The deaths of two American service members in an Iranian missile-and-drone assault in Jordan on Friday have altered the grammar of a conflict Washington and Tehran still describe as limited. A third remains missing, while the US toll has risen to 16 dead and more than 420 wounded.
Washington answered with an eighth consecutive night of strikes. Central Command said Iranian military facilities were hit to “swiftly punish” the Revolutionary Guards responsible and protect navigation through Hormuz.
Many argued renewed hostilities were inevitable and violence would continue until a clear battlefield winner emerged. The first proposition has proved partly correct; the second may not. Both powers can inflict pain. Neither appears capable of compelling surrender.
Iran’s attacks have been accurate but not exacting. Missiles and drones may have reached targets from Jordan to Kuwait and Bahrain, penetrated defences and damaged infrastructure, yet not produced sustained operational paralysis.
The United States faces the opposite limitation. Its aircraft can destroy installations, but air power has run into the old Clausewitzian problem: tactical destruction does not amount to political decision. Iran’s dispersed missiles and drones survive. Nor can Washington guarantee passage through Hormuz, where mines, missiles or Shahed-type drones may keep crews away. The Tanker War showed that a strait need not be sealed to become unusable.
The result is stalemate. President Donald Trump must restore deterrence without exposing more US bases and Gulf infrastructure. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said the soldiers’ sacrifice “only stiffens our resolve”. Tehran has promised heavier reprisals. Neither side has defined what would constitute enough.
For Pakistan, this is also a test of months of diplomacy. Islamabad helped produce the 14-point Islamabad Memorandum and an implementation effort intended to halt military operations, reopen Hormuz and create time for negotiations. Its collapse is testing whether regional diplomacy can survive competing interpretations of the same text.
Iran’s Ambassador to Pakistan, Reza Amiri Moghadam, offered Tehran’s clearest account of the breakdown on Saturday. He said Washington had interpreted the memorandum contrary to its terms and sought control over parts of Hormuz to obtain what it had failed to secure on the battlefield.
Iran, he said, could not accept this “arbitrary interpretation” and regarded renewed US attacks as violations of the memorandum and international principles.
Washington has presented the dispute differently, maintaining that the agreement required safe commercial passage through Hormuz and reaffirmed that Iran would not acquire a nuclear weapon. Vice President JD Vance, central to the Pakistan-backed negotiations, has continued to defend diplomacy.
The administration was “not going to bomb and bomb and bomb”, Vance said, adding that “you’ve got to actually be willing to talk and to try to figure out the problem”. Military force was one tool, he said; “diplomacy is another tool.”
Whatever follows, former US diplomat Prof Joanne Held Cummings believes Pakistan deserves “enormous credit” for its “yeoman work” in bringing the adversaries to an agreement. Islamabad’s Gulf relationships and wider view of the conflict gave it an important role, she said.
“Pakistan cannot fix the conflict on its own, but it has a role that others simply might not be able to play.”
That role is complicated by Pakistan’s security ties. Islamabad has a mutual-defence agreement with Saudi Arabia, Pakistani personnel are deployed in the kingdom, and Gulf states have explored expanded defence cooperation with Pakistan. As attacks move closer to Gulf infrastructure, Islamabad must reassure Arab partners without forfeiting credibility in Tehran. Mediation has become strategic insulation.
This may explain why Pakistan has resisted the false choice between neutrality and active diplomacy. The Foreign Office has urged both sides to end the violence and return to the Islamabad formula. Iran’s trump card, Hormuz, cannot deliver conventional victory even if it denies Washington one.
The campaign’s nuclear purpose is also in danger of being swallowed by the war. Strikes may damage facilities and delay programmes, but they may strengthen the argument inside Iran that only a completed deterrent can prevent future attacks. A war launched against proliferation could, without a political settlement, make proliferation appear more necessary in Tehran.
The next threshold may not arrive with a declaration. It could come through further attacks on civilian infrastructure, Israel’s full re-entry or an attempt to secure Hormuz with forces neither side can deploy without immense escalation.
Violence will probably recur. A clear winner may not. In that narrowing space lies Pakistan’s opening: returning the adversaries to a table they abandoned before either found a battlefield capable of giving it what diplomacy had withheld.