On 26 March, the most revealing development in this war was not another missile barrage. It was the report that Pakistan had urged Washington to restrain Israel from killing Abbas Araqchi and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf because, as a Pakistani source put it, “there is no one else to talk to” if they are gone. If that account is even broadly right, then the meaning of the moment is hard to miss. This is no longer a war with diplomacy running beside it. The struggle over how to end the war is already shaping how the war itself is being fought.

That is the frame much of the commentary still misses. Too much analysis remains stuck on a stale question: are there talks, or are there not? But that is no longer the most important issue. The real question is how an emerging endgame is already changing target selection, political language and diplomatic cover. Donald Trump is not moving cleanly from war to peace. He is trying to use the threat of a wider war to force a narrow, controlled de-escalation on terms favourable to Washington. Iran, for its part, is not giving a flat no. It is reviewing a proposal while constructing a reply designed to protect both deterrence and its regional position.

The grammar of deniable engagement

Tehran’s denials are not proof that diplomacy is absent. They are part of how diplomacy is being made politically survivable.

Araqchi has said there has been no dialogue or negotiation with the US, while also acknowledging that messages are being exchanged through intermediaries. That is not a contradiction. It is a method.

Araqchi has said there has been no dialogue or negotiation with the US, while also acknowledging that messages are being exchanged through intermediaries. That is not a contradiction. It is a method.

The method has a very specific grammar. Iran’s denials have been cast in the past tense: no negotiations have taken place, no dialogue has occurred. Not: we will not negotiate. Not: talks are forbidden. This is past-tense denial — a refusal worded so that it closes off yesterday without foreclosing tomorrow. If direct talks occur in the coming days, Tehran can still say, with narrow technical accuracy, that at the time of each denial no such talks had yet happened. That is not merely evasive language. It is how states buy room to move before they are ready to admit they are moving.

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Trump himself has, in effect, described the same dual track, saying Iranian leaders want a deal badly but are afraid to say so publicly. He meant it as a taunt. It reads more usefully as an inadvertent account of structured ambiguity: private movement, public denial and political reasons on both sides for pretending the two do not coexist.

Iranian statecraft has used deniable channels before. The secret US-Iran contacts in Oman that opened the way to the 2013 interim nuclear agreement were kept out of public view until they could be politically defended. The lesson was not simply that secrecy works. It was that systems facing ideological and domestic constraints often need concealment first, explanation second and acknowledgement only at the end.

Washington is now bargaining over an end-state

What makes the current moment different from the war’s earlier phase is that the intermediary channel is no longer simply carrying signals. It is carrying content. Public reporting has linked the US proposal to Iran’s highly enriched uranium, enrichment activity, ballistic missiles, support for regional allies and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Karoline Leavitt later said parts of the public reporting were inaccurate, but she did not deny that a proposal existed or that indirect exchanges around it were continuing. That is enough to establish the central fact: Washington has shifted from attrition to bargaining over an end-state.

Trump’s five-day pause on strikes against Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure made that shift visible. The pause was never a ceasefire, and it was never meant to be read as one. Other parts of the campaign continued. That selectivity is precisely why it mattered. It signalled that Washington was holding back from one especially escalatory step while keeping the rest of its pressure intact. This was not restraint in any moral sense. It was coercive diplomacy: a warning that the war could become much more dangerous unless Tehran moved.

Tehran’s answer is not “no”. It is: “not on these terms”.

Iran’s initial response to the US proposal was described as “not positive”, but not as a final rejection. That distinction matters. A flat refusal closes the file. A negative first response keeps the argument open.

More importantly, Iran is not simply delaying. It is setting a price. Tehran has told intermediaries that any ceasefire must include Lebanon and bring Israeli operations against Hezbollah into the same framework. Iranian sources have also indicated a harder stance tied to guarantees against renewed attacks and conditions around Hormuz.

This is the strongest evidence yet that Tehran is not treating the war as a narrow bilateral problem between itself and Washington. It is trying to ensure that any exit preserves part of the regional architecture on which its deterrence has long depended.

This is the strongest evidence yet that Tehran is not treating the war as a narrow bilateral problem between itself and Washington. It is trying to ensure that any exit preserves part of the regional architecture on which its deterrence has long depended.

The substance of the Iranian reply is therefore not simple rejection. It is a counter-position: not on these terms, not with this scope and not if Lebanon is left outside the bargain.

That is also why Ghalibaf’s reported role makes sense. He is not part of the foreign ministry. He is not a career diplomat. He is not a serving commander. He is a heavyweight political figure with independent standing and obvious presidential ambitions. If he is being used in this channel, the choice is revealing. He is senior enough to be taken seriously, but not so institutionally exposed that any contact must immediately be framed as a formal executive negotiation. He is useful because he is deniable. His public rejection of talks does not disprove the channel. It helps preserve it.

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Pakistan is not just a venue. It is political cover.

Islamabad matters less as a place than as a form of political cover. Pakistan is a Muslim-majority state, a nuclear power and one of the few countries still maintaining direct channels to both Washington and Tehran. Current reporting indicates that Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey are all mediating in different ways, while an Iranian embassy official in Islamabad has said Pakistan remains Tehran’s preferred venue if talks move forward. Pakistan matters because it offers a politically workable channel.

That same mediation has exposed a quieter fault line.

Senior Israeli officials have said Trump appears determined to reach a deal to end hostilities, while Israeli officials doubt Iran will accept meaningful terms and worry that US negotiators could narrow Israel’s future freedom of action.

Senior Israeli officials have said Trump appears determined to reach a deal to end hostilities, while Israeli officials doubt Iran will accept meaningful terms and worry that US negotiators could narrow Israel’s future freedom of action.

Israel has also insisted that its campaign against Hezbollah is separate and should continue. From Tehran’s point of view, any agreement that leaves Lebanon outside the frame is no agreement at all.

The threat of escalation is now part of the negotiation

None of this should be mistaken for an orderly peace process. Leavitt has warned that Trump will hit Iran harder if Tehran fails to accept that it has been “defeated militarily”. That was not idle rhetoric. It was the language of an administration trying to negotiate from the apex of force. Reports about more drastic Pentagon scenarios, including possible ground options, should be treated carefully because they remain contingency planning rather than announced policy. But the broader signal is unmistakable: Washington wants Tehran to believe the next round could be worse.

The likeliest outcome, at least for now, is not a grand bargain and probably not a full-scale ground war. It is something narrower, uglier and more deniable than either. Think of a limited de-escalation that no side will want to call a settlement: no immediate US strike on Iran’s energy backbone, some reduction in pressure around Hormuz, continued indirect messaging and perhaps a meeting or call that all parties insist was not really a negotiation. Washington would present that as pressure producing results. Tehran would present it as resistance forcing respect. Both would be telling partial truths.

That path is fragile. A major strike on energy infrastructure, a deadly maritime incident in Hormuz or a sharp deterioration in Lebanon could destroy it quickly. But the central point is already visible. The first draft of the endgame is not being written in communiqués. It is being written in selective pauses, in carefully worded denials, in counter-conditions attached to what is formally described as a refusal to engage and, perhaps most revealingly of all, in decisions about who must be kept alive long enough to talk.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

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