Islamabad, Pakistan – On Monday morning, the United States Navy began escorting commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz. By Tuesday afternoon, the operation had been paused.

President Donald Trump announced the reversal on Truth Social, citing the “request of Pakistan and other Countries” and “great progress” towards a “complete and final agreement” with Iran.

Earlier on Tuesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that Operation Epic Fury, the air and naval campaign launched on February 28, was “concluded”.

What Washington now sought, he said, was a “memorandum of understanding for future negotiations”.

For weeks, that is precisely what Iran has been demanding.

In proposals passed on to the US through Pakistan, Iran has in recent weeks sought multistage negotiations, with a preliminary deal aimed at ending the war, and negotiations on the White House’s demands that Tehran end its nuclear programme pushed for later.

Trump and his administration resisted, with the US president insisting that getting Iran to give up its nuclear programme was central to any deal with Tehran.

Now, the US appears to have come around to accepting Iran’s demand, say experts. On Wednesday, the Reuters news agency and the US publication Axios reported that the US and Iran were close to agreeing to a one-page MoU to end the war, even though there have been no detailed negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear programme.

Seyed Mojtaba Jalalzadeh, an international relations analyst based in Tehran, said the week’s diplomatic signals reflected a sober reassessment in Washington of what was achievable.

“Moving towards a memorandum of understanding, a framework for future talks, is a good, viable and important first step to solve the immediate problem,” he told Al Jazeera.

Shift amid fraying ceasefire

Pakistani officials close to the country’s efforts to mediate peace between the US and Iran told Al Jazeera that Islamabad’s role as an intermediary had intensified in recent days, with senior officials in direct communication with both sides. Details of those exchanges remain closely held.

On Wednesday afternoon in Islamabad, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif responded to Trump’s announcement of the pause in the operation to open the Strait of Hormuz, naming Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as a partner who prodded the US president to suspend the military mission in the waterway.

Pakistan, Sharif wrote on social media, was “very hopeful that the current momentum will lead to a lasting agreement that secures durable peace and stability for the region and beyond”.

Just 24 hours earlier, that optimism would have appeared misplaced.

Since the weekend, an already fragile ceasefire between the US and Iran appeared to be fraying.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) allegedly launched missiles and drones at the United Arab Emirates on Monday and Tuesday, the first such attacks since the April 8 truce. An oil facility in Fujairah was struck, wounding three Indian workers. Iran denied involvement.

The US and Iran each claimed they had hit the other’s ships, and each denied the other’s claims of success.

Washington, however, declined to escalate. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Dan Caine said the incidents remained “all below the threshold of restarting major combat operations”. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the ceasefire “certainly holds”.

Has Washington blinked?

The central question is whether the US has, implicitly, accepted Iran’s core demand: end the war and settle the Strait of Hormuz first, with the nuclear programme to follow.

Rubio’s Tuesday briefing suggests a sharp departure from Washington’s initial position.

At the outset, the US outlined four objectives: destroy Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities, dismantle its navy, sever support for armed proxies, and ensure Iran never obtained a nuclear weapon.

A 15-point proposal delivered to Tehran via Pakistan in late March went further. It called for dismantling nuclear facilities at Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow, handing over highly enriched uranium to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and permanently prohibiting nuclear weapons development.

By contrast, Rubio declared the military phase over. Nuclear material, he said, “has to be addressed” and is “being addressed in the negotiation”, but he declined to elaborate.

What Washington now seeks is an MoU, a framework defining “the topics that they’ve agreed to negotiate on” and “the concessions they are willing to make at the front end”.

That marks a significant shift from March.

In early April, he warned that “a whole civilisation will die tonight” if Iran did not yield. This week, he called for an agreement to be “finalised and signed”.

Rubio also offered a revised account of the campaign’s outcomes, arguing it had destroyed the “conventional shield” behind which Iran concealed its nuclear programme.

The framing sidesteps the question of enriched uranium still buried underground and effectively redefines the war’s purpose.

