The core issues to be settled -- access to Hormuz, Israel's aggression in Lebanon, the question of Iran's nuclear programme, sanctions relief and compensation -- are thorny enough to require weeks of patient negotiation.
The most likely outcome of the opening sessions is that both sides take the measure of each other, establish what is and is not negotiable, and return home without having broken anything. That would count as progress.
Prem Panicker continues his must read blog on the Iran War.
The guns have mostly fallen silent.
A two-week ceasefire hangs over the Persian Gulf and the wider region and yet, even as the clock counts down to peace talks in Islamabad, the terms of the ceasefire continue to be disputed, and what is on the table in terms of an agenda depends on who you ask.
Strait of Hormuz Disruption Deepens
Meanwhile, the world's most critical energy artery, the Strait of Hormuz, remains virtually paralysed (external link).
Shipping traffic has slowed to a trickle, with barely a handful of vessels moving in the last 24 hours against the normal daily average of well over a hundred as Iran asserts its own rules of passage, warns of mines, and effectively demands a toll even while insisting the waterway is open. [Reuters (external link)]
Oil Supply Shock Hits Markets
The result, as fresh data shows, is the biggest single disruption to global oil supply in history.
The picture grows more complicated when you consider that Saudi energy facilities (external link), including the Ras Tanura refinery complex and the vital East-West pipeline, have taken fresh hits, knocking out hundreds of thousands of barrels per day (external link) of production and throughput. [Reuters (external link)]
Oil prices have responded accordingly, with Brent pushing toward the high nineties and analysts warning of further spikes if the strait does not get unblocked quickly.
This puts immediate pressure on every importing economy, India very much included.
Key Points
- Strait of Hormuz traffic has nearly halted, severely restricting global oil shipments and disrupting one of the world's busiest energy routes.
- Iran is asserting control over passage, warning of mines and imposing conditions despite claiming the waterway remains open.
- Attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure have reduced production capacity, compounding supply concerns and tightening global oil availability.
- Oil prices are rising sharply, with analysts warning of further spikes if shipping disruptions in the Gulf persist.
- Diplomatic efforts led by Pakistan aim to stabilise the situation, but major disagreements continue between the United States and Iran.
Saudi Oil Facilities Under Attack
Diplomacy, meanwhile, is attempting to catch up with events on the ground.
Pakistan has thrust itself into the ambitious role of mediator, hosting what are billed as make-or-break US-Iran talks in Islamabad this weekend.
Islamabad's investment is not casual: Both Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif and army chief Asim Munir have staked considerable political capital on preventing the kind of anarchy that could spill across their border.
The hope is that bringing the Americans and Iranians back to the table can convert the ceasefire into something durable. But the fault lines are already visible.
Iran made clear it will not even send a delegation unless the ceasefire is explicitly extended to Lebanon and 'elsewhere' -- a pre-condition that pulls Hezbollah and the wider axis of resistance into the conversation. (Latest reporting says that the Iranian delegation has landed in Islamabad. It remains to be seen whether Lebanon, particularly Hezbollah, will see this as an abandonment.)
Trump Pressure Mounts on Iran
In Jerusalem, Benjamin Netanyahu, with his corruption trial resuming on Sunday, has suddenly signaled a tactical pivot: He now says he will initiate direct talks with the Lebanese prime minister on disarming Hezbollah and establishing "peaceful relations."
Whether this is genuine de-escalation or a maneuver to keep the larger deal alive remains to be seen; either way, it underscores how domestic political calendars are now shaping battlefield and negotiating timetables.
In Washington, the strain is audible. President Trump has taken to lashing out in multiple directions: castigating (external link) various hitherto MAGA-leaning talking heads for breaking the faith, telling reporters that both Israel and Iran have already violated the ceasefire (external link), demanding that Iran stop charging toll (external link) for the use of Hormuz and calling it (external link) dishonorable, saying that NATO needs (external link) to send ships to Hormuz within days or else, and once again floating the idea of an American pull-out from the alliance.
At the same time, reports of continued US troop and asset movements toward the Gulf suggest the administration is keeping its military options very much on the table even as it pushes for a diplomatic off-ramp.
Pakistan Hosts US-Iran Talks
The negotiating team being dispatched to Islamabad -- a group that includes Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff -- carries with it the baggage of earlier, unsuccessful efforts and a clear deficit of trust from the Iranian side.
There is also an imbalance in qualifications. On the US side J D Vance, a war sceptic who has spoken both for and against the war, leads the delegation.
