Like the fruit of the medlar tree, the ceasefire between Iran and the United States threatened to turn rotten before it was ripe. Barely hours after it was announced, Israel launched a series of blistering attacks on Beirut, while both Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates reported Iranian drone strikes. Each side accused the other of misrepresenting the deal, with confusion over its precise terms. Amid that backdrop, negotiators finally met in Islamabad, but eventually walked away after failing to reach an agreement. President Trump responded almost immediately by announcing a full blockade of all Iranian ports, with a series of commensurate threats following from Iran, which threaten retaliation against partners in the Gulf.

All this reveals the extent to which each side distrusts the other, a factor that will provide the most significant hurdle in securing a lasting settlement. While some reports suggest that mediators may soon meet again, conflicting statements from Pakistani and Iranian officials have made it difficult to read what the Islamic Republic will do next. In any case, the region’s potted history of conflict and conciliation reveals an uneven catalogue of both success and failure from high-level diplomatic initiatives.

The strongest parallels for the current negotiations come from the aftermath of the 1973 war between Egypt and Israel. It was the second time the two countries came to blows in just six years, with the previous encounter, in 1967, resulting in Israel capturing the Sinai. The resulting humiliation set the stage for the Yom Kippur War, which ultimately produced an unexpected and remarkably enduring peace. In the event, neither Egypt nor Israel trusted one another, but the events of recent years had convinced both parties that some form of diplomatic settlement was preferable to a constant cycle of conflict.

One of the most important factors in securing a lasting deal was the fact that each side was able to project victory to their domestic audiences. Launching a rapid advance, Egyptian forces pierced the Bar Lev line, a sand and concrete fortification along the eastern shore of the Suez Canal, in just under two hours, using water cannons to blast their way through Israeli fortifications. The Israelis were caught by surprise, forced to retreat, and had to concede ground to almost 100,000 advancing Egyptian troops. By the time Israeli Defense Forces launched an audacious counterattack to encircle their adversaries, a plan masterminded by Ariel Sharon, the damage was already done. Anwar Sadat could argue that he burst the IDF’s aura of invincibility and had demonstrated to the Israelis that an indefinite occupation of the Sinai would come with associated costs. Indeed, the pace of their advance shocked military planners in Jerusalem. This allowed Sadat to enter negotiations more emboldened than he might otherwise have been. By contrast, the Israelis had survived the assault and could point to Sharon’s counteroffensive.

Although active hostilities lasted for only three weeks, the conditions they created were radically different from the environment that immediately preceded it. One year after Sadat became president in 1970, he offered to recognise Israel and reopen the Suez Canal if the Sinai were returned to Egypt. It followed intense efforts by Gunnar Jarring, a Swedish diplomat leading UN efforts to find a lasting settlement between Israel and its neighbours following the 1967 war. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir had rejected the proposal, fearing that an Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai would leave the country vulnerable to attack in the future. The United States was also sceptical. Neither President Richard Nixon nor his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, regarded Sadat as serious or stable enough to actually deliver on the plan.

The diplomatic stasis helped to convince the Egyptian leadership that only military action would help them recover the peninsula. During celebrations held in 1973 to mark the third anniversary of America’s closure of the Wheelus Air Base in Libya, which followed on the heels of Muammar Gaddafi’s rise to power through a coup in 1969, Sadat concluded that ‘what was taken by force can only be recovered by force’. In the aftermath of the October 1973 war, both the Americans and Israelis were prepared to take Egypt more seriously, setting the stage for Henry Kissinger’s now infamous ‘shuttle diplomacy’ when he first arrived in Aswan, southern Egypt, in January 1974.

Iranian negotiators find themselves in a similar situation. Although their position is not necessarily one of strength, it is one of earned respect. Their conduct during the war has, by all accounts, demonstrated remarkable resilience. Despite suffering a catastrophic series of assassination strikes against senior leadership figures, including the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the regime has persisted. Indeed, it long warned of its readiness for precisely this moment, creating contingency plans and strategising what an asymmetrical military response should look like when confronted by far superior conventional forces. In the event, Iran’s command structures have held up remarkably well and managed to replicate the Suez closure of 1967 by strangling the Hormuz chokehold, despite suffering an estimated 13,000 airstrikes over just 40 days. President Trump has conceded that he was surprised by the extent of Iran’s retaliation.

