Iran’s nuclear trajectory is more like a cautious glide along a familiar route than a leap into the unknown, made up of tactical, reversible steps aimed at buying time rather than fundamentally changing the project.
In New York, Iranian officials quietly explored whether a brief delay to the re-imposition of UN sanctions (‘snapback’) could be negotiated on the sidelines of the General Assembly if negotiations addressed their stockpile enriched to 60 percent.
The proposal, described by Iranian and Chinese state outlets as including a forty-five-day cushion and even direct contact with US counterparts, did not come to fruition; the deadline passed, the meeting never materialised, and UN sanctions were duly reinstated, with Washington and allied capitals imposing additional designations.
In American and European views, the old guardrails are still seen as essential — zero enrichment, credible missile limits, and restrictions on funding regional allies — while in Tehran, the same demands are regarded as externally dictated and, for this reason, illegitimate.
The legal mechanics of snapback are severe enough, with renewed restrictions on arms, missiles, travel, and assets, but their sharpest edge is political.
Every time the sanctions framework is put in place, the argument for compromise diminishes on both sides of this dispute, and the factions that mistrust diplomacy see their case validated.
Between sanctions and strikes
Across the region, Israel indicates that further strikes on Iran remain a possibility, while Gulf capitals brace themselves for sporadic flare-ups and the exhausting cycle of raids and retaliations.
Inside Iran, the latest sanctions impact market sentiment and the currency, yet officials maintain resilience and insist that nuclear decisions will keep flowing through the Supreme National Security Council.
Within that framework, the likely futures are modest: either a frozen crisis managed just short of war, or a limited, time-bound agreement in which Iran caps enrichment and restores intrusive access for inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in exchange for targeted pauses in sanctions enforcement and some economic relief.
The Agency’s own accounting helps explain the urgency: by mid-June, inspectors had judged Iran’s 60-percent stockpile to be roughly 441 kilograms, a figure made more alarming by the fact that on-site verification has been patchy to non-existent since the summer strikes on nuclear facilities.
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What limits any prospective understanding is not simply leverage, but authority.
Despite confident forecasts after the twelve-day war with Israel, Ali Khamenei still decides when narrow openings appear and when they snap shut.
Concessions, whether to restore IAEA access or to support a ceasefire track, are cast by his lieutenants as acts of “revolutionary rationality,” not capitulation.
Similarly, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has linked any new inspection framework to the consent of the Supreme National Security Council and has clarified that, with snapback already in force, those arrangements are suspended unless and until the leadership in Tehran considers that circumstances warrant their revival.
Cautious diplomacy, constrained power
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian speaks in tones of managerial pragmatism, promising socio-cultural and fiscal restraint at home and measured steps abroad, yet he repeats the central predicate of the system: nothing proceeds against the Supreme Leader’s guidance.
In practice, this results in continuity rather than a break. Incremental cooperation is permissible; surrendering sovereign benefits is not.
Western officials, for their part, insist that without reinstated onsite verification and strict limits on enrichment levels, the crisis will merely persist and recur.
To understand why Tehran still tests the temperature of back-channels even as it rejects maximalist conditions, it helps to hear a familiar argument from within the establishment.
The veteran diplomat Abdolreza Faraji Rad, speaking to the Iranian outlet Fararu, argued that Israel wields “broad influence” over the US–Iran nuclear issue and even over European policy; he contended that, for this reason, diplomacy should not be “deactivated” during difficult times and that discreet contact with Washington should be maintained to prevent doors from shutting.
The point is not to invite the reader to adopt this thesis, but to register that such reasoning – part grievance, part caution – underpins Tehran’s preference for quiet probes that avoid the optics of capitulation while preserving room to manoeuvre.
Across the water, the Western brief is stark and, in its own way, equally linear.
When enrichment rises to unprecedented levels without a convincing civilian reason, and when inspectors cannot reliably verify materials, only direct and consequential negotiations, combined with verifiable limits on enrichment, credible restrictions on missiles, and curbs on external financing—namely Iran’s support for armed proxies such as Hezbollah and the Houthis—will be effective.
European officials add that snapback was never their preferred remedy, that the door to diplomacy should remain ajar, and that the nuclear crisis does not lend itself to a military solution that would not, in time, recreate the very dangers it set out to remove.
In this telling, guardrails are not a punishment but the price of any relief that might endure the next cycle of provocation and reply.
Meanwhile, Gaza remains at the centre of the broader conflict dynamic.