Neither Kushner and Witkoff have diplomatic qualifications. And they are up against highly skilled career diplomats Mohammad Bagher Galibaf, a former air force pilot, professor, and speaker of the Iranian parliament, and Seyid Abbas Araghchi, the erudite minister of foreign affairs.
Asking Vance, Kushner and Witkoff to pull off the multiple miracles required (Hormuz access, Lebanon, nuclear parameters, compensation) feels like a high-stakes gamble in an atmosphere already thick with mutual suspicion.
This, then, is the true nature of the current stasis. It is not peace so much as a high-pressure pause in which every actor is calculating, posturing, and waiting for the other to blink first.
Pakistan is attempting to play honest broker on a stage far larger than its usual brief.
Trump is trying to project strength while visibly impatient.
Iran is leveraging its control of the Strait.
Israel is balancing military reality against legal and political deadlines at home. [Reuters (external link)]
And beneath it all, the oil market, the shipping lanes, and the global economy are already feeling the cost of uncertainty.
How long this uneasy limbo can hold is the only question that matters right now.
One misinterpreted signal in the strait, one walkout in Islamabad, one strike in Lebanon, and the region could tip back into open conflict with consequences that will be measured not just in barrels and tankers, but in the price ordinary citizens pay at the pump from Mumbai to Manchester.
Netanyahu can't stop fighting. But is he winning the war? (external link)
In the Wall Street Journal, Anat Peled presents a sober battlefield accounting.
Despite over 20,000 strikes, Iran's regime survives, Hezbollah remains a 'potent threat', and Gaza's Hamas is still resisting.
The central tension -- operational success accumulating into strategic gain -- is crystallised by a former Israeli intelligence official.
Iran discovered something important, he says: that they control the arteries of the international economy. That discovery is now the dominant fact of the ceasefire.
Israel Complicates Trump's Push for Peace With Iran (external link)
The most useful mapping of the Trump-Netanyahu fault line comes from Michael Crowley in the New York Times.
Lebanon is where the divergence is sharpest: For Netanyahu it is an existential priority; for Trump it is, in one analyst's phrase, 'a tertiary concern at best'.
The key insight here is the domestic political logic that structures Netanyahu's every move.
Trump's approval makes 'Trump asked me to do this' a viable excuse with the right flank, and Netanyahu will use it to absorb pressure while continuing to fight.
Iran's Battered Leaders Emerge From War Confident -- and With New Cards (external link)
The Iran point of view comes from Yeganeh Torbati and Erika Solomon in the New York Times.
The regime's calculus is the mirror image of Netanyahu's: Just surviving two of the world's most powerful militaries is, in Iran's framing, a 'divine win'.
Control of the Strait of Hormuz has become, as one analyst notes, a more immediately usable lever than the nuclear program ever was.
The darker undercurrent: A population that is broadly dissatisfied, watching their country in ruins, governed by a leadership now more emboldened to suppress dissent and race toward a bomb.
Netanyahu-Trump Divisions on Iran War Threaten to Box In US (external link)
Ben Bartenstein of Bloomberg reports on the internal fault lines on both sides.
The key disclosure: Netanyahu was told of the ceasefire terms only shortly before the announcement, was not consulted on the Lebanon clause, and immediately challenged them with the biggest single Lebanon strike of the war.
The internal Washington divide: Kushner and Witkoff pressing the campaign, Rubio and Vance urging caution, has now shifted, for the moment, toward the latter.
The question the piece leaves hanging: Whose war aims was the US serving?
Lebanon's 10 Minutes from Hell (external link)
In the Financial Times, Raya Jalabi produces a ground-level piece that sits beside all the geopolitical analysis.
One hundred targets in ten minutes, at least 303 dead -- a higher toll than the 2020 Beirut port explosion.
The detail that lingers is this: Displaced Lebanese had begun returning home, believing the ceasefire covered them.
The strikes came without warning. Israel called it Operation Eternal Darkness.
Trump Is Wishcasting Victory in Iran (external link)
The transcript of a Radio Atlantic conversation between Adam Harris, Tom Nichols and Nancy Youssef is the sharpest read on American accountability.
The core diagnosis: This was a regime-change war from day one; the CIA director reportedly called the 'regime will fall' scenario 'farcical', and when it didn't happen, the administration had no strategic direction to fall back on.
Nichols' formulation is worth the read: operational successes without strategic direction don't get you toward victory.
Youssef's observation on Iran is equally pointed: One side had no clear aims; the other had one: to survive.