The shift has not gone unnoticed in Tehran. When Trump launched Project Freedom — the mission aimed at escorting stranded ships through the Strait of Hormuz — on Sunday, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi posted on X that “there’s no military solution to a political crisis”, calling it “Project Deadlock”. Within 48 hours, it was paused.

Jalalzadeh said the reversal reflected a reality Washington had been slow to acknowledge.

“The balance of deterrence is currently skewed in Iran’s favour, and I think this reality is slowly sinking in in Washington,” he told Al Jazeera.

Andreas Krieg, associate professor at King’s College London’s School of Security Studies, described the shift as a limited but meaningful concession.

“Washington has accepted that the simultaneous resolution of the war, Hormuz, and the nuclear file in one final package is not currently feasible,” he told Al Jazeera. “Diplomatically, this is a concession to Tehran.”

Gaps that remain

Iran’s position has remained consistent.

After submitting a 14-point proposal to Pakistan on April 30, later transmitted to Washington and described by Trump as “better” than expected, Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei made the sequencing explicit.

“At this stage, we do not have nuclear negotiations,” he said.

The proposal calls for ending the war within 30 days, lifting the US naval blockade, releasing frozen Iranian assets, paying reparations, removing sanctions and establishing a new mechanism governing the Strait of Hormuz. Nuclear talks are deferred.

Iran received a US response via Pakistan on Sunday. Neither side has disclosed its contents.

Significant gaps remain. Rubio made clear that Washington’s definition of “opening the strait” diverges from Tehran’s.

“Under no circumstances can we live in a world where we accept that this is normal, that you have to coordinate with Iran, you have to pay them a toll in order to go through the Straits of Hormuz,” he said.

Iran’s proposal, however, calls for a “new mechanism governing the strait”, language Washington is likely to interpret as precisely such an arrangement.

Jalalzadeh said Hormuz remains the most unresolved issue, not only between the two sides but within Iran itself.

“Neither side has a good offer on the table because even the Iranians do not yet know how they want to administer it,” he said.

The diplomatic clock

Still, several deadlines are now converging, and none favours any delay.

Araghchi arrived in Beijing on Wednesday for talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, his first visit to China since the war began in February.

He said, according to Iran’s state-affiliated ISNA news agency, Tehran would “only accept a fair and comprehensive agreement” in negotiations with the US.

The trip comes eight days before Trump’s scheduled summit with President Xi Jinping on May 14 and 15. US officials have openly pressed China to lean on Tehran to open up the strait.

But Beijing’s willingness to act as a pressure mechanism on Iran is constrained by its own confrontation with Washington, say analysts.

Last week, China’s Ministry of Commerce ordered domestic companies to defy US sanctions on five Chinese oil refineries buying Iranian crude oil, invoking for the first time a law allowing Beijing to retaliate against what it considers unlawful foreign sanctions.

China absorbed more than 80 percent of Iran’s shipped oil in 2025, according to analytics firm Kpler.

Gulf states are applying pressure from a different direction. Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in a statement on Tuesday, expressed concern over the “current military escalation” and explicitly backed Pakistan’s mediation efforts.

Riyadh called for the Strait of Hormuz to be restored to its pre-February 28 state and demanded the safe, unconditional passage of ships, a position that mirrors Washington’s stated demands and sits at odds with Tehran’s insistence on a new governing mechanism for the waterway.

On Wednesday, in Beijing, Araghchi spoke by telephone with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, according to Iran’s state news agency IRNA.

The two sides reviewed the latest regional developments and emphasised the continuation of diplomacy and cooperation among regional countries to prevent further escalation.

The approaching Hajj pilgrimage adds a separate constraint. With roughly 1.8 million Muslims expected to converge on Mecca from around May 25, including Iranian pilgrims, any escalation during that period would carry severe political costs for all parties.

Krieg said the converging deadlines made some form of agreement more likely without guaranteeing its substance.

“Washington wants to maintain military pressure but not burn the diplomatic path. In the language of negotiations, such a move is more of a limited confidence-building measure than a strategic concession,” Krieg said.

“The timetable increases the chances of a limited deal, but lowers the chances of a grand agreement.”