That has emboldened the Iranians, but the recent conflagration has also brought the limits of their power into sharp relief. ‘This was a clash of human will. Some people are tired. But they are more frustrated on the Iranian side,’ General Kenneth McKenzie Jr told the Jerusalem Post. In this context, both sides will be able to project a message of success to domestic audiences if they can extract transactional concessions from one another. Kissinger’s success after 1973 was predicated on his ability to move both Sadat and Meir away from grand bargaining and maximalist demands towards more proximate and tangible goals. President Trump has already made it clear he is primarily concerned with the reopening of Hormuz. That has been the starting point of discussions, although it will probably remain shuttered, while more contentious aspects such as support for proxies, strike rules and nuclear enrichment remain unresolved.

A significant sticking point here relates to trust. Iran has stated that it simply doesn’t trust President Trump, regarding him as reneging on promises and frequently changing his mind. One of Iran’s most visible English-language advocates, Mohammad Marandi, tweeted: ‘Trump’s words are worthless. He’s a Zionist tool and a representative of the Epstein class.’ Although Marandi is ostensibly a professor of English literature at Tehran University, he is known to have deep ties to the IRGC. Indeed, he fought with them during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, was an adviser to the Iranian negotiating teams whose work led to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal, and is the son of Alireza Marandi, once the personal doctor of the late Supreme Leader.

In recent years, Marandi has used his position to offer an insight into the thinking of the Iranian regime. On their attitude to President Trump, he has explained:

[Trump] tore up the JCPOA nuclear deal. Forget the fact that when we had negotiations with the United States nine months ago, he was conspiring with Netanyahu to attack the country. Forget the fact that just before this war he did the same thing over again. He was negotiating but [was also] secretly conspiring. All of that aside which makes it impossible to be able to negotiate with such a person and have the paper that he signs [having] any value.

Shortly before the Iranian delegation left for Islamabad, Marandi insisted Tehran would remain intransigent. ‘Iran’s position is not going to change, and it will continue to control the Strait of Hormuz until its requirements are met,’ he said.

When Sadat made a deal with the United States, it stemmed from a wider loss of confidence in the Soviet Union, which had hitherto been Egypt’s traditional partner. He came to the view that Soviet support was only useful for the supply of arms, but that it was incapable of convincing Israel to retreat from the Sinai and creating a durable peace. Sadat repeatedly asserted that the United States held 99 per cent of the cards for Middle East peace. It was that belief which led him to recalibrate Egypt’s diplomatic focus, a process that ultimately restored the Sinai and created lasting peace. In Kissinger, Sadat’s pragmatism eventually found an unorthodox diplomatic operator who was willing to do things differently.

Of course, it is a tired truism to observe that Trump is erratic and whimsical. In the current context, however, that could work for him as much as it is working against him. There are no golden calves for this administration. Trump’s is a presidency of praxis guided only by force of personality, breaking dramatically from an international system previously defined by punctilious managerialism. Eager for a deal, it is possible Trump might get carried away and force concessions from the Israelis that other presidents, wedded to a more traditional modus operandi, could not secure.

This raises broader concerns over what else could go wrong. Talks in Islamabad were bilateral discussions between the United States and Iran, although the ripples of this conflict reach much further. Yet negotiations are unlikely to capture the full kaleidoscope of actors or their aims. Most notably, Israel was not represented in Islamabad. Not only was it absent, but Pakistan’s Defence Minister also published a highly incendiary tweet just hours before negotiations were due to start. He wrote:

While peace talks are underway in Islamabad, genocide is being committed in Lebanon. Innocent citizens are being killed by Israel, first Gaza, then Iran and now Lebanon, bloodletting continues unabated. I hope and pray people who created this cancerous state on Palestinian land to get rid of European jews burn in hell.

It was since deleted – but not before undermining Pakistan’s already threadbare claims to be a neutral broker. ‘Israel views very gravely these blatant antisemitic blood libels from a government claiming to “mediate peace”,’ wrote Israeli Foreign Minister, Gideon Sa’ar, on X, adding that ‘Israel will defend itself against terrorists who vow its destruction.’