Donald Trump Is the War's Biggest Loser (external link)
The Economist's leader, in this week's edition, does not equivocate.
The three war aims -- taming Iran, toppling the regime, eliminating the nuclear threat -- have all fallen short. Iran has a new supreme leader, harder-line than his father.
The nuclear programme is degraded but not dismantled, and the incentive for Iran to race toward a bomb has increased.
The Gulf states are asking whether they can depend on America.
The piece's closing argument on the 'might is right' fallacy is the most pointed editorial judgment in today's reading.
The Costs of Trump's Iran-War Folly (external link)
Through this war, staff writer Susan B Glasser of the New Yorker has produced a series of forensic pieces (external link). This one is among her sharpest.
The immediate metric of failure, she says, is this: As of Thursday, only seven ships transited the Strait despite a ceasefire supposedly conditioned on its 'complete, immediate, and safe' opening.
Glasser's larger frame: Trump has traded one Supreme Leader Khamenei for another, harder-line one, while authorising Iran to charge tolls on a waterway that was previously free.
The parallel to Putin, back in 2022, ordering his generals to invade Ukraine with their dress uniforms packed and ready for a victory parade in Kyiv, is apt. And damning.
A Ceasefire Will Not Prevent the Iran War's Economic Harm (external link)
The Economist presents the economic ledger.
Brent is projected to end the year around $75, roughly a quarter above pre-war expectations.
Qatar's Ras Laffan export facility lost 17% of its capacity and will take years to repair.
A fertiliser shortage has already disrupted planting seasons across the northern hemisphere and parts of Africa.
The silver lining, energy disruption accelerating the push toward renewables, is real, but comes as cold comfort for the importing economies that will feel the cost first.
NATO Labors to Avoid Becoming Another Casualty of the Iran War (external link)
In the New York Times, Anton Troianovski examines the position of the alliance.
Trump's fury at NATO for not backing a war he launched without consulting them has deepened a gulf that predates this conflict.
The reported option of moving US troops from 'unhelpful' Western European countries to Poland and Romania is the practical expression of that anger.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte's diplomatic phrasing -- 'we have the political home front to take care of' -- is a carefully calibrated understatement.
Trump Officials Deny Threatening Vatican Over Pope Leo's Criticisms (external link)
In the Financial Times, Amy Kazmin looks at an outlier.
Yesterday, the Internet was abuzz with reports that the Pentagon had summoned (external link) the US representative of the Vatican for a 'bitter lecture'.
The provocation appears to have been Pope Leo (external link) saying that God rejects the prayers of leaders who wage wars.
The reported invocation, by the Pentagon, of the Avignon papacy [Wiki (external link)] as an implicit threat to an American-born pope who called for US citizens to lobby Congress against the bombing is, whatever its accuracy, a signal of how far the administration's tolerance for dissent has shrunk.
The Vatican's core objection, to Hegseth's framing of the campaign as a religious war, a crusade, goes to the deepest legitimacy question the war has raised.
1979 Is the Year That Explains Donald Trump (external link)
I saved this piece for The Atlantic by Jonathan Lemire and Isabel Ruehl for the end because this is the historical lens through which everything else looks different.
Trump's Iran hawkishness is not new. It dates to a 1980 NBC interview and has not substantively changed in 46 years.
The madman theory, the take-the-oil instinct, the regime-change fantasy: All of it was on the record before he was president.
The Pentagon, the Atlantic notes, has a plan for a ground invasion of Kharg Island awaiting Trump's approval if the ceasefire fails.
That is an idea he had floated to The Guardian in 1988.
In passing...
This weekend, the focus is on Islamabad.
The two delegations meet on Saturday, and the gap between them is wide enough that expecting a breakthrough in the first session would be optimistic to the point of naivety.
The core issues to be settled -- access to Hormuz, Israel's aggression in Lebanon, the question of Iran's nuclear programme, sanctions relief and compensation -- are thorny enough to require weeks of patient negotiation.
Trump is not present, but he will be briefed at every stage. His Truth Social will reflect his changing moods depending on how the negotiations are going.
That is not going to make 'patient negotiation' easy.
The most likely outcome of the opening sessions is that both sides take the measure of each other, establish what is and is not negotiable, and return home without having broken anything. That would count as progress.
A walkout, a fresh strike in Lebanon, or an Iranian move in the strait would count as the alternative.
This blog will be back Monday. By then, we should know which way the first weekend went.
Photographs curated by Manisha Kotian/Rediff
Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff
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