핵심요약

• 7월에 휴전이 선언되었으며, 8월 중순까지 60일의 협상 기간이 열렸습니다.
• 협상은 이란의 핵 프로그램과 호르무즈 해협 통제권 같은 핵심 문제를 해결하는 데 중점을 두었습니다.
• 미국은 제재 종료 및 군대 철수에 대한 양보를 했으며, 이는 이란이 협상에서 원하는 바를 확보하는 결과를 가져왔습니다.
• 이란은 전쟁의 시기와 방식을 결정하는 데 있어 주도권을 확보하는 데 성공했습니다.

도입

본 기사는 이란 전쟁이 군사적 충돌을 넘어 외교적 협상 단계로 진입했음을 보여줍니다. 이는 지정학적 리스크가 단순한 군사적 충돌을 넘어 경제 및 에너지 시장에 미치는 영향을 분석하는 데 있어 매우 중요합니다. 특히 중동 지역의 불안정성이 글로벌 공급망과 에너지 가격에 미치는 연쇄 효과를 이해하는 데 핵심적인 통찰을 제공합니다.

본문 1: 외교적 메커니즘과 권력 이동

협상 과정은 단순한 휴전이 아니라, 군사적 압박과 외교적 수단을 결합한 복잡한 권력 이동의 결과입니다. 미국이 군사적 타격을 가하고 잠시 중단한 후 외교 채널을 개방한 것은, 군사적 목표를 달성함과 동시에 협상 주도권을 이란에 넘기려는 전략으로 해석됩니다. 이란이 MOU를 통해 60일의 시간을 확보함으로써, 미국이 설정한 틀 내에서 핵 프로그램과 해협 통제권이라는 가장 민감한 의제를 협상 테이블에 올려놓는 데 성공했습니다. 이는 미국이 군사적 힘을 이용하려 했으나, 최종적인 종결 방식과 조건은 이란의 의지에 따라 결정될 수 있음을 보여줍니다.

본문 2: 경제적 파급 효과와 지정학적 위험 프리미엄

이러한 협상 단계의 진입은 에너지 시장과 국제 금융 시장에 직접적인 영향을 미칩니다. 호르무즈 해협 통제권에 대한 불확실성은 원유 및 천연가스 공급망에 대한 위험 프리미엄을 높입니다. 만약 협상이 결렬되거나 불안정해질 경우, 에너지 가격의 변동성은 더욱 커질 수 있으며 이는 글로벌 인플레이션 압력으로 작용합니다. 또한, 미국의 제재 철회와 관련하여 국제 금융 시장은 미국의 정책 신뢰도에 따라 변동성을 보일 것입니다. 이는 중동 지역의 지정학적 위험이 장기적인 투자 결정에 미치는 영향을 고려해야 함을 의미합니다.

본문 3: 장기적 전망과 리스크 관리

장기적인 관점에서 볼 때, 이 협상 기간은 이란의 국내 정치적 안정성과 국제적 외교 역량에 대한 평가를 반영합니다. 이란이 협상에서 확보한 언어와 조건이 실제 이행될 수 있는지 여부가 향후 중동 지역의 안정성에 결정적인 요소가 될 것입니다. 투자자들은 협상의 진행 상황뿐만 아니라, 이란 내부의 정치적 역동성과 국제 사회의 개입 가능성을 면밀히 관찰해야 합니다. 이는 단기적인 에너지 가격 변동성뿐만 아니라, 장기적인 지정학적 리스크 관리 측면에서 중요합니다.

결론

결론적으로, 이란 전쟁은 군사적 종료를 넘어 외교적 협상이라는 새로운 차원으로 전환되었습니다. 60일간의 협상 기간은 양측이 상호 이해를 시도하는 동시에, 핵심적인 안보 문제에 대한 주도권을 재조정하는 과정으로 읽힙니다. 투자자들은 이 과정에서 발생하는 지정학적 불확실성이 에너지 시장과 글로벌 금융 시장에 미치는 영향을 지속적으로 모니터링해야 할 것입니다. 향후 협상의 결과는 중동 지역의 안정성과 글로벌 경제 환경에 중대한 영향을 미칠 것으로 전망됩니다.

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Fighting While Talking: The Iran War Enters Its Bargaining Phase - Lawfare

On July 8, President Trump, speaking at the NATO summit in Ankara, pronounced the ceasefire with Iran “over.” The same day, Qatari and Pakistani mediators shuttled between the two delegations with U.S. negotiators keeping the channel open, as U.S. Central Command settled into a rhythm of striking Iranian targets and then pausing . The pattern would carry on for weeks—until early August, when Washington paused new strikes and the diplomatic dialogue moved to an Omani channel . As one U.S. official described it, this new pattern was a deliberate effort to hit Iran militarily, wait, and let diplomacy work.

Commentators said the scene looked like the collapse of diplomacy . But in reality, this was its continuation—by other means.

