World Affairs Dispatch
Bombs Before the Ink Dried
How the United States and Israel went from the negotiating table to full-scale war in 48 hours — and why the fragile ceasefire holding the Middle East together may already be crumbling.
On the morning of February 26, 2026, the Omani foreign minister sat across from both delegations in a quiet Geneva residence and told the world's press that the US and Iran were making substantial progress. "We are inches from something," he said. Washington's negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, had been going room to room relaying messages. Tehran's foreign minister Abbas Araghchi had not shaken their hands directly — the format was still indirect — but the mood, by most accounts, was the most constructive it had been in months.
Forty-eight hours later, the sky over Tehran turned orange.
In what the Pentagon called Operation Epic Fury and the IDF named Roaring Lion, the United States and Israel launched one of the most extensive coordinated military strikes since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was assassinated. Four of Iran's most senior military commanders were killed within the same half-minute. Iran's nuclear infrastructure — Natanz, Fordow, Isfahan — took direct hits. Civilian areas burned. A girls' school near a military base in southern Iran was struck, killing 148 children. Iran declared 40 days of national mourning and, within hours, began firing back.
This is the story of how a war that didn't have to happen began, why the peace talks that followed have stalled, and what the world faces as a brittle ceasefire continues to fray.
The Long Road to the Brink
To understand February 2026, you have to go back to April 2025, when Trump sent a personal letter to Khamenei and gave Iran a 60-day deadline to negotiate a nuclear agreement. The first round of talks convened in Muscat, Oman, on April 12, 2025, led by Witkoff and Araghchi in separate rooms, messages flowing through Omani intermediaries. Both sides called it constructive. A second round followed in Rome. A third in Muscat again.
By January 2026, the process had shifted from promising to poisoned. Iranian security forces had massacred thousands of civilians in what became the largest anti-government uprising since 1979. Trump responded by ordering the largest American military buildup in the region since the Iraq War. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said openly he wasn't sure you could make a deal with "these guys." JD Vance expressed frustration that the Supreme Leader himself never sat at the table. The Iranian side was negotiating, but Khamenei — the man who actually made decisions — was not in the room. Vance found that intolerable.
The February 6, 2026 talks in Muscat were, in retrospect, the last real chance. The Omani foreign minister later told CBS's Face the Nation that a deal was "within our reach." But the two sides remained apart on the core issue: the US was demanding zero uranium enrichment. Iran refused to surrender that right under any terms. The Wall Street Journal reported that Witkoff and Kushner had told Trump it would be "difficult, if not impossible" to reach an agreement.
The third round of indirect talks, held in Geneva on February 26, focused specifically on the nuclear file. The Americans had grown harder. According to the Journal, Witkoff told the Iranian delegation that Iran must destroy its three main nuclear sites and hand over its entire enriched uranium stockpile. The Iranians called it a maximalist demand. The Omani mediators remained hopeful. The Americans left disappointed. And Trump, back in Washington, said publicly he was "not happy" with how negotiations were going.
"By the time the third round of talks ended in Geneva, Trump had likely already made the choice to go to war."
— Arms Control Association analysis, April 2026The Arms Control Association, in a detailed post-mortem, concluded that no outcome short of complete Iranian capitulation would have averted the strikes. Trump had made his decision. The Geneva meeting was, in effect, the final courtesy call before war.
February 28: The Day the Sky Broke
The IDF's Brigadier General Effie Defrin later revealed that months of "strategic and operational deception" — doctored satellite imagery showing empty airfields, officers taking their cars home so parking lots looked normal — had been coordinated in advance. Three separate gatherings of Iranian officials were struck within the same 30 seconds of the opening salvo. It was a military operation planned in extraordinary detail.
Khamenei was killed by an Israeli strike on his residence. His daughter, son-in-law, grandchild and daughter-in-law were also killed. IRGC commander Mohammad Pakpour, Defence Minister Amir Nasirzadeh, chief of staff Mohammad Bagheri, and senior intelligence figures were eliminated in parallel strikes across Tehran. Iran's foreign minister initially told NBC News he believed the leadership was still alive. Within hours, the truth emerged. Iran declared 40 days of national mourning.
In an eight-minute video posted to Truth Social, Trump said the objective was to "eliminate imminent threats from the Iranian regime." Netanyahu said the goal was to remove "the existential threat posed by the terrorist regime in Iran." Mossad launched a Farsi-language Telegram channel, addressing "our Iranian brothers and sisters," telling them they were not alone. The Israelis were betting that the Iranian people, brutalised by their own government for years, would not rally behind the clerical regime. They were partly right. Celebrations broke out in some parts of Tehran alongside mourning.
