Iran Seeks Guarantees Before the Guns Fall Silent
Iran signalled it would not end the war on Washington's terms, demanding reparations, guarantees against renewed attack and recognised authority over the Strait of Hormuz.
By Friday, the question was no longer whether Tehran would answer Washington. It was on what terms it would agree to speak at all.
Iran is expected to deliver its response to a United States peace proposal aimed at ending the war that has convulsed the Middle East since late February, according to Reuters1 and a source briefed on the matter. But the shape of that response, as described by a separate source in Washington, makes clear that Tehran is not approaching these exchanges as a defeated power seeking terms. It is presenting itself as a state demanding political recognition, strategic guarantees and compensation for the costs of war.
That distinction matters.
The proposal under review, a 15 point framework reportedly sent through Pakistan, was said to include demands that would cut to the centre of Iran’s security doctrine, from dismantling its nuclear programme to curbing missile development and, in effect, surrendering control over the Strait of Hormuz. For Tehran, that was never likely to read as a basis for peace. It read as an ultimatum dressed in diplomatic language.
The response now expected from Iran suggests an effort to turn that logic back on Washington.
According to information relayed to the Gunpowder Chronicles by a source in Washington, Iran’s conditions for ending the war are specific and expansive. They include a complete halt to what Tehran describes as enemy aggression and assassinations, concrete mechanisms to ensure that war cannot simply be reimposed on the Islamic Republic at a later date, guaranteed and clearly defined payment of war damages and reparations, an end to the conflict across all fronts and for all resistance groups aligned with Iran across the region, and international recognition of Iran’s sovereign authority over the Strait of Hormuz.
Taken together, those demands amount to far more than a ceasefire formula. They are an attempt to redefine the political terms of the conflict itself.
The first condition, a total halt to aggression and assassinations, is framed not merely as a military pause but as a repudiation of the method by which this war has been prosecuted. For Tehran, the issue is not only bombardment. It is also the wider architecture of coercion, including targeted killings and the constant threat of renewed attack. To accept talks without addressing that would be, in Iran’s view, to negotiate under the gun.
The second demand, mechanisms to ensure the war is not reimposed, goes further still. It reflects a deep distrust of American and Israeli intent, and of any arrangement that rests on temporary restraint rather than enforceable guarantees. Here, Tehran appears to be insisting that peace cannot mean an interval between campaigns. It must mean a structure, however difficult to define, that prevents the conflict from being resumed at a moment of Washington’s choosing.
Then comes the question of money, and with it, legitimacy. By seeking war damages and reparations, Iran is not simply asking for compensation. It is making a legal and moral argument about responsibility. Reparations imply injury wrongfully inflicted. They imply that the destruction suffered by Iran is not an unfortunate byproduct of war, but harm for which another party must answer. In diplomatic terms, that is a heavy demand. In political terms, it is a refusal to let military force dictate the historical record.
The fourth condition broadens the frame beyond Iran itself. Tehran wants the war to end across all fronts and for all resistance groups involved throughout the region. That language is revealing. It suggests Iran is not prepared to separate its own security from the network of allied and affiliated forces that form part of its regional posture. Any settlement confined narrowly to Iran, while leaving other theatres active, would risk being seen in Tehran not as peace but as strategic dismemberment.
And then there is the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran’s insistence on recognition and guarantees regarding its sovereign right to exercise authority over the strait is not a marginal point. It is central. The waterway has long been both an artery of global commerce and a lever of Iranian power. Any proposal that appears to strip Tehran of influence there touches not only economics and naval strategy, but national sovereignty and regional standing. By making Hormuz one of its conditions, Iran is signalling that control over this corridor is not a concession to be negotiated away under pressure. It is a line tied directly to the state’s sense of itself.
This helps explain why the gap between Washington’s apparent proposal and Tehran’s likely response looks so wide. The United States, by the reported terms of the offer, appears to have sought de escalation through maximalist concessions from Iran. Tehran, by contrast, is moving toward a framework in which any end to the war must acknowledge Iranian rights, regional linkages and the costs imposed on the country by the conflict. One side seems to have approached diplomacy as an instrument of pressure. The other is preparing to use it as a language of resistance.
That does not mean diplomacy is dead. On the contrary, even the most critical Iranian voices have not declared the door closed. An Iranian official told Reuters that senior officials reviewing the American proposal believed it served only United States and Israeli interests, yet still maintained that diplomacy had not ended. Marco Rubio, the American secretary of state, offered a similarly cautious note after a Group of 7 meeting in France, saying Iran had shown willingness to discuss certain matters through exchanges of messages, even as Washington was still waiting for clarity on who would speak, about what, and when.
That uncertainty is telling in itself. In wars such as this, negotiations rarely begin with shared assumptions. They begin with efforts to establish whether there is even a mutually intelligible basis for negotiation. At present, that basis remains fragile.
What is emerging, however, is a clearer understanding of how Tehran wants this war to be read. Not as a conflict in which it has been cornered into surrendering its strategic posture, but as one in which any settlement must prevent future coercion, recognise the damage done, encompass the wider regional battlefield and preserve Iranian authority where it matters most.
For Washington, that presents an uncomfortable reality. If the White House expected a simple answer to a peace proposal, it may instead receive a challenge to the assumptions beneath it. Iran’s reply, if it follows the contours now described by those briefed on it, will not merely ask for an end to hostilities. It will ask who gets to define the peace, and on whose terms the war is said to have ended.
Iran's Terms for Peace Harden as War Widens Across the Region
In Isfahan province, officials said the latest round of United States and Israeli strikes had expanded beyond military and nuclear related targets to include major industrial and energy infrastructure. Mehdi Jamalnejad, the governor of Isfahan, told Iran’s state news agency IRNA that 25 workers had been killed in various parts of the province. He said two power stations in Mobarakeh county, with generating capacities of 914 and 250 megawatts, were destroyed, alongside a production complex, and that part of the Mobarakeh steel workshop had also been damaged. Iranian media separately reported that at least one person was killed and two others were wounded in the attack on the steel factory, while rescue teams were deployed to clear debris at the struck sites.
The strikes also hit facilities central to Iran’s nuclear fuel cycle, further hardening the political atmosphere around any diplomatic exchange. Iranian officials said the Khondab heavy water complex in Arak and the yellowcake production plant in Ardakan, Yazd province, had been targeted. Israel later confirmed attacks on both sites, describing the Ardakan facility as part of the infrastructure used in uranium processing and saying the Arak plant had been struck after what it called Iranian attempts to restore damaged capacity. Iranian authorities said there had been no radiation leak from either site, a point echoed by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which said it had been informed by Tehran that there was no increase in off site radiation levels following the strike on Ardakan.
The military pressure unfolded alongside widening regional and domestic strain. A senior Iranian official said attacks on industrial and nuclear infrastructure while Washington continued to speak of negotiations were “intolerable”, adding that Tehran had not yet decided whether to respond to the latest United States proposal. At the same time, Iran’s representative to the United Nations in Vienna said Tehran had agreed, at the UN’s request, to facilitate the passage of humanitarian shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. Elsewhere, Israeli forces said they had begun a large scale wave of attacks on Beirut, while Hezbollah said it had launched missiles at northern Israel. Inside Iran, the judiciary signalled a separate tightening at home, with state linked agencies reporting threats to confiscate the assets of prominent public figures accused of criticising the government.