Three months after joint U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran started a war in the Middle East, the United States remains stuck in strategic limbo, with no clear resolution to the conflict in sight. Dueling U.S. and Iranian blockades have closed the Strait of Hormuz to nearly all maritime traffic, removing some 14 million barrels per day of Persian Gulf oil from world markets. Despite weeks of punishing airstrikes, the Islamic Republic remains intact and defiant. Diplomatic exchanges mediated by Pakistan are ongoing, and both American and Iranian officials have suggested that a deal is in the works. But the U.S. and Iranian negotiating positions remain far apart, not least because the United States continues to strike Iranian military targets amid the peace talks, with recent rounds of bombings earning threats of retaliation from Tehran.

The situation with Iran is untenable—yet as badly as Trump needs and wants a deal to end the impasse, his own decisions continue to sabotage the bargaining process. For an agreement to be reached, Trump will first need to recalibrate his demands to match the strategic reality, which now favors Iran. That means dropping maximalist positions on Iran’s nuclear program and giving up for good any hope of imposing constraints on Iran’s missile capabilities or support for proxy forces.

For a deal to stick, Trump will also need to grapple with a problem created by U.S. actions over the past 18 months: a lack of credible assurances, which we wrote about in Foreign Affairs last year. Pushing Iran into a deal requires more than just military threats. It also requires convincing the Iranian regime that by cooperating with U.S. demands and giving up its nuclear program, Tehran can prevent future aggression from the United States and Israel. By attacking Iran during negotiations and engaging in maximalist online rhetoric, such as his threat to erase a “whole civilization,” Trump has made it increasingly difficult for Washington to offer the types of commitments that Tehran will require before it agrees to even a minimal version of U.S. demands.

A narrow path to a deal still exists, but it will require U.S. concessions, on both the Strait of Hormuz and the nuclear file. Necessary, credible assurances could come in several forms, including a phased process that separates the status of the Strait of Hormuz from nuclear negotiations and rewards Iran for moving on either issue or for using third-party guarantors such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

This type of deal may be unpalatable to Trump, but at this point Washington faces only bad options. An indefinite standoff over the strait will only weaken the U.S. bargaining position as the delayed consequences of removing Persian Gulf oil from world markets compound and worsen. Further military escalation through additional strikes is also unlikely to induce Iranian surrender. Instead, Iran will likely retaliate by targeting Gulf oil infrastructure. And after triggering such escalation, Trump will still need a deal, forcing the same credible assurance problem back to the forefront. Trump could just walk away, ending strikes and leaving the region to resolve the remaining fallout on its own. But this option is probably the least politically viable for a president who has made preventing a nuclear Iran part of his mantra.

Reaching a narrow and enduring deal now that gets the United States out of the current quagmire and guards against future rounds of conflict between the United States, Israel, and Iran is Trump’s least bad outcome, even if it requires uncomfortable U.S. concessions. Unfortunately, those concessions are the price of a failed war that has left the United States worse off than when it began.

When the United States launched Operation Epic Fury, on February 28, amid ongoing negotiations with Iran, the Trump administration believed that it could force Tehran into a better deal than the one it was willing to accept at the bargaining table. Though the operation’s objectives have changed almost daily since then, Trump’s underlying desire remains mostly the same: a better nuclear agreement than anything Tehran previously offered, including the now defunct Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal. Trump now faces a higher priority........

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