Washington has two failed peace deals and both failed the same way

The sixty-day window that Washington and Tehran gave themselves to end their war expired on August 17 without an agreement, leaving the two sides deadlocked over the Strait of Hormuz and the future of frozen Iranian funds. Europe offers no better news, since formal peace talks between Russia and Ukraine have not reconvened since the bombing of Iran began in late February. Two American-brokered frameworks now lie dead within six months of one another, and the instinct in Washington will be to treat them as unrelated misfortunes with unrelated causes. They are not unrelated in the slightest, and the thread running between them has nothing to do with bad luck or the bad faith of adversaries. Both collapsed because the United States offered political assurances instead of binding legal guarantees, and by the time each document was signed, neither Moscow nor Tehran had much reason left to believe them.

Pakistan spent the spring of 2026 learning that lesson at close range and at considerable expense to itself. Islamabad brokered the ceasefire that took effect on April 8, then hosted Vice President JD Vance and Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf for twenty-one hours of talks on April 11 and 12. The meeting was the highest-level direct engagement between the two governments since 1979, and it produced nothing beyond a shared understanding of how far apart the parties remained. The bill arrived almost immediately, because the United Arab Emirates declined to roll over its deposits with Pakistan’s central bank and demanded the return of $3.45 billion, a sum equal to roughly a fifth of the country’s reserves. Saudi Arabia covered most of the gap with fresh deposits, yet the message to every middle power watching the war was perfectly clear. Mediation between Washington and Tehran carries a price, and the states willing to pay it deserve something more durable than what they received.

Nobody in that room questioned American military power, and the Iranian delegation never raised it as an issue. Ghalibaf said afterward that he had told Vance directly of his delegation’s complete distrust of the American side.

The Iranians were not asking whether Washington could destroy things, since they had spent six weeks watching it do exactly that. They were asking what an American signature would be worth on the morning after it was applied to paper. No mediator in the building could answer that question, and the collapse of the talks followed directly from the silence.

The question has an uncomfortable history, and the answer was written into American practice more than thirty years ago. Ukraine agreed in 1994 to surrender the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, and in exchange it received the Budapest Memorandum, signed that December by Russia, Britain and the United States. The document reads impressively on the page, committing its signatories to respect Ukrainian borders, to refrain from the threat or use of force, and to avoid economic coercion. Every one of those commitments was an assurance rather than a guarantee, and American negotiators chose that distinction deliberately throughout the drafting process. The memorandum was never submitted to the Senate for ratification, for the straightforward reason that it created no obligations requiring the Senate’s consent. Nothing in the text specified what any signatory would actually do if another broke it, beyond a promise to seek action at a Security Council where each of them holds a veto. Ukraine discovered the practical meaning of that architecture in 2014 and again in 2022, and the discovery has cost it roughly a fifth of its territory.

The architecture has not changed in the decades since, and Washington has now rebuilt it twice within a single year. The understandings reached with Moscow, and the memorandum signed with Tehran in June, share the same essential design as the 1994 text. Each was a political commitment rather than a ratified instrument, each lacked any defined consequence for breach, and each rested entirely on the goodwill of a government that changes every four years. Both then failed in precisely the same manner, with each side accusing the other of violation and no mechanism existing to determine who was right. The failures have also begun to compound one another, which is the part of this story Washington seems least willing to examine. Russian negotiators now read American promises about Ukrainian neutrality through the lens of what Tehran was promised and then denied. The entanglement runs further still, and Trita Parsi has warned that Kyiv now sees advantage in merging the two theaters into a single conflict. A reputation for unreliability is not a regional problem, because it travels with the United States into every negotiation that follows.

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A second pattern runs through these two wars, and it is considerably harder to discuss in Washington than the first. The United States spent four years exercising extraordinary care in Ukraine, refusing a no-fly zone, hesitating over F-16s and long-range missiles, and rejecting any deployment that might place American and Russian forces in direct contact. The reasoning was sound and was stated openly at the time, because a war between nuclear-armed powers threatens consequences that no policy objective could justify. Iran received no comparable caution, and the campaign that opened on February 28 included strikes aimed at the country’s leadership, a naval blockade, and the death of the supreme leader himself.

Allied preferences and domestic politics certainly shaped the pace of both wars, and no honest account of either can leave them out. Neither factor explains the gap in risk tolerance, and the variable that does explain it is depressingly simple. Russia holds nuclear weapons and Iran does not, and every government on earth has now watched what follows from that distinction. Officials in Seoul, Warsaw, Riyadh and Ankara are not slow learners, and they have spent six months watching an unusually clear demonstration. A state that trusts American assurances and forgoes an arsenal ends up like Ukraine or like Iran, while a state that keeps its arsenal gets negotiated with instead of bombed. The conclusion corrodes the entire nonproliferation bargain, and it was demonstrated by American conduct rather than manufactured by anyone’s propaganda.

The war was justified as a means of preventing an Iranian bomb, and on that measure the results deserve honest examination. American and Israeli strikes destroyed centrifuge halls and cratered facility entrances, and the physical damage to Iran’s declared sites was real and substantial.

The damage did not resolve the underlying problem, which was never fundamentally a question about buildings. The International Atomic Energy Agency lost access to Iran’s declared enrichment facilities well before the current war, and its reporting to the board of governors in late February acknowledged that inspectors had been reduced to studying commercial satellite imagery of tunnel entrances.

The agency has said since that it cannot verify the status of the enriched uranium stockpile without reaching the enrichment sites themselves. Monitoring is weaker today than it was in February, warning times are shorter, and the honest position is that nobody outside Iran knows the current state of the program.

None of this means Tehran has decided to build a weapon, and claiming otherwise would repeat exactly the sort of confident assertion that helped produce this war. It does mean the threshold has grown more dangerous, because a program nobody can see is a program no agreement can bound. A workable alternative still exists, and versions of it have circulated among nonproliferation specialists for years. A regional enrichment consortium, operating on Iranian soil under multinational ownership and continuous inspection, would give Tehran the civilian program it insists upon while giving everyone else the visibility they need. Selling that arrangement in Tehran has become far harder after six months of bombardment, which counts as one more cost of choosing force over patience.

The remedy is a Senate‑ratified treaty, with clear consequences for breach. South Korea has one, and it has held for seventy years. But no Arab state has such a treaty; their defense rests on political assurances, the very kind that failed Ukraine and Iran. That is why the Iran war exposed their vulnerability. A credible guarantee must be legal, not political. Verification must be continuous, sanctions relief tied to verifiable steps. None of this is new. American diplomats understood it in 1994 but chose political promises over binding law.

Middle powers like Pakistan can arrange talks, but they cannot enforce a great power’s word. Lasting peace requires a signed, legally binding agreement, not political promises.

Force has failed across two wars, drained American Patriot interceptor stocks by two‑thirds, and left both conflicts unresolved. History shows that binding treaties work, yet Washington keeps avoiding them. The real reason both wars continue is not bad luck or bad faith; it is America’s refusal to use the only instrument that has ever reliably ended such conflicts: a ratified treaty with clear consequences for breach. Until that changes, mediation will remain hollow, and the fighting will persist.

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