Nicole Jeffrey
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian is trying to keep alive a remarkably simple proposition in an increasingly complicated war: if Washington returns to the commitments it made in June, Tehran will do the same.
Speaking at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek on Tuesday, Pezeshkian said Iran would “immediately reciprocate” if the United States returned to its obligations under the interim memorandum reached between the two countries in June.
His statement came at perhaps the least promising moment for diplomacy.
The United States and Iran have just exchanged direct attacks for the first time since late July. U.S. forces struck Iranian launchers on Larak Island after American officials said Revolutionary Guard units appeared to be preparing attacks threatening navigation in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran responded by attacking U.S. military facilities in Jordan.
President Donald Trump has meanwhile threatened further retaliation, while Washington is intensifying economic pressure on an Iranian economy already struggling with sanctions, inflation and a collapsing currency.
Yet Pezeshkian is still talking about a deal.
That persistence says something important about the political battle taking place inside Iran.
The pragmatist’s argument
Pezeshkian is not offering Washington unilateral concessions. His formula is deliberately reciprocal.
The message is essentially: implement what was agreed, and Iran will implement its part immediately.
This allows him to advocate diplomacy without appearing to retreat under American pressure. It also shifts responsibility for restarting the agreement onto Washington.
The June memorandum had emerged after months of war and negotiations involving regional mediators. But the arrangement quickly unravelled amid disputes over implementation, sanctions and the Strait of Hormuz.
For Pezeshkian, restoring it offers something Iran badly needs: an exit from the costly condition between war and peace that has exhausted the economy without producing a decisive strategic outcome.
Iran’s economic pressures make that argument increasingly difficult to dismiss. The rial fell beyond 2 million to the dollar in August, while annual inflation reached 66% in July. Tehran insists it has sufficient foreign currency reserves, but even government officials acknowledge the strain on living standards.
Pezeshkian’s pragmatism is therefore not simply ideological moderation. It is rooted in economic arithmetic.
But Pezeshkian does not control Iran alone
The problem is that some of the most powerful forces inside the Islamic Republic draw a different lesson from the war.
Hardliners, including figures associated with the Paydari Front and parts of the security establishment, have argued that Iran should not surrender the leverage it gained through the Strait of Hormuz.
For them, reopening the waterway without extracting substantial American concessions would mean abandoning one of Tehran’s strongest remaining instruments of pressure.
That dispute emerged almost immediately after the June agreement. Hardline critics accused Iranian negotiators of conceding too much, while supporters of diplomacy argued that indefinite confrontation with a militarily superior United States would impose increasingly intolerable costs on Iran.
The political balance has become even more difficult since the war strengthened the influence of Iran’s military and security establishment.
Pezeshkian may be president, but decisions on war, the nuclear program, ballistic missiles and the Strait of Hormuz extend far beyond the presidency.
His room for maneuver therefore depends on whether the broader leadership concludes that diplomacy can preserve more Iranian leverage than continued confrontation.
Trump has his own hardline problem
There is a mirror image in Washington.
Pezeshkian’s offer assumes that the United States is prepared to return to the June framework. That assumption is far from certain.
The Trump administration has instead intensified sanctions while considering additional limited military operations designed to prevent Iran from rebuilding capabilities around Hormuz.
Trump therefore faces his own strategic choice.
He can attempt to convert military and economic pressure into a negotiated settlement, or continue using that pressure in the expectation that Iran will eventually accept significantly tougher terms.
The danger is that both sides may believe time is working in their favor.
Washington sees Iran’s economic deterioration as evidence that pressure works. Iranian hardliners see continued disruption around Hormuz as proof that Tehran still possesses the ability to impose costs on Washington and the global economy.
Pezeshkian sits between those two calculations.
Hormuz is the real test
This makes the Strait of Hormuz much more than another negotiating item.
Tehran has repeatedly linked unrestricted navigation through the waterway to American implementation of the June agreement. Washington, meanwhile, increasingly treats freedom of navigation as something that cannot be conditional on Iranian political demands.
That creates a fundamental collision.
Pezeshkian’s diplomatic strategy can succeed only if both governments conclude that an imperfect agreement is preferable to testing how far the other side can be pushed.
His advantage is that neither country appears eager to return to full-scale war.
His disadvantage is that powerful factions on both sides may still believe they can obtain a better settlement through more pressure.
The Iranian president is therefore attempting something more difficult than reopening negotiations.
He is trying to prove that pragmatism can produce results before the hardliners in Tehran — and the advocates of maximum pressure in Washington — prove the opposite