Why the US Needs Track II Diplomacy with Iran

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Official US-Iran diplomacy has obviously failed. For it to return, people-to-people connections must form.

All wars eventually come to an end. When the Iran War does, the United States and Iran will face a question that over five weeks of strikes, counterstrikes, and a closed Strait of Hormuz have made more urgent, not less: whether any basis for a different relationship can be built from what remains. On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and dozens of senior military and intelligence officials—and doing so, with shattering irony, amid indirect nuclear negotiations that Oman’s foreign minister had described, the day before, as having achieved a breakthrough.

The war that followed is now in its fifth week. Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei—the son of the slain Ali Khamenei, hardline cleric, and longtime Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) intimate—has pledged to continue fighting. Ceasefire proposals exchanged through Pakistani, Omani, Turkish, and Egyptian intermediaries have so far come to nothing.

And yet the fundamental argument for Track II diplomacy is not weakened by any of this. It is, if anything, made more urgent. The question is not whether first-track diplomacy has failed—there is no serious Track I process underway, nor is one likely soon—but whether the intellectual and human infrastructure for a fundamentally different relationship can be built now, through other means, before the moment for official engagement arrives.

The Structural Failure of US Diplomacy with Iran

The history of American diplomacy with Iran over the past four decades is a history of structural failure, and the war that began on February 28 is its culmination rather than an aberration. From the hostage crisis through to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action’s (JCPOA) negotiation, collapse, and failed resurrection, every serious attempt at first-track engagement has either collapsed under domestic political pressures, foundered on regional conflict, or been overtaken by events. 

In the United States, Iran policy became a reflexive instrument of partisan competition: Democratic administrations pursued engagement, Republican administrations pursued pressure, and the oscillation made any agreement’s durability hostage to the next electoral cycle. In Iran, the supreme leader’s authority over foreign policy meant no elected official could deliver genuine normalization. At the same time, the IRGC’s economic empire gave it structural incentives to perpetuate the isolation that kept foreign competition at bay.

What makes the current situation qualitatively different—and more corrosive for any future diplomacy—is the specific manner in which the war began. The United States and Israel attacked Iran while indirect nuclear negotiations were underway and, by the Omani mediator’s own account, approaching a genuine breakthrough. Whatever the strategic rationale for those strikes, their effect on Iran’s calculus about the trustworthiness of any future diplomatic engagement is not difficult to assess. Tehran has now been attacked twice during high-level talks under the Trump administration. The institutional memory of that fact will outlast any individual leader on either side, and it will shape the terms on which any future engagement must be constructed.

Five Defining Issues in the US-Iran Relationship

Five factors now define the landscape for any future diplomacy with Iran.

First, the US-Israel relationship is no longer a constraint on American diplomacy but its operational expression. The two countries are conducting joint strikes. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pressed publicly for the war’s continuation even as President Donald Trump has moved toward ceasefire feelers, and the tension between them; Trump seeking a deal he can claim as a win, Netanyahu seeking the destruction of Iran’s military and nuclear infrastructure. This reflects divergent interests that Washington has yet to resolve. Any future diplomatic framework with Iran will have to navigate this fracture.

Second, the nuclear question has been transformed rather than resolved by the strikes. Iran’s nuclear infrastructure has been significantly degraded. Still, Iran has threatened to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and the underlying proliferation incentive—a state that has watched its leadership decapitated by a country that faces no comparable accountability—has arguably intensified. A post-war second-track process cannot simply pick up where the JCPOA left off; it will need to reckon with a fundamentally altered nonproliferation environment.

Third, Iran’s regional proxy network has been substantially degraded. Hezbollah is weakened, Israeli strikes have eliminated key IRGC commanders overseeing regional operations, and the Houthis have made a delayed entrance. But degraded is not dismantled. An Iran that emerges from this war humiliated, partially reconstructed, and governed by a hardline leadership with deep IRGC ties is not necessarily an Iran whose regional ambitions have been permanently reduced. The grass will grow back after being mowed.

Fourth, Iran’s internal political divisions have been thrown into sharp relief by the war. President Masoud Pezeshkian has signaled openness to ending the conflict under conditions; Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has pledged continued resistance. This tension between the Islamic Republic’s elected executive and its theocratic apex is playing out in real time and underscores a point any future diplomacy must internalize. There is no single Iranian voice, and engaging only the pragmatist current while ignoring those who control the security apparatus is not diplomacy.

Fifth, and most practically urgent: the pool of potential interlocutors on both sides is shrinking. The assassination of senior Iranian officials, intelligence chiefs, and military commanders has not only degraded Iran’s command structure; it has destroyed the personal networks through which any future diplomatic engagement would have to run. Trump acknowledged this bluntly early in the war, noting that most of the Iranians Washington had in mind as potential contacts were dead or feared death. That shrinking pool makes the cultivation of new relationships—carefully, informally, outside official channels—not merely useful but overdue. Track II diplomacy has never been seriously employed as a sustained instrument of US-Iran engagement. The war makes the cost of that neglect harder to ignore.

