The US and Iran have agreed a two-week ceasefire in a deal brokered by Pakistan, which will see Iran open the Strait of Hormuz to shipping while negotiations continue for a more permanent settlement.
The US president, Donald Trump, announced the agreement on his TruthSocial platform less than two hours before the deadline of 8pm EST on April 7. Hours earlier he had posted: “A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
Talks are due to begin in Islamabad on April 10, where the two sides will discuss a ten-point plan presented by Iran on April 6. The plan offers to open the Strait of Hormuz in return for a permanent end to attacks by the US and Israel. Other conditions include lifting all primary and secondary sanctions, US withdrawal from the Middle East and Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz, with plans for a US$2 million fee for ships transiting the strait in future to be shared between Iran and Oman. Fees collected by Iran would be used for reconstruction.
The office of Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said that it supports the ceasefire but that the deal does not include Lebanon. But both Iran and Pakistan have said that Lebanon is part of the deal. This point of contention is likely to affect negotiations from the start.
An important issue to consider as all parties to the conflict continue to react to each other’s attempts at diplomacy is the level of trust involved. On March 31, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told Al Jezeera that Iran had “zero trust” in the US. He added that: “Twice – last year and now this year – we negotiated and the result was an attack by them. And so we don’t have any faith that negotiations with the US will yield any results.”
With Mark Saunders at the University of Birmingham and Chiara Cervasio at the British American Security Information Council (BASIC), I’ve been looking into the relationship between trust and distrust in international relations. The first thing to note is the importance of distinguishing between the absence of trust and the presence of distrust. In a situation where the parties involved neither trust nor distrust each other, they remain open to the possibility that negotiations could reach a state where trust develops. Where there is distrust, by contrast, at least one of the parties is sure that the other has hostile intentions.
Araghchi’s language of “zero trust”, then, is best understood as an expression of active distrust. This reflects a clear belief on the part of Iranian decision-makers that diplomatic engagement with Washington will be exploited and not reciprocated.
From Tehran’s perspective, the US has repeatedly acted in bad faith. It carried out its Operation Midnight Hammer on Iran’s nuclear facilities while engaged in active negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme. Again, on February 28, when the US commenced Operation Epic Fury in concert with Israel, mediators had reported that negotiations were proceeding well and reliable sources suggested that a deal was in the making.
Vital role of trust
In his interview with Al Jazeera, Araghchi mentioned that the US and Iran had been able to reach a deal “one time, years ago”. This was the Joint Comprehensive Programme of Action (JCPOA) negotiated with Iran in 2015 by the Obama administration with the UK, France, China, Russia and Germany as co-signatories. The agreement significantly rolled back Iran’s enrichment programme and set up a regime of inspections which – until the Trump administration pulled the US out of the agreement in 2018 – Iran was reportedly complying with.
The JCPOA agreement only became possible because of trust at the highest levels of US-Iran diplomacy. But this has clearly now hardened into active distrust on Iran’s part.
Trust requires a willingness to be vulnerable based on positive expectations about the intentions of others. So when states enter into negotiations they have to believe in the other side’s good faith and a commitment to using diplomacy to find a deal that will satisfy the interests of all sides. This requires a “presumption of trust”: a willingness to treat the other side as potentially trustworthy.
There’s an interesting historical parallel in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The episode, which brought the world to the brink of a nuclear confrontation, occurred during a period where the US and the Soviet Union deeply distrusted each other. But both the US president, John F. Kennedy, and the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, came to recognise their shared vulnerability in the face of the destructive power of each side’s nuclear arsenal. This recognition enabled them to develop a bond that allowed a path to de-escalation. But in this instance both leaders believed that the other understood the stakes and the importance of trustworthiness in reducing tensions.
Araghchi’s recent statement suggests that Iran has no such presumption of trust in the US. By communicating that Iran believes negotiations will be exploited by Washington rather than reciprocated, Araghchi is indicating that the basic condition for diplomacy, and with it the promise of trust, no longer exists.
If Trump is serious about negotiations, he will have to convince Iranian leaders that US diplomacy is not a cover for further military action. The lesson is not that trust is necessary for diplomacy to begin but that it cannot operate when one or both sides think they are going to be betrayed.
Nicholas John Wheeler has received funding from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council.