On Saturday, August 8, after a week of negotiations with Oman over a mechanism for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council raised new demands aimed at extracting further concessions from the United States. Although Trump and the American diplomatic apparatus had said nothing over the past week about direct talks with Tehran regarding the Strait of Hormuz, it was widely understood that Oman was participating in these talks on behalf of the US, and Trump repeatedly expressed hope that a deal was within reach and that the strait would reopen. Now, with new demands on the table, including the unfreezing of the regime’s blocked funds, an end to the naval blockade, the withdrawal of American forces from around Iran, and several other conditions that roughly mirror the Islamabad agreement, the Iranian government has effectively dashed Trump’s plan to declare a victory.

The Wall Street Journal wrote in its Sunday, August 9 that For weeks, President Trump had been laying the groundwork to declare victory in the Iran war should Tehran fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, even floating the idea privately to senior aides that he’s willing to walk away without a nuclear deal, U.S. officials said. …But now, Trump’s options for walking away from the conflict have again narrowed.

On Saturday, the US president also faced a new problem, this time from Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister explicitly announced his opposition to Trump’s fifteen-point plan for Gaza, one provision of which calls for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. He also said that as long as he remains prime minister, he will under no circumstances accept a Palestinian state, whether in the West Bank or in Gaza.

The narrowing of options for breaking the current deadlock in the Iran war is not limited to the American government and Trump. What remains of the Islamic Republic after the war is in no better position, facing enormous challenges in deciding how to escape the impasse in which it finds itself. It would be a mistake to interpret the regime’s zigzagging and back-and-forth in negotiations as a sign of strength. Although the Iranian regime is fairly confident that Trump neither can nor wants to launch a ground invasion similar to what happened in Iraq or Afghanistan, ending the war formally without extracting maximum concessions from the US would leave the regime’s political apparatus extremely vulnerable, both internally and in the face of a population that has nothing left to lose. Likewise, the realization of Trump’s threats to intensify airstrikes on infrastructure and energy facilities is a situation whose potential and unpredictable consequences the Iranian government would have no way to control. Even setting aside large-scale American air attacks, the continuation of economic sanctions and the naval blockade, inflation, and the rial’s ever-deepening collapse have reached a point that could push the Islamic Republic to the edge of unknown precipices.

Pezeshkian’s (Iran’s president) success in pushing back the Revolutionary Guard in an open confrontation with the secretary-general of Iran’s Hezbollah faction reveals the depth of strategic divisions within the system over how to end the political deadlock inside the regime, as well as how to end a war that has resulted in the elimination of half of the regime’s political leadership. Although it is said that a handful of Revolutionary Guard figures effectively control the war and domestic affairs, last week’s public dispute between Mohammad Bagher Kharrazi — secretary-general of the faction known as Iran’s Hezbollah, who clearly has powerful backers within the Guard — and Pezeshkian ended with the Guard backing down and Mojtaba Khamenei intervening (at least via his message) in Pezeshkian’s favor. This outcome was the result of Pezeshkian standing firm against the rival faction. Also on Sunday, Mojtaba Khamenei’s website announced that the new leader of the Islamic Republic had met with the president at the start of the third year of Pezeshkian’s presidency. Pezeshkian had publicly complained the previous week about being unable to secure a meeting with the younger Khamenei.

Despite superficial similarities in the lack of easy paths out of the current war for both the American government and the Iranian regime, one clear difference stands out. The continuation of the present situation, and the deadlock in which both sides are locked, is not existential for the United States; at most it would result in a Republican defeat in the next election. For the Iranian government, however, it is a matter of life and death — in other words, the survival or overthrow of the Islamic Republic, even if only postponed from one crisis to the next.