The Islamabad memorandum of understanding (MOU) that halted the war in June did not end it, nor did it intend to. Instead, it opened a 60-day window that closes in mid-August to negotiate the terms that the fighting had failed to settle, leaving the hardest questions, chief among them the future of Iran’s nuclear program and control of the Strait of Hormuz, deliberately unresolved.

While much was left unsaid and unspecified in the MOU, what was spelled out was even more concerning. Washington made a series of concessions at the negotiation’s outset , signaling to Tehran that more could be extracted from the U.S. administration. What the Iranian regime secured was language it had long placed on its wish list when negotiating with U.S. counterparts—language that previous administrations refused to concede. The memorandum committed Washington to terminate all sanctions , withdraw its forces from Iran’s proximity within 30 days of a final deal, and pledge noninterference in Iran’s internal affairs. The result was that, viewed from Tehran, the United States had chosen the time, place, and manner of the war, but Iran had the upper hand in determining when and how to end it. And for now, the Iranian leadership, having pocketed some of the concessions and paid the price of the war, has no incentive to end it once and for all.

What has followed is a familiar and dangerous condition: a war that has entered a bargaining phase, in which military operations and negotiation are a single process and each strike is a message about what one side will pay and what it will accept.

While anathema to America’s vision of “unconditional surrender” or its ideal of turning adversaries into allies, this is how most wars end: not in surrender or decision, but in a violent haggling over terms. It is also where wars are most easily prolonged, because parties with the clearest interest in breaking the deal are often not the adversaries at the table but the allies beside it. In this war, Israel on the U.S. side and proxies ranging from Lebanese Hezbollah to the Houthis in Yemen on the Iranian side have each shown the capacity to reignite a conflict their allies were trying to wind down.

Understanding why the Iran war will not end cleanly and what it would take to end it at all requires seeing the fighting and the talking as the same thing, and taking seriously the spoilers who have the capacity and reason to wreck it.

The 14-point memorandum signed on June 17 was less a settlement than a schedule for one. It formalized the fragile ceasefire that had held, unevenly, since April. In practice, it was meant to end the U.S. naval blockade imposed in response to Iran’s partial closing of the Strait of Hormuz, restore Iran’s ability to sell oil, and open a 60-day window to negotiate a permanent agreement. On the war’s central prize, it committed Iran only to “its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels” —toll-free for 60 days, with the strait’s future administration left to later talks.

Washington presented the clause as a path to an open waterway by day 60; Tehran claimed it as recognition of Iranian control. The ambiguity could be blamed on sloppy drafting by amateurs: The memorandum was negotiated by the president’s son-in-law , a real estate developer who lacks substantive knowledge of the history of U.S.-Iran relations, nuclear energy or weapons technology, economic sanctions on Iran, or maritime security, and without proper input by government experts. After all, the same team negotiating the MOU had failed to anticipate that Iran would close the strait, something Tehran had telegraphed and U.S. analysts gamed out for years . But it was also the key disagreement, papered over and deferred.

What followed traced a pattern now familiar enough to diagram. A week after the MOU’s signing, Iran struck a ship in the strait ; the U.S. answered with what it called “contained” strikes. The two sides traded fire, then agreed to stop. Shipping crept back— reaching 49 transits on July 7 , the most since the war began. Then Iran hit three more tankers , Washington revoked the oil-sales license it had just granted, and the exchange escalated into the largest U.S. operation since the truce: some 90 targets along Iran’s coastline in a single night, then widening to bridges, ports, and the perimeter of the Bushehr nuclear power plant . Iran answered with missiles and drones targeting U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan . Traffic in the strait collapsed to 13 transits a day , compared to a prewar norm near 110.

Yet even as the two countries were exchanging fire, the diplomacy never fully stopped. On the day Trump announced the ceasefire was over, Qatari and Pakistani mediators were already working on the next steps in the process. Iran’s parliamentary speaker declared that the strait would open on Iranian terms, not U.S. threats. Meanwhile, Vice President Vance answered that the artery had to stay open —each side restating the same unresolved grievance, this time with ordnance attached. Strike, pause, shuttle, repeat: The sequence looks like a truce failing. But it is better understood as a bargain being priced.

By early August, the two sides were nearing an agreed-upon price. Trump called off a threatened follow-on assault he had billed as the biggest since World War II, and the diplomacy shifted to Muscat, where Tehran—still refusing direct talks with Washington—agreed with Oman on a two-lane workaround: inbound traffic through Iranian waters, outbound through Omani ones, toll-free for an initial period. Both sides now say a deal is close; but Iran still says the strait stays shut until the blockade lifts, while Trump vows never to accept tolls.

The pattern has a pedigree. Scholars of war termination have converged on a finding at odds with the way Americans imagine wars ending: Most wars do not end in “unconditional surrender.” They end when both sides accept terms. Paul Pillar’s classic study of war termination, “Negotiating Peace,” treats combat and diplomacy as a single process: Each side fights to improve the terms it can demand at the table, and talks to lock in what the fighting has won.

