The risk of war with Iran is growing despite talks

The resumption of contacts between Washington and Tehran in early February 2026 has reopened a narrow diplomatic corridor that many observers had already written off. The first indirect round in Muscat, mediated by Oman, produced the kind of cautious, mutually face-saving language that usually signals one thing more than any breakthrough. Both sides want room to keep talking. For a region that has lived for years with the expectation of sudden escalation, even that is not nothing.

It is tempting to treat the very fact of renewed dialogue as evidence that a pragmatic compromise is finally within reach. There are reasons to hope. Iran has publicly floated the idea of diluting its stock of highly enriched uranium if the financial sanctions regime is lifted, and that is a meaningful signal because it touches the most sensitive technical parameter in the nuclear file. The US has also shown, at least tactically, that it is willing to sit in a format that Tehran can accept, namely indirect talks with an intermediary rather than face to face negotiation that would be politically costly for the Iranian leadership at home.

Still, hope is not the same as probability. The structural problem is that the parties are starting from positions that remain far apart, and the gap is not only about numbers and timelines. It is about what each side believes the negotiation is supposed to achieve. Washington is signaling that it wants a wider agenda that reaches beyond the nuclear program to Iran’s missile arsenal, its regional partnerships with armed groups, and even its internal governance. Tehran insists the conversation must stay strictly within the nuclear file, arguing that any attempt to widen the agenda is an attempt to turn diplomacy into a tool for strategic rollback and domestic pressure. Those are not minor differences of emphasis. They are incompatible negotiating frameworks, and when frameworks clash, even technical progress can collapse overnight.

The history of the last year underlines how quickly things can unravel. The experience of summer 2025 showed that the diplomatic track is exceptionally fragile when military dynamics shift. After Israel’s June 2025 strike, described by Israel as preemptive, the region moved into an escalatory spiral in which mediation channels existed but bargaining space shrank dramatically. Iran signaled through intermediaries that it would not negotiate while it was under attack and would only consider serious talks after responding. That is the logic of deterrence, not of compromise, and once that logic dominates, diplomacy becomes a side show rather than the steering wheel.