The United States and Iran are said to have agreed in principle to a framework that could wind down the Middle East war by reopening the Strait of Hormuz and committing Tehran to dispose of its highly enriched uranium, a senior US official told reporters on Sunday. Another American official went further, saying Washington believed Iran’s supreme leader had signalled he would not veto the broad outline of the deal.
To date, no Iranian source has publicly corroborated that assertion. A senior Tehran official told Reuters on Sunday that the Islamic Republic had not agreed to hand over its stockpile and that the nuclear file remained outside any preliminary agreement. Another Iranian official, quoted by The Guardian, added another layer, saying the proposed memorandum still requires approval from Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and the supreme leader, and that “one or two clauses” must be clarified before the document can move up the chain. Just as importantly for Pakistan, those reservations have already been conveyed to Pakistani mediators, confirming that Islamabad remains inside the most sensitive part of the process rather than merely watching from the corridor.
Washington’s warming to Pakistan has as much to do with the collapse of US-India ties as with Islamabad’s diplomatic acumen, a reminder that geopolitical shifts have made Pakistan an indispensable middleman.
As Washington presents the war launched in February as nearing a political settlement, attention in diplomatic circles has again turned to Pakistan. Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir, Pakistan’s chief of defence forces and army chief, left Tehran late Saturday after what Islamabad’s Inter-Services Public Relations described as a “short but highly productive” visit, during which he met President Masoud Pezeshkian, Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Interior Minister Eskandar Momeni to urge de-escalation and a “final understanding”. The fact that Iran’s remaining objections have been passed through the Pakistani channel suggests Islamabad continues to be trusted with the clauses that could make or break the draft.
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, meanwhile, tried to speak to both foreign and domestic audiences. He told Iranian media that Tehran was ready to assure the world it was not seeking nuclear weapons. “We are not seeking unrest in the region,” he said, arguing instead that Israel was the actor seeking to destabilise it.
The American president and his senior advisers have kept their language calibrated between negotiation and deterrence. President Donald Trump told reporters this weekend that a memorandum of understanding with Iran was “largely negotiated,” though “final aspects and details” were still being discussed. He insisted that the talks were proceeding in an “orderly and constructive manner,” and emphasised that he had instructed his representatives not to rush because “time is on our side”.
According to The Guardian, Gulf leaders, along with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, urged Trump by phone to avoid a return to bombing inside Iran, warning that renewed strikes could invite Iranian reprisals without delivering a political end-state.
For Trump, the careful cadence is as much about managing domestic hawks as about signalling to Tehran. He has given himself room to walk away: if talks collapse, he will “begin striking Iran again,” he told Axios, while his communications director, Steven Cheung, responded to critics on X with an expletive-laden rejoinder.
Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, has repeatedly echoed the optimism but emphasised that the work is incomplete: there has been “significant progress, although not final progress” and “Iran can never have a nuclear weapon”. Speaking in India, he also pushed back at Republican suspicion that Trump would accept a weak arrangement, saying the idea that the president would agree to a deal leaving Iran stronger on the nuclear front was “absurd” and “not going to happen”.
Trump, too, has begun defending the emerging framework against the charge that it resembles the Obama-era JCPOA. He insisted on social media that any deal he reaches would be “THE EXACT OPPOSITE” of the 2015 agreement he abandoned in 2018, while warning that “both sides must take their time to get it right” because “there can be no mistakes.” He also said the US blockade of Iranian ports would remain in force until any agreement was “reached, certified, and signed,” language clearly aimed at hawks who fear sanctions and blockade leverage may be surrendered too early.
Tehran’s public statements have been more cautious. Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said differences were narrowing but that Iran remained cautious after being attacked twice during negotiations. His colleague Javad Heiran-Nia, a Tehran-based analyst, told Al Jazeera that the dispute over sequencing is fundamental: Tehran wants the blockade lifted and Hormuz reopened before nuclear talks begin; Washington wants nuclear concessions first.
In Islamabad, these semitones are being parsed by a leadership that knows how narrow its margin is. Pakistan has emerged over three months of fighting as the single most reliable channel between Tehran and Washington. Analysts across several capitals now acknowledge that its advantage lies in access: it can speak to both sides without appearing to carry someone else’s flag. It has no permanent US bases on its soil and was among the first regional actors to condemn the February 28 attacks on Iran, a stance that enhanced its credibility in Tehran. It also remains a US partner and, with Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Egypt, has worked to give the talks regional cover. That makes Pakistan acceptable as a venue and an interlocutor.
To call Islamabad marginal at this stage is to misunderstand how wars begin to end. They do not always end with grand declarations. Sometimes they end because one channel remains open long enough for each side to deny what it is privately prepared to discuss.
Pakistan hosted one of the most consequential US-Iran contacts in decades in April, then managed to persuade both sides to extend the ceasefire despite drone strikes, mine incidents and public threats from both sides. It was Pakistan that delivered the US counterproposal to Tehran and then carried Iran’s 14-point plan back to Washington. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif publicly congratulated Trump on the progress and said he hoped to host the next round “very soon”. According to sources, talks could happen right after the prime minister returns from China.
Iran’s Fars news agency, close to the Revolutionary Guard, dismissed Trump’s claim that an agreement was nearly final as “inconsistent with reality” and said the management of the Strait of Hormuz, including route, timing, method of passage and permits, would remain the “monopoly” of the Islamic Republic.
At the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Paul Staniland wrote that Pakistan had emerged as a key mediator by passing messages between Tehran and Washington and hosting regional powers, but warned that Islamabad’s utility stems from its position as an interlocutor rather than an enforcer.
The Council on Foreign Relations has noted that Washington’s warming to Pakistan has as much to do with the collapse of US-India ties as with Islamabad’s diplomatic acumen, a reminder that geopolitical shifts have made Pakistan an indispensable middleman. Those strategic calculations are why the draft still reads less like a peace treaty than a ceasefire mechanism with political explosives packed into the fine print. According to officials cited in international reporting, the potential agreement would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, formally end the war, allow Iran to sell oil under sanctions waivers and create a 60-day negotiating track on nuclear issues, sanctions relief and frozen assets. The Guardian has reported that the arrangement could unlock as much as $20bn in frozen Iranian assets, including at least $12bn held in Qatar, while the timetable for the next phase could begin on June 5 in Pakistan. The most sensitive question remains the fate of Iran’s highly enriched uranium: some material may be diluted, while the rest could be transferred to a third country, with Russia already offering itself as a possible custodian.
Yet there are other numbers to remember. The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates Iran has 440.9kg of uranium enriched to 60 per cent, enough for roughly ten nuclear weapons if enriched further. The bar to verifying its removal is therefore high.
The battlefield, in that sense, still sits beneath the negotiating table.
Field Marshal Munir was in Tehran not to sign a treaty, but to keep the corridor open. He and Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi have been shuttling between capitals for weeks. These efforts, Pakistani officials say, are aimed at buying enough time for a text to mature and for Washington and Tehran to acclimate their hardliners to the idea of compromise. They have already produced one tangible outcome: the ceasefire has held since April 8, lasting longer than the period of open hostilities.
The writer is OpEd Editor (Daily Times) and can be reached at durenayab786 @gmail.com. She tweets@DureAkram.