Korea is the canonical case. Armistice negotiations opened in July 1951 , two years before the shooting stopped, and the U.S. Army’s official history of the period is appropriately titled “Truce Tent and Fighting Front.” The battles of those two years—fought over hills whose names became bywords for futility—were not separate from the haggling at Panmunjom. They were the haggling, conducted by other means.

The theory explains why. Wars begin and often persist, James Fearon argues in a foundational account , because each side has superior knowledge of its own strength and resolve, and has every incentive to bluff. Each strike and week of endurance reveals what words alone cannot prove, and wars end when the fighting has brought both sides’ expectations close enough to strike a deal. It is what Thomas Schelling means by the diplomacy of violence : force used to communicate what further fighting will cost.

By that standard, the current Iran campaign is textbook. A superpower that strikes 90 targets and then pauses, keeps a target list in reserve, revokes an oil license one week and dangles frozen assets the next is negotiating in a language it expects the Iranians will understand.

Adversaries of the U.S. have understood this well. Hanoi fought the last years of the Vietnam War under an explicit doctrine it called “fighting while talking, talking while fighting” —Le Duc Tho later told Henry Kissinger that the bloodiest battle of 1972 had been fought to pressure the Americans at the table in Paris. Tehran is running the same play with the Strait of Hormuz, periodically showing its ability to choke off this vital bottleneck in the international oil and gas market and to pressure the U.S. to abandon its war aims.

A bargaining war turns on two quantities: what each side can threaten, and what each side can bear. In the Iran war, the question is what price each side believes it has already paid and how much more it is willing to pay for an acceptable outcome.

Washington holds the stronger hand on paper: It is a nuclear-weapon state with the world’s most sophisticated conventional military and installations around the world, including in Iran’s backyard. It also has the power to cripple Iran’s disastrous economy further or offer it a lifeline. It can reimpose the naval blockade the memorandum lifted, restore the sanctions it eased, fund reconstruction, and—as the 90-target night showed—inflict damage Iran cannot answer blow for blow. But even U.S. firepower has limits, and the early-August pause in strikes came amid Pentagon warnings about depleted munitions stockpiles.

What the U.S. truly lacks is patience. Its public opposed the war from the start and is increasingly frustrated with the state of the economy just months before midterm elections that could end the president’s ability to meaningfully advance his agenda in the last two years of his term.

At the leadership level, the president has already blinked once, settling in June for a memorandum far short of the victory he had promised. He has indicated that he is “ bored ” of dealing with Iran and is already eyeing Cuba as his next target . Tehran watched him leave President Obama’s nuclear deal in his first term without a plan for what would come next; he left office in 2021 having failed to secure the comprehensive deal his administration promised. In his second term, he threatened regime change only to settle for a leadership reshuffle (for the worse). And he promised the obliteration of Iran’s nuclear program, only to agree to an MOU that did not secure any verifiable measures on the matter beyond a vague reiteration of claims that Tehran would not acquire a nuclear weapon. Now, the Iranian regime is betting Trump will blink again.

Tehran’s leverage is that the Strait of Hormuz is a dial, not a switch. Iran can throttle traffic from open to near-closed and back, matching pain to the state of the talks—the transit count serving as a barometer of its perceived bargaining position. Its nuclear program also serves as a negotiating card, and commercial satellite imagery showed Iran rebuilding damaged nuclear and missile sites at the Parchin complex and at a site called Pickaxe Mountain—which analysts read as a commitment to reconstitute what the war had destroyed.

Beneath this balance is a deeper asymmetry: For Washington, this was a war of choice prompted by a partner (Israel). The U.S. has also revised down its war aims from “unconditional surrender” to terms worse than the status quo ante. For Tehran, by contrast, this is a war of survival, and a theocratic regime fighting for its life will force its people to absorb costs the U.S. will not.

Iran does not need a victory at the end of this war: It can already present the outcome as a win. Not only is the regime still standing, but it has also been legitimized by the U.S. administration that talked the toughest talk, securing concessions that include its preferred language on key issues ranging from the presence of U.S. forces in the Middle East to the termination of all U.S. sanctions.

Neither government, though, bargains with a free hand. Fred Iklé describes the end of a war as not only a negotiation between enemies, but a struggle within each government over whether to end it at all. In Tehran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps maintains an even more dominant position following the leadership reshuffle caused by the war, now increasingly asserting control over political, economic, and military affairs. The guard has greater ability to shape the course of negotiations than it had in past iterations of U.S.-Iran talks under the previous leadership. And those within the Iranian system once considered hard-liners for opposing concessions to the United States now represent its mainstream.

Source: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiowFBVV95cUxNT3JJQmRWR0xLMENleWozcE9RZFZRRFdRNUxzVklZR241NWlTT3hGOUlib2M4aTNSbDg3Wkw1N0FPQkFCOEp6N2tady11R3hmUVl0M21mRU5rMGYwa2RZUUpBY3c4bE9pR0xFTjdpSzFmQlhFNTZUM0dPcDY5ekttWUFsc0FmOThwN25wRzhadmZZTkJRc1VoM2Z2QjRJSGpaYURB?oc=5