Iran's response was immediate and regional. Missiles and drones rained on Israel. US military bases across Iraq, Syria, and the Gulf were hit. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait all reported incoming strikes. Jordan intercepted 49 drones and missiles threatening its territory. In Pakistan, protesters stormed the US consulate in Karachi, killing nine. And then came the move that would transform a regional war into a global economic crisis: Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz.
Roughly a fifth of the world's oil supply transits the Strait. Within days, crude prices surged past $100 a barrel. Shipping insurance costs spiked. Container traffic rerouted at enormous cost. The world's just-in-time supply chains, still fragile from years of disruption, shuddered.
United States: Full halt to uranium enrichment (20-year pause proposed), missile programme curtailed, proxy support ended. Sanctions lifted in exchange.
Iran: Right to enrich uranium preserved, 5-year limit maximum, guarantees against future strikes, sanctions relief, war reparations, civilian nuclear recognition.
Israel: Permanent elimination of Iran's nuclear capability. Netanyahu wants no deal that allows any enrichment to continue.
Pakistan: Broker of the current ceasefire, hosting negotiations in Islamabad. Wants regional stability and an end to the conflict.
Russia: Offered to store Iran's enriched uranium. Trump reportedly rejected the offer. Moscow remains a diplomatic ally of Tehran.
March: The War Nobody Could Stop
Through March, the war ground on with no sign of resolution. On March 4, Secretary Rubio announced that US-Israeli attacks on Iran would increase in intensity. The Basij headquarters were struck. Mojtaba Khamenei — Ali Khamenei's son, now the new supreme leader — survived an airstrike by what Iranian state media called a miracle. The IDF announced that an F-35I had shot down a Russian-made Iranian Yak-130 in air-to-air combat over Tehran — the first time an F-35 had ever downed a crewed fighter jet in history.
Trump's public statements in this period were erratic in a way that unsettled allies and adversaries alike. On March 6, he wrote on Truth Social that there would be "no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER." By March 9, he was claiming the war was "pretty much" over and that Iran's military had been destroyed — a statement directly contradicted by ongoing Iranian missile strikes on Israel. On March 15, he was demanding that NATO and China help reopen the Strait. On March 24, he claimed the US and Israel had "won."
Iran had not won. But it had not been destroyed either. Its military infrastructure had taken devastating damage — air defences, missile sites, nuclear facilities, command-and-control. But the IRGC's capacity to sustain missile and drone attacks had not been eliminated. Hezbollah in Lebanon reopened a second front, firing rockets into northern Israel and drawing Israeli retaliatory strikes that Lebanon's government condemned as war crimes. The war had spread to at least five countries simultaneously.
Inside Iran, the picture was more complicated. The street protests that had preceded the war — brutally crushed by Khamenei's security forces — had left a deeply fractured society. Some Iranians had quietly cheered Khamenei's death. Others had rallied against what they saw as foreign aggression. The regime's new leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, had none of his father's religious authority and faced an enormous legitimacy crisis. Human rights groups were documenting ongoing arrests, torture, and executions even as the government nominally sought peace.
April 7–8: Pakistan Steps In
By early April, the war had reached a kind of exhausted stalemate. Iran could not repel American airpower. The US could not force Iran's surrender. The Strait of Hormuz remained closed, oil prices remained elevated, and global markets were becoming restless. Trump had threatened to "destroy a whole civilisation" if Iran didn't make a deal. The rhetoric was apocalyptic. Something had to give.
That something was Pakistan. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and army chief General Asim Munir worked the phones across both capitals for days, developing a 10-point Iranian framework that could serve as a basis for a ceasefire. On April 7, Trump announced on Truth Social that he had agreed to a two-week truce. Iran's foreign minister confirmed acceptance hours later.
The ceasefire framework called for an immediate halt to hostilities, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and a 15–20 day window of negotiations between the US and Iran, mediated by Pakistan. Iran would submit its own proposal. The US would submit its 15-point counter-plan. Then they would negotiate. On paper, it was a sensible structure. In practice, it immediately began to fray.
The first dispute emerged within hours. Pakistan's PM Sharif said the ceasefire covered all fronts, including Lebanon. Netanyahu rejected this outright, saying Lebanon was not included. Trump backed Netanyahu. Hezbollah, which had announced a pause in attacks, watched Israel resume its strongest wave of assaults on Lebanon since the war began. Iran paused Hormuz traffic again in protest. The Lebanese government called the Israeli strikes a war crime. The IRGC warned of a "regretful response." The ceasefire was barely a day old and was already being tested from every direction.