In its recent statement, the Gulf Cooperation Council declared that “Iranian attacks have also led to a sharp loss of confidence by the Council states in Iran, which requires Iran to take the initiative to make serious efforts to rebuild trust”. While rebuilding trust in our region is a lofty and essential objective, and while Iran has always taken the initiative in this regard, it is imperative for all sides to recognise their share in the current regrettable state of affairs.

The unprovoked aggression against Iran was the product of blatant miscalculations and mistakes. It was predicated on the illusion that Iran had been weakened and thus incapable of resisting and responding forcefully to a massive onslaught by two nuclear powers, aided and abetted by regional actors. Policymakers in Washington and Tel Aviv and in some regional capitals convinced themselves that a swift campaign of economic pressure, sabotage, covert operation, decapitation and indiscriminate war crimes could break the Islamic Republic and leave it with little opportunity to respond. They were wrong. Iran’s response, measured yet resolute, demonstrated not only its military resilience but also its capacity to react on a scale that reverberated far beyond the region.

Our Arab neighbours in the GCC had their grave share in these miscalculations – and Iran may have played a role in misleading them. For five decades, they consistently stood on the wrong side of history – supporting Saddam Hussein’s aggression and even assisting Israel to intercept Iranian missiles launched in self-defence following Israel’s murder of an Arab leader in Iran. Some of them actively encouraged the United States to take military action against Iran, even asking the latter to add Iranian naval forces to its list of targets. In return, they allowed the United States to establish military bases within their territories to launch and logistically support many of its acts of aggression and war crimes against Iran. They even publicly sided with the United States as it committed war crimes against Iran, reminding Iranians of the sad days when these Muslim brothers and sisters sided with Saddam Hussein as he used chemical weapons against Iranian and Iraqi Kurdish civilians. Extensive human and financial damages were inflicted upon the people of Iran through these illegal attacks, which were deliberately launched and sustained from the sovereign territories of our Arab neighbours. Even as it became unmistakably clear that the United States was preparing to commit systematic war crimes against Iran’s civilian population — including strikes on populated areas and critical infrastructure — they indeed proved unwilling to prohibit or even restrict the use of their land, airspace and military facilities for such war crimes against their Muslim brothers and sisters in Iran.

Some of our Arab neighbours in the GCC mistakenly hoped that Iran would either be incapacitated and unable to respond, or would continue to turn a blind eye to their complicity in an aggression that explicitly targeted its territorial integrity and even its very existence. That illusion proved tragically wishful, and Iran had no other choice but to reluctantly respond – still in a calibrated and restrained fashion – to the attacks launched or logistically supported from the territories of Council states.

To move forward, it is therefore imperative for our neighbours to disabuse themselves of such distorted perceptions of the past and their misplaced proclamations of victimhood. A transitional moment now confronts our region. The conflict has exposed the fragility of imported security architectures and the enduring strength of Indigenous power and regional security networking. Rather than doubling down on yesterday’s alliances, our brothers and sisters in the region will be well-advised to pause and reassess. The right lessons from this episode point towards a future grounded in self-reliance, regional agency and an inclusive security network.

First, Iran and its Arab neighbours are here to stay. Iran has weathered sanctions, foreign-sponsored terrorism, hybrid warfare and even decapitation for nearly five decades. Its population, though diverse, has repeatedly shown it will rally around the flag when faced with foreign intervention. Tehran possesses the means to counter existential threats, and its geography grants it leverage that can impose devastating consequences on global markets if pushed too far. Iran’s exercise of restraint for far too long created the misimpression that the Strait of Hormuz could be open to all while Iran was essentially deprived of it due to illegal and immoral US sanctions – from which our neighbours immensely benefit – building their fortunes on the unlawful miseries imposed on their Iranian brethren.

More importantly, Iran’s power is not imported or artificial; it is home-grown, rooted in unchangeable variables: a millennial history of an enduring and continuous civilisation-state, a rich and cohesive culture, a youthful and educated population and an instinct for survival sharpened by centuries of resisting external domination. No amount of foreign pressure can alter these foundations. Those neighbours who continue to bet against this reality can only blame themselves for ignoring geography, history and demography.

