Inside the chaotic US-Iran talks that let Trump claim victory, but not yet peace

WASHINGTON - It was fight night on the White House lawn. Beneath a great steel canopy nicknamed “the Claw”, Justin Gaethje did a backflip off the caged ring in the centre of the South Lawn after winning the Ultimate Fighting Championship title card. In the audience, the president, newly 80, had just announced that the Iran war was over, and the Strait of Hormuz was open.

Hours earlier, around when he was gathering for a birthday dinner with family inside the White House, Donald Trump had fired off a social media post announcing a deal to end the Iran War he’d started nearly four months earlier: “The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all! I hereby fully authorise the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade,” he declared on Truth Social. “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!”

But as with so much of the war, Trump’s rhetoric ran ahead of the facts on the ground. The text hadn’t been released, the formal signing was still days away and the hardest questions – nuclear, sanctions, Lebanon – had been kicked down the road.

It almost didn’t happen. That morning around 6.45am in Washington, Israel bombed southern Beirut – exactly the kind of move that Iranian negotiators warned would blow up the talks. Israel said it was responding to projectiles fired by Tehran-backed Hezbollah.

Across the West and the Gulf, critics saw something else: a last-ditch effort by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to scuttle a deal he’d been shut out of. Iran balked, but four hours later, Trump took to social media to criticise the Israeli attack, which he said “should not have happened”.

His frustration with his wartime partner was no longer secret. He told Axios that afternoon that the signing was delayed a few hours because of the strikes, and that he’d called Netanyahu to berate him over it. “I was so pissed off. I let him know,” he said in a expletive-laden tirade.

Within a few days, the US president would be echoing some of Israel’s staunchest critics. But first he needed Iran to agree to sign.

Three hours later, Trump had the thing he’d been promising for months: a deal, or at least the framework for one. There were no details beyond leaked drafts that suggested a financial bonanza for Iran: immediate oil waivers, potentially imminent sanctions relief, and a possible US$300 billion (S$384 billion) reconstruction fund backed by Gulf money. For Washington, the gains were narrower: a reopened Hormuz, an end to the fighting, and another pledge that Iran wouldn’t pursue a nuclear weapon.

The war had already cost the US tens of billions of dollars, strained munitions stocks and its alliances, sent pump prices soaring and roiled the global energy market – all to achieve a deal that risks falling short of the JCPOA struck by President Barack Obama that Trump had long criticized and tore up during his first term.

As the cage emptied on the South Lawn, Trump prepared to fly to the Group of 7 meeting in Evian, France, where European leaders were ready to lavish praise on a deal they had not read.

This account is based on interviews with Western and Middle Eastern officials familiar with the talks, who requested anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters, as well as draft language, White House talking points and contemporaneous accounts of the mediation efforts.

As UFC fighters spattered blood on the canvas in front of the White House, Qatari mediators were in Tehran grinding through 17 hours of shuttle diplomacy, carrying messages between Iranian officials and the Americans, according to people familiar with the discussions. It was the culmination of four weeks of quiet mediation the wealthy Gulf state had undertaken at the request of both sides, each seeking a deal to end the war that had become a burden back home.

Until mid-May, Qatar had played a supporting role, alongside Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey, in the search for an off-ramp. Doha had long made itself indispensable as a regional intermediary, but it had deliberately avoided taking the lead here, in part because Tehran had targeted it and its Gulf neighbors, including hitting the US$20 billion Ras Laffan LNG facility, the people said. But after Tehran and Washington asked it to get involved more directly, it secretly sent a delegation to Tehran – via Turkey, in order to evade detection – led by senior mediators Ali al-Thawadi and Hamad al-Kubaisi, to get a better understanding of Iran’s position, the people said.

They were in Tehran working on the contours of a deal on May 17 when Trump again publicly floated bombing Iran, posting on Truth Social that “the clock is ticking” for Iran. The next day, he said he’d told his military to call off “the scheduled attack of Iran tomorrow,” at the request of the leaders of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, because “serious negotiations are now taking place.”

On May 19, the Qataris flew directly to Washington, again without publicity, where they met with Vice-President J.D. Vance, and Trump’s lead negotiators, son-in-law Jared Kushner and real estate magnate Steve Witkoff, the people said.

Soon after they departed, according to the people, the Qataris and Pakistanis heard from two Western states that Israel was considering attacking Iran. It would mark yet another potential spoiler, but after a US intervention, Israel backed down. The Qataris landed back in Tehran on May 22, later joined by Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, who spent hours locked in discussion with Iranian Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.

The key issues were Iran’s demand for a commitment to permanently end the war, Tehran’s willingness to discuss handing over its highly enriched uranium, and the fate of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran agreed to commit to discuss diluting the uranium or handing over the stockpile. In return, the US agreed to a phased process of sanctions relief tied to the progress of talks towards a final deal – an extraordinary financial lifeline for a regime under severe economic pressure.

Two days later, Ghalibaf and Araghchi flew to Doha, along with Iran’s central bank governor, the people said. But they left without signing. In Washington, Trump was growing increasingly impatient, so the Qataris travelled to Miami, where they spent a day in talks with Witkoff and Kushner in a bid to keep the process on track.

Meanwhile, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon kept bleeding into the Iran talks. It had already killed thousands and displaced more than 1 million people, a fifth of the population, while Hezbollah fire kept northern Israel under threat, and Netanyahu insisted on full autonomy to pursue the war.

As May wore on, Trump’s anger increasingly shifted from Tehran to Jerusalem. Netanyahu, backed by widespread domestic support, insisted that he would continue to bombard Lebanon. As Israel continued to ramp up its campaign, Trump exploded at his Israeli counterpart in a profanity-laced phone call in which he told Netanyahu he was “crazy,” as first reported by Axios and later confirmed by the president.