Indeed, those terrorist movements are also absent from discussions, leaving the status of Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iraqi militias unresolved. One of Iraq’s most prominent militant groups, Kataib Hezbollah, even kidnapped an American journalist in Baghdad last month, although she was eventually released following a prisoner swap with the Iraqi government. The State Department has followed up by issuing a $10 million reward for information on the group’s leader Ahmad al-Hamidawi. Iran regards these proxies as an integral component of their defence, explaining its dogged commitment towards them. Marandi even described attempts by the Lebanese Prime Minister, Nawaf Salam, to resolve the issue of Hezbollah through direct negotiations with Israel as ‘obstructing the ceasefire’. His words underscore the extent of Tehran’s disdain for Lebanese sovereignty and reveals just how central Hezbollah remains to Iran’s plans. Nonetheless, they illustrate why any discussions to secure a durable settlement to the current crisis in the Middle East will need to extend far beyond a dialogue between two parties. This is about more than the US and Iran alone.

The exclusion of invested parties from peace talks undermines their ability to succeed. In this respect, the Islamabad talks call to mind the various efforts to mediate an end to the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-90. These failed for the very same reason – a failure to bring all parties to the table – until the Taif Agreement, sponsored by Saudi Arabia, was finally negotiated in 1989. By then, the Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians, Israelis, Palestinians and the United States were either represented in discussions or had lost interest, being distracted by priorities elsewhere, or simply exhausted. By contrast, the earlier Riyadh and Cairo summits of 1976 failed because the Syrians worried about losing their influence. Other frameworks failed for similar reasons, where one party or another felt its interests were overlooked or excluded, including the Multinational Force in Lebanon (1982), the Lebanon Reconciliation Talks in Geneva (1983) and the Tripartite Agreement (1985).

To their credit, one area where current US-Iran negotiations are avoiding the pitfalls of previous diplomatic initiatives is by not postponing the discussion of thorny or difficult issues. JD Vance has stated that a major sticking point in Islamabad centred on Iran’s desire to continue enriching uranium. ‘We need to see an affirmative commitment that [Iran] will not seek a nuclear weapon, and they will not seek the tools that would enable them to quickly achieve a nuclear weapon,’ Vance said. ‘That is the core goal of the president of the United States, and that’s what we’ve tried to achieve through these negotiations.’ It was possible that negotiations could have focused on immediate tangible goals such as reopening the Straits of Hormuz, while postponing complex topics like this, thus storing up problems for another round of conflict. In many respects, the front-loading of immediate gains and the avoidance of complexities helped undermine the Oslo Accords of 1993, by leaving the final status of several key issues unaddressed, including Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, borders and sovereignty.

By contrast, Kissinger’s experience in reaching a settlement between the Egyptians and Israelis was predicated on a careful series of negotiations that aimed to develop trust where none previously existed. After all, both parties had been at war four times in the last 25 years. Kissinger therefore focused on agreeing narrow aims and clear sequencing around set milestones. This included an initial Israeli withdrawal 20 miles from the Suez to demonstrate military de-escalation. Later, they returned control over the strategic Mitla and Gidi passes to Egypt as well as, notably, the Abu Rudeis oil fields. It provided much-needed relief for the Egyptian economy and was accompanied by the signing of an interim UN agreement in which both parties agreed ‘conflict between them and in the Middle East shall not be resolved by military force but by peaceful means’. Two years later, in 1977, Sadat was in Jerusalem addressing the Knesset, paving the way for an historic peace treaty between Egypt and Israel that would eventually be signed in 1979.

No one expects a replay of those events, but the Egyptian-Israeli rapprochement reveals how both confidence and a transactional peace can be achieved. Much of the global economy will depend on this. There is an acceptance that talks in Islamabad earlier this month were never going to resolve matters between the United States and Iran. They are best viewed as the start of a long and complex process, not the final chapter. ‘We should not have expected to reach an agreement in a single session,’ conceded Esmaeil Baghaei, spokesman for the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. ‘Contacts between us and Pakistan, as well as our other friends in the region, will continue.’