Second, the “security-and-development model” pursued by several Arab states has proven deeply flawed. For years, the formula was simple: purchase security by spending lavishly on procuring the most sophisticated US weapons systems and hosting US military bases – and even Israeli intelligence and terrorism centres – and invite foreign investment under the umbrella of that imported security. The model delivered neither genuine security nor the perception of stability required for sustainable economic growth.

The perception that some Arab capitals sided with the United States and Israel against a fellow Muslim country earned them infamy across the Islamic world. That reputational damage was later compounded by the US president’s crude and condescending rhetoric directed at them. Now, reports that Washington is contemplating forcing our neighbours to foot the bill for a war launched at their expense and on Israel’s behalf only confirm the cynicism at the heart of the arrangement. The greatest mistake would be to double down on this failed model once the guns fall silent. Continuing to tie national security and economic futures to external patrons who use their bases as a staging ground for aggression against neighbours and treat them as obedient clients is a recipe for perpetual dependence and recurring humiliation.

Third, the war has produced political and legal realities that our neighbours need to recognise. The presence of American bases – from which aggression to “annihilate Iranian civilisation” was launched and logistically supported – cannot be considered as an innocent and neutral security partnership, but as an existential threat to Iran – as it has been proven over the course of the past two wars and even in previous hostilities against Iran. These bases have been erected here not to protect their hosts but to harm Iran even at the expense of their hosts. Arab states that continue to host such installations are actively participating in the militarisation of the region, including the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint vital to their own economies.

Fourth, Israel’s deepening presence in the region has only brought conflict and will bring nothing but insecurity and the erosion of state independence. Israel does not merely occupy land; it penetrates political systems through sophisticated networks of lobbies and pressure groups. It hollows out sovereignty from within, turning national decision-making into an extension of its own interests. To understand the pattern, one needs only examine how AIPAC has captured key levers of power in Washington, or how similar organisations have replicated the model across European capitals. Just pay attention to the disgust in the United States about how Israel – which has never taken one single step to help its American benefactors – has imposed its whims at the expense of American blood and treasure. Arab states that have rushed to normalise ties with Tel Aviv – or want to replicate its behaviour – have traded long-term autonomy for short-term optics. The people of our region deserve better than to watch their governments’ foreign policies increasingly dictated from afar. A regime that is actively blackmailing its patron, including through the Epstein files, cannot be expected to treat any better those who want to outsource their security to its defunct iron dome.

Fifth, and most constructively, Iran’s past initiatives – such as the Hormuz Peace Endeavour (HOPE), the Muslim West Asian Dialogue Association (MWADA) or the Middle East Network for Atomic Research and Advancement (MENARA) – have demonstrated a genuine desire to reach out to neighbours in order to establish inclusive regional cooperation networks. Ignoring or even dismissing these overtures under the illusion that Washington would provide ironclad security has been a historic error. The path forward lies in revising past mistakes and embracing a genuinely local security networking regime rooted in shared interests.

West Asia is blessed with immense wealth, energy resources, ancient cultures, a common religion and centuries of intertwined histories. These assets should be capitalised upon to forge a new regional network capable of addressing common challenges – from water scarcity and climate change to economic diversification and technological advancement – without external tutelage. A security network architecture built by the region, and for the region, is no longer a utopian slogan; it is a strategic necessity.

The war has ended the era of comfortable illusions. It is evident that security cannot be purchased or outsourced. Nor can security be attained at the expense of the insecurity and threats against Iran. With this war, realities cannot be ignored, nor can Iran’s grievances be swept under the rug. Foreigners are only here to take advantage and will leave as soon as the costs outweigh the benefits. But we are destined to live together until the Day of Judgement.  Iran has shown it cannot be subdued by the war machines of the biggest evil powers, but is eager to live in peace with its Muslim brothers and sisters in the region. The real question is whether the rest of West Asia will have the wisdom to adapt to that enduring truth. Let us all seize this moment to build a future defined by respect, dignity, and mutual security and prosperity.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.