But talks were continuing behind the scenes. The war, never widely supported in the US, was becoming harder to defend, as inflation accelerated in May to the fastest pace in more than three years amid spiking gas prices.

Since the start of the conflict, the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s attacks on regional energy infrastructure have whipsawed oil prices, even after the first ceasefire was agreed in April. While prices have declined in recent weeks as the two sides negotiated a peace deal, both crude futures and the price of gasoline at the pump remain well above pre-war levels.

Trump sounded increasingly keen for a deal – any deal – to end the conflagration that threatened to consume his second term. Americans have grown increasingly dissatisfied with his stewardship of the economy, polls show, putting his Republican Party at risk of losing control of Congress in November’s midterm elections.

“The one president I did not want to be was the late great Herbert Hoover. I didn’t want that, and who knows what would have happened,” Trump said on June 17.

Meanwhile, Iran – its leadership bloodied, its military battered – was preparing its own story of victory. The war had killed the Supreme Leader and scores of the regime’s upper ranks, and exposed how vulnerable the Islamic Republic had become. But it had survived, and in doing so revealed new strengths that led to a potential deal it could legitimately frame as a win: oil sales, sanctions relief and reconstruction money even before the nuclear question was settled.

The first week of June nearly destroyed the talks – Israel and Lebanon agreed to a ceasefire, but Hezbollah and the Israeli military continued firing on each other. Then Israel struck Beirut, and began trading fire with Iran. The next day, Trump, clearly frustrated by having to constantly publicly and privately urge Netanyahu to back off Lebanon, told the Financial Times that his Israeli counterpart would be forced to accept any deal he struck. “I call all the shots,” he said. He reportedly called Netanyahu that night to tell him to back down. But Israel fired on Iran the next morning anyway, and he was back on Truth Social, demanding an end to the fighting.

Then, on June 9, an American Apache helicopter crashed near the strait after being hit by an Iranian drone, and Trump vowed to retaliate. The two sides exchanged fire over the next two nights, and on the 11th, the US struck targets in southern Iran – when the Islamic Republic closed its airspace, the Qatari mediators were left stranded on the runway.

But they made it out, and when they arrived in Doha, regional leaders pressed Trump to hold off on further strikes, trying to convince him that a good deal was almost finalised, the people said. Netanyahu stepped out of a meeting with key ministers to take a call from Trump with the news a deal was close.

Two days later, as UFC fighter Ilia Topuria was shoving Gaethje during a press conference in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Trump said the agreement would be signed on Sunday – and the Qatari negotiators flew back to Tehran for one final push.

Over the course of 17 hours of negotiations, the team from Doha repeatedly threatened to walk as the Iranians pushed for further tweaks to the language of the framework deal, the people said. They were on the verge of an agreement when Netanyahu made the move that nearly broke the talks. Israeli airstrikes ripped through southern Beirut in response to Hezbollah firing on northern Israel.

In Israel, the response was furious – politicians across the ideological spectrum slammed Netanyahu for turning the country into a vassal of the US, and called his stewardship of the conflict a total failure. They decried Trump’s “betrayal.” The prime minister had pushed for the war for decades, arguing that his tight relationship with Trump was the only way to secure Israel’s future. Now with an election looming this fall – which could also decide his fate in a long-running corruption trial – that closeness had become a liability.

Netanyahu had quietly dropped Israel’s initial demand that any deal include major steps to curb Iran’s missile program and proxy network, betting that the war had degraded both significantly. Israel is counting on the final deal to require Iran’s highly enriched uranium to be removed from the country, according to a person familiar with officials’ thinking, and would see anything short of that as a failure. But he’s promised Israelis that he would protect them from Hezbollah, a group that’s publicly called for his country’s destruction and fired thousands of rockets across the border.

Trump was making that increasingly clear. By Tuesday, the president came close to echoing the prime minister’s harshest critics. “You don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody,” Trump said on the sidelines of the G7. “There are a lot of people in those apartment houses and they’re not all Hezbollah.”

In Evian, US allies were largely flying blind and kept it light. Their aim: don’t upset Trump, focus on Iran and keep the reservations they were harboring about the deal private. At one point, while waiting for him to arrive at a working session, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni shared with her cohort how she quit smoking. Quite a few of them had sparred with Trump and were looking to patch things up. She was one of them.

Meanwhile, Trump was in a good mood. Canada’s Mark Carney, whose country Trump often likes to refer to as the 51st US state, shared a joke with his southern neighbor. He was seen pointing out that host Emmanuel Macron had left his watch on the table. “Gimme,” said Trump jokingly.

Back home, Trump’s administration was trying to sell a deal that seemed to many observers to be a resounding defeat for the US. The administration drew up talking points on the MoU with five messages: Iran won’t ever have a nuclear weapon; Trump ended fighting on every front including Lebanon; Iran’s “rewards” weren’t coming from US taxpayers; Hormuz was open, toll-free; and the fact that “Obama never even got a signed document.”

In Tehran, state media cast the framework as proof that Iran had brought the US and Israel to heel. The regime had paid dearly, but it had withstood both the region’s and the world’s greatest military powers and after four months of war had emerged battered but in at least one way stronger than before, with an economic weapon arguably more important than any nuclear bomb – an on-off switch for the Strait of Hormuz.

As of June 14, it had a deal that could see sanctions lifted and billions in assets unfrozen – via Qatar – in return, it just had to agree to abandon its ambitions for a nuclear weapons, something it’d done a decade earlier in the Obama deal.

As he was wheels up, headed for a dinner fit for a king in the Palace of Versailles, the president kept people guessing whether in fact he might show up in person for the signing.

“This way if it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” Trump said. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming J.D.” BLOOMBERG