Iran projects victory in potential deal with Washington.

 

May 24, 2026, 8:46 a.m. ET35 minutes ago

Erika Solomon

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/05/24/world/iran-war-trump

 

Iran projects victory in potential deal with Washington.

 

As President Trump and regional diplomats began to herald the possibility of a deal with Iran that could end the war, the spokesman for the Iranian foreign ministry responded with his version of a history lesson.

 

Esmail Baghaei, the spokesman, posted an image on social media of a famous relief carved into an archaeological site in Iran, that portrays a Roman emperor bowing in submission to a king of the Sassanians, an ancient Iranian empire.

 

“In the Roman mind, Rome was the undisputed center of the world,” Mr. Baghaei wrote, in what appeared to be a reference to the political and military might of Washington today. “The Iranians shattered that illusion.”

 

Despite the military and economic battering Iran has endured during its war with the United States and Israel, its leaders are casting the reported terms of a preliminary agreement with Washington as a victory.

 

On Saturday, American and Iranian officials announced that a preliminary framework for an agreement between the two countries had been largely negotiated, though not finalized. Details of what is in the proposal are unclear, though Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post that the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for oil and gas shipments, would be reopened as part of the agreement.

 

How well Iran has fared through the negotiations can only be determined once the actual terms are known. But regional experts say the country will have a good chance of portraying the results as a win.

 

“For their domestic and regional base, they proved themselves the underdog, capable of taking on two nuclear armed powers,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, an analyst and the author of the European Council of Foreign Relation’s Iran Nuclear Monitor. “They consistently refused to surrender to Trump’s maximalist demands on the nuclear program, and were prepared to go to war twice against the most advanced army in the world.”

 

By comparison, the American and Israeli ambitions against Iran seem to have been frustrated. The killing of Iran’s supreme leader and top military commanders has not toppled the country’s autocratic system of clerical rule. Any terms for curbing Iran’s ballistic missiles or its regional network of allied militias, according to what has been reported about the preliminary agreement, do not appear to have been addressed.

 

And it remains unclear what commitments Iran would have and under what time frame, to suspend its nuclear program or remove its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, which could be turned into a nuclear weapon.

 

Some versions of the plan have pushed discussion about those commitments into a second phase of negotiations, Mr. Geranmayeh said.

 

Even if Iran is able to avoid concessions on its major red lines, it still faces many challenges.

 

The country is in the throes of a devastating economic crisis. Critical industries with both military and civilian uses have been badly bombarded — from steel factories to petrochemical plants.

 

Yet, perhaps most important for Iran’s leaders, Iran will apparently retain its newfound ability to close the Strait of Hormuz through the threat of renewed drone or rocket attacks on shipping, said Farzan Sabet, an analyst of Iran and weapons systems at the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland.

 

“In the short to medium term, that’s the sort of deterrence they’re going to be able to maintain,” he said.

 

If the negotiations offer Iran either temporary sanctions waivers to sell its oil, or an unfreezing of some of its economic assets abroad, Iranian leaders can sell that domestically as another win, he added.

 

Much of the outlook on an agreement depends on it moving beyond just an understanding to end hostilities, said Ali Vaez, the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group. He was pessimistic the two sides would actually be able to move to a second phase of negotiations, when a tentative plan to halt the war would be transformed into a substantive deal.

 

“I don’t like the framing a lot of people use to say this is just a defeat for the U.S., or a win for Iran,” he said. “This had really turned into a lose-lose dynamic for both sides, and I don’t believe either side will be really winning as a result of this understanding.”