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The United States’ Unreadiness for Iran Negotiations

It would be intellectually dishonest to diagnose Iran’s readiness problems without acknowledging an equally serious one on the American side. The Trump administration’s preferences for personalized summit diplomacy, transactional deal-making, and high-visibility gestures packaged as wins are antithetical to the patient, institution-building logic of second-track engagement. A serious initiative would require sidelining diaspora voices, regime-change advocates, and maximalist pressure campaigners who populate current policy networks and have every interest in ensuring no diplomatic process takes hold. 

The most plausible pathway to any White House endorsement might run through Secretary of State Marco Rubio or, perhaps more efficaciously, Vice President JD Vance. Yet there is no indication that either has the inclination or the political capital to make the sale to President Trump. The honest conclusion is that the United States, like Iran, is not ready. Acknowledging this is not a reason to abandon the argument; it is a reason to be clear-eyed about what “ready” would actually require.

What Track II Diplomacy with Iran Can Accomplish—and When

Track II diplomacy conducted by non-governmental actors, academics, former officials, think tanks, and civil society organizations is not a substitute for official engagement. It is the precondition for it. Its value lies not in producing binding agreements but in doing the sustained preparatory work that official diplomacy cannot: building personal trust across adversarial lines, identifying latent areas of consensus, generating creative policy options that governments can later adopt, and maintaining channels of communication when official channels are closed or politically unusable.

The experience of constitutional reform negotiations in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2005 and 2006 is instructive. The process that produced the April Package of constitutional amendments was driven not by government negotiators but by an NGO secretariat working alongside Bosnian political parties representing all three ethnic communities. Its unofficial character was the enabling condition: parties could explore ideas, float proposals, and walk back positions without the political costs that attend official negotiations. 

The secretariat structured dialogue in collaboration with its Bosnian political counterparts and recorded areas of consensus and non-consensus. The resulting constitutional amendments fell two votes short of the two-thirds majority required for passage, but the process itself was never seriously disputed. All sides acknowledged that it established a legitimate and workable model, and it remains a reference point for constitutional reform in Bosnia to this day.

It is worth noting that something resembling a primitive second track is already at work in the current war: Pakistan, Oman, Turkey, and Egypt are serving as message carriers between Washington and Tehran; Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence has reportedly made quiet contact with the CIA through a third country’s intelligence service. These are not second-track initiatives in any purposeful sense, but wartime back-channels, improvised under fire, focused on immediate de-escalation rather than long-term relationship-building. However, their existence confirms that even in the most hostile circumstances, unofficial channels fill the vacuum left by the collapse of direct engagement. The question is whether those channels can be built with more intention and depth before the next crisis rather than during it.

A serious post-war second-track initiative would need to be carefully structured and led by credible non-governmental actors with expertise and established relationships on both sides. Its mandate should be explicitly limited: not to negotiate agreements, but to explore the conditions under which normalization might become possible, to map areas of potential convergence, and to build the personal relationships and conceptual frameworks that any future official process will require. 

Critically, it must include, on the Iranian side, not only pragmatists but also officials with genuine standing within the Islamic Republic’s power structure. The Iranian exile community, including figures associated with monarchist restoration such as Reza Pahlavi, however well-spoken and Western-educated, lacks meaningful purchase on Iranian political realities and would delegitimize any serious process. A second track that excludes those who actually hold power is not a serious process. The engagement of hardliners is not an obstacle to second-track diplomacy; it is a condition of its credibility.

US-Iran Diplomacy Requires Preparation

Whether through negotiation, exhaustion, or some combination of both, the Iran War will come to an end. When it does, the United States and Iran will face the same fundamental question—how to manage a relationship that neither side can afford to leave permanently at the level of open hostility—now made far more acute by the destruction, deaths, and mutual betrayals of the conflict. The fact that the United States attacked Iran during active negotiations will cast a long shadow. Mojtaba Khamenei’s deep ties to the IRGC will constrain whatever space exists for pragmatist voices. The destroyed institutional networks will not rebuild themselves.

Against all of this, the case for Track II diplomacy rests on a single observation: the moment of maximum openness is almost never the moment of minimum preparation. It is the moment when the preparation already done can be brought to bear. The Bosnian process did not begin when diplomatic conditions were ideal. It began when a small number of committed actors concluded that waiting for official channels to become viable was itself a form of inaction with costs. Those who built the framework when no one was asking for it were ready when the moment arrived. The same discipline is needed here—not because the moment is near, but because it will come, and those who do the preparation will have something to offer. Those who wait for better conditions will not.

About the Author: Bruce Hitchner

R. Bruce Hitchner is professor of Classics and International Relations at Tufts University and former chairman of the Dayton Peace Accords Project (1998–2016). He was a member of the international team that led the 2005–2006 NGO-driven constitutional reform negotiations in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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© The National Interest