Islamabad: The Talks That Failed
JD Vance, Witkoff, and Kushner flew to Islamabad. The Iranian delegation included Araghchi and parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. The talks were direct — face-to-face, for the first time — and ran for a full day. The setting was the Pakistani capital's diplomatic quarter, a city that had staked its considerable regional credibility on this process working.
It did not work. Vance announced on April 12 that the negotiations had produced no agreement. Trump said "most points were agreed to, but the only point that really mattered, nuclear, was not." Iran's foreign minister said an agreement was "just inches away" but blamed "maximalist demands" from US negotiators. Ghalibaf said trust had not been established. Baghaei, Iran's foreign ministry spokesman, said the talks ended with "gaps on major issues."
The specific gap was stark. The US was insisting that Iran stop all uranium enrichment for 20 years and hand over its existing stockpile of enriched material to a third country. Russia had offered to take it. Iran's foreign ministry said the uranium "will under no circumstances be transferred anywhere." Iran's counter-proposal was a maximum five-year pause on enrichment — a fraction of what Washington demanded. And Iran's parliament speaker Ghalibaf had said publicly, before the talks even began, that any negotiation with the US would be "unreasonable" if Israeli attacks on Lebanon continued. They were continuing.
"Trump said 'most points were agreed to, but the only point that really mattered, nuclear, was not.' Iran called American demands maximalist. Both left the table."
— Islamabad, April 12, 2026Trump responded by announcing a US naval blockade of all Iranian ports, effective April 13. If diplomacy wouldn't work, economic suffocation would. Iran called the blockade a breach of the ceasefire terms. The ceasefire, technically, was still in place — but it had become a ceasefire in name only.
The Strait, the Seizure & the Weekend From Hell
The week before this article was written was, by any measure, one of the most volatile seven days of the entire conflict. Iran's foreign minister began a diplomatic tour — Islamabad, Oman, Moscow — to build international pressure on the US to ease the blockade. Russia's Kremlin continued pushing its uranium-storage proposal as a way out. Trump rejected it.
On Friday, April 18, Iran announced the Strait of Hormuz was fully open. Oil prices dropped more than 10% in hours — one of the sharpest single-session falls in years. Traders breathed. Markets rallied. Then, by Saturday, Iran reversed course. The blockade of Iranian ports remained. Iran closed the Strait again. The rally evaporated. West Texas Intermediate surged back to $89 a barrel. Brent approached $95.
On Sunday, the US Navy fired on and seized the Iranian-flagged cargo vessel Touska — nearly 900 feet long — after it attempted to breach the US naval blockade in the Gulf of Oman. Trump announced the seizure on Truth Social in characteristically vivid terms. The Iranian Red Crescent said the ship was carrying medical supplies for dialysis patients and called the seizure a violation of international law. Trump called Iran's weekend actions a "total violation" of the ceasefire and renewed threats to strike Iranian power plants and bridges if no deal was reached.
The IRGC responded by seizing two foreign-flagged vessels of its own and firing on a third. The Strait — supposedly open, supposedly closed, supposedly being negotiated — had become a theatre of daily confrontation. China's President Xi Jinping issued his most explicit statement yet, warning that the Strait must be fully open for all vessels. The Pentagon dismissed as "cherry-picked" a classified briefing that estimated it could take six months to clear Iranian-laid mines from the waterway. The reality was that nobody had a clear timeline for anything.
Trump, asked about the impact on fuel prices, told Americans to expect to pay more "for a little while." He said the payoff was "Iran without a nuclear weapon." He then said he "could make a deal right now" but was willing to wait for an "everlasting" agreement. The contradiction — urgency one moment, patience the next — reflected the broader incoherence of American strategy in these weeks.
Where Things Stand Today
This morning, Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi arrived in Islamabad for meetings with Pakistani officials. The White House confirmed that Witkoff and Kushner are flying to Pakistan today to participate in direct talks. Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Baghaei posted on X that "no meeting is planned to take place between Iran and the US," and that Araghchi was there to meet Pakistanis only. Semi-official Iranian news agencies confirmed there were no negotiations with Americans on the agenda. Whether the two delegations are in the same building, passing messages through Pakistanis, or not speaking at all is, at time of writing, genuinely unclear.
This kind of mixed signalling has become the signature of this conflict. Both sides say they want peace. Both sides maintain positions the other calls unacceptable. Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group told Al Jazeera that the key hurdle was whether the US was willing to ease pressure enough to make diplomacy credible, and whether Iran was willing to curb its leverage enough to keep talks alive. Neither condition has been met.
