deal fell below the cost of continued war. The question for the Islamabad Accord is whether the world can afford to wait for that moment, or whether the architects of this negotiation are bold enough to engineer it deliberately.
