On his 80th birthday, President Donald Trump announced what many in Washington, Jerusalem, Abu Dhabi, Manama and elsewhere had been waiting to hear: the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran had reached a framework agreement aimed at ending a dangerous war, reopening the Strait of Hormuz and initiating a new round of negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme.

This is good news. It should be welcomed. But it should not be romanticised.

No serious person in the Middle East is looking for war. The populations of the region – Israelis, Emiratis, Bahrainis, Kuwaitis, Lebanese, Yemenis and above all the Iranian people themselves – have lived for far too long in the shadow of rockets, militias, threats and ideological extortion. They want security, dignity, prosperity and a future for their children. They do not want yet another generation sacrificed to revolutionary fantasies or strategic miscalculations.

The real obstacle to peace has never been the Iranian nation. It is the regime that rules Iran against the will and wishes of its own people – a regime that behaves less like a normal state than a revolutionary security cartel. Its power rests on domestic repression and foreign destabilisation. Its proxies have terrorised Israel, threatened stability in the Gulf region, paralysed Lebanon, destroyed Yemen and turned the Palestinian cause into an instrument of regional influence rather than a path to dignity and prosperity.

It is for this reason that this framework agreement, if implemented seriously, represents an opportunity.

President Trump deserves recognition for having understood something that many traditional diplomats often overlook: in the Middle East, diplomacy without power is rarely diplomacy, it is theatre. His method has often been described by critics as transactional. Perhaps it is. But transactions can be useful when they deliver results, and there is no virtue in an elegant failure. If this framework silences the weapons, reopens a vital artery in the world economy, reduces immediate risks to Israel and the Gulf region and creates a diplomatic window for dealing with Iran’s nuclear programme, then it is a meaningful achievement.

The central question now is unavoidable: what happens next?

The answer will determine whether this becomes a strategic turning point or merely another pause before the next crisis.

The first principle must be clarity. Iran cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons – not under this framework agreement, not after sixty days, not in five years, not through ambiguity, delays, concealment or gradual normalisation of violations. The nuclear issue cannot be postponed until it becomes irrelevant, while sanctions relief, access to oil and the release of frozen funds are granted in advance. Any serious diplomatic process must begin with verifiable commitments, intrusive inspections, full accounting of enriched uranium stockpiles and consequences that are automatic rather than rhetorical.

The second principle must be enforcement. An agreement with Tehran is not a contract with a normal government. It is an agreement with a fractured, opaque and militarised system, where diplomats may sign while commanders sabotage, presidents may speak while the Revolutionary Guard decides, and moderates may promise one thing while hardliners prepare the next escalation.

This is not an abstract concern. Iran’s recent posture follows a familiar pattern: negotiate under pressure, demand relief, preserve influence and use regional proxies to complicate the situation on the battlefield. The Revolutionary Guard is the backbone of the regime’s coercive power at home and its power projection abroad. Figures such as Ahmad Vahidi symbolise the problem. The West is not negotiating only with foreign ministers and eloquent diplomats. It is negotiating with a security apparatus marked by hostage-taking, proxy wars, repression, missile programmes and ideological militancy.

Therefore the framework agreement must not be limited to the Strait of Hormuz and the nuclear issue. It must also address the mechanisms behind regional destabilisation.

Iran’s ballistic missile and drone capabilities must be curtailed. Its support for Hizbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other armed groups must be cut, monitored and punished. Its financial networks, front companies, arms transfers, training channels and intelligence support to proxies must be exposed and dismantled.

If Tehran is allowed to trade temporary calm in the Gulf region for continued pressure from proxies in Lebanon, Gaza, Syria, Iraq or Yemen, the agreement will not lead to peace but simply move the war from one front to another.

The third principle must be regional consultation. Israel has direct security concerns that cannot be dismissed as a political inconvenience. The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait lie within missile range of Iranian power and within economic range of Iranian coercion. Lebanon and Yemen know the human cost of Iran’s imperial ambitions. Any serious American strategy must encompass these states’ concerns, rather than asking them to trust a process designed elsewhere.

There is also a moral dimension that Washington must not forget: the Iranian people.

The Iranian people are the regime’s first victims and the natural allies of any future peace. They have been beaten, imprisoned, censored, tortured and killed for demanding the most basic rights: dignity, freedom, women’s rights, economic opportunity and a normal life.

Washington does not need to make regime change the declared goal of this diplomacy. But the United States should not grant the regime legitimacy without conditions. Human rights must remain part of the framework: internet freedom, political prisoners, women’s rights, the right to demonstrate and accountability for repression.

It is here that President Trump should consider a bold political and economic supplement to the security negotiations: entrusting Jared Kushner with a parallel track focused on the future of the Iranian economy, but designed for the benefit of the Iranian people – not to enrich the regime.

Kushner’s achievement with the Abraham Accords was not only that he helped negotiate documents, it was that he understood the strategic power of economic imagination in a region exhausted by ideology. The same logic should now be applied to Iran. Any easing of sanctions, investment mechanism, infrastructure plan or economic opening must be tied to transparency, development of the private sector, young entrepreneurs, women, students, technology and civil society – not to the Revolutionary Guard, not to the clerical establishment and not to the regime’s coercive networks.

Iran is a great civilisation with a young, educated and creative population. The country should be a bridge between Asia, the Gulf region, the Caucasus, Europe and the Mediterranean. It should export talent, technology, culture, energy and ideas – not fear, drones, militias and repression. The purpose of diplomacy should not be to save the regime from the consequences of its own mistakes. It should be to ensure that the Iranian people, and not their jailers, are the ultimate winners of peace.

If this framework prevents a war, it deserves support. If it prevents a nuclear-armed Iran, it will deserve the praise of history. But if it allows the regime to get back on its feet, rearm, finance proxies, conceal nuclear material and suppress its own people with renewed confidence, it will be remembered not as peace, but as a pause.

The Middle East does not need yet another illusion. It needs a disciplined peace – generous towards the Iranian people, firm towards the regime and marked by the pragmatic regional logic that led to the Abraham Accords.

This is the test. And it begins now.

Originally published at Gatestone Institute on 15 June 2026.