Iran has been preparing a formal counter-proposal that Reuters reported on Friday may address some US demands on the nuclear file, Hormuz security, and proxy support. The framework under discussion involves a two-stage approach: first, extend the ceasefire; second, negotiate a comprehensive accord covering sanctions, nuclear safeguards, and maritime security. Egypt has joined Pakistan, Oman, Qatar, and Turkey in mediation efforts. The diplomatic infrastructure for a deal exists. The political will, on both sides, remains in question.
On the Israel-Lebanon front, a separate thread of diplomacy is slightly more hopeful. Israeli and Lebanese delegations met in Washington this week for a second round of direct talks — the first direct engagement between the two countries in decades — aimed at reinforcing their fragile ceasefire. The ceasefire has been extended three weeks. Israeli ambassador to the UN Danny Danon told CNN it was "not 100%" — Hezbollah fired rockets at northern Israel on Thursday, and Israel struck southern Lebanon in response, killing at least three people including a journalist. Netanyahu, meanwhile, disclosed he had quietly undergone treatment for early-stage prostate cancer, having withheld the news for two months so it would not be released "at the height of the war."
Deal reached: Iran submits a proposal that bridges the enrichment gap; both sides extend the ceasefire; negotiations enter a 45-day final phase. Probability assessed as low but not zero.
Extended stalemate: Ceasefire holds technically but violations continue on both sides. Blockade and Hormuz disruptions persist. Neither side escalates to full war. Markets remain volatile indefinitely.
Talks collapse, war resumes: Iran refuses further negotiations; the US resumes airstrikes. Iran retaliates with Hormuz closure and missile campaigns. Regional escalation risks become acute.
Regime change / collapse: Internal pressure in Iran reaches a breaking point; the new leadership structure fractures; a new government sues for peace on different terms.
The Question Nobody Can Answer
The deepest problem in these negotiations is not tactical — it is structural. The US and Iran do not trust each other. They have not trusted each other since 1979. The 2015 nuclear deal, the JCPOA, was the closest they came to a functional framework, and Trump killed it in his first term. Iran spent the years after that decision enriching uranium past levels needed for any civilian purpose — approaching 60% purity, edging toward weapons-grade. By the time the Geneva talks collapsed in February, Iran had accumulated more than 400 kilograms of uranium enriched to that level, according to the IAEA.
The Arms Control Association, in its devastating analysis of the pre-war negotiations, argued that the Trump team was ill-prepared for serious technical talks — that Witkoff did not understand the nuclear file well enough to negotiate it effectively, and that his characterisation of Iran's enriched uranium stockpile as essentially weapons-ready was factually misleading. Israel had already destroyed Iran's uranium conversion facility during the Twelve-Day War of June 2025, meaning the stockpile could not be further enriched without rebuilding infrastructure that, as of March 2026, no US intelligence assessed Iran had attempted to reconstruct.
In other words: the war may have been launched on an overstated threat assessment. The nuclear weapons Iran was supposedly on the verge of building were, per the US government's own intelligence, not actually being built. The decision to go to war — made, most analysts now believe, before the Geneva talks even ended — may have been driven less by an imminent nuclear threat than by a strategic determination that Iranian power needed to be permanently broken.
Whether that determination produces the outcome Washington wants — a chastened, contained, non-nuclear Iran that reopens Hormuz and stops funding regional proxies — or a different outcome entirely — a martyred nation, a galvanised population, a new leadership with nothing to lose and everything to prove — remains the most consequential open question in the world right now.
Trump says he could make a deal today. Iran says it wants dialogue. Both say the other side's demands are impossible. Witkoff and Kushner are on a plane to Pakistan. Araghchi is already there. Whether they will be in the same room, or even the same building, is uncertain as of this morning.
The ceasefire, extended once already, has no firm deadline. The Strait of Hormuz is nominally closed. Oil is at $89. A school in southern Iran is gone. A supreme leader is dead. And the world's most consequential negotiation is being conducted through intermediaries, in a city that didn't ask for any of this, between two governments that have not formally spoken to each other in 47 years.
What happens in Islamabad this weekend may determine whether the 21st century's most dangerous standoff finds an off-ramp — or whether the bombs that fell before the ink dried will fall again.
Sources: CNN live updates · UK House of Commons Library briefing · Al Jazeera analysis · Wikipedia ceasefire entry · Arms Control Association · NPR · Wikipedia negotiations entry
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