The guns have fallen silent, but for Trump and Iran that's the easy part

Yet again US President Donald Trump is selling peace with Iran, and for once he has something real to offer – or so it seems.

After months of flare-ups and sabre-rattling – the grinding cycle of Iranian drone attacks on commercial shipping, American retaliation against Iranian military assets in and around the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian strikes in turn on the Gulf Arab states hosting US bases, all of which left the April 8 ceasefire fragile from the start – Tehran and Washington are closing in on a fresh memorandum of understanding to stop the shooting.

Expect the marketing blitz to begin immediately. Mr Trump and his entourage will spend the coming weeks insisting this truce is sharper, tougher and altogether better than anything former US president Barack Obama managed. In the very short term, the pitch will land. A halt to the bombing is a real achievement, and a spooked market will take it.

The trouble comes later. Stopping a war and building a peace are not the same task, and the qualities that make the ceasefire saleable today are precisely the ones that will leave Mr Trump with nothing to sell when the talks turn to a comprehensive deal.

The choreography is familiar – the leaks, the brief rallies in energy markets, the maximalist briefings – but beneath the theatre, something has genuinely shifted. A truce was always coming. Both sides had simply run out of reasons to keep fighting and discovered, separately, that they shared an interest in saying so.

Consider Mr Trump's position. The economics of the war had turned against him: a Strait of Hormuz where Iran was striking tankers and the US was hitting Iranian shipping in turn pushed energy prices up and rattled the markets in a way a president who promised cheap fuel cannot afford to ignore.

The clock made it worse. As the University of Chicago's Robert Pape has argued, global oil inventories are heading for a cliff in late July and early August – the point at which Tehran's bargaining power surges rather than fades. Why, Mr Pape has asked, would Iran settle while its leverage is still rising? Mr Trump appears to have grasped the same logic from the other end: better to lock something in before the price of a deal climbs.

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Talks on nuclear issue to be held later, says Iran

The original objective had also evaporated. Washington and Israel set out in February to break the regime; they killed supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and watched Tehran install his son Mojtaba within days. Regime change produced another regime, only younger. And then there is the matter of brand. Mr Trump styles himself the dealmaker who ends wars, not the man who begins open-ended ones, and an inconclusive bombing campaign sits awkwardly with that image.

Tehran's calculations were no less cold-blooded. Survival came first. A leadership that inherited power mid-war, with its air defences shredded and its commanders dead, cannot consolidate authority while bombs are still falling. Money came a close second: the MoU drafts in circulation reportedly include the release of billions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets – useful currency for buying loyalty at home. Each week of fighting, meanwhile, drained missile stocks and hardware built over decades – the very deterrent the regime will need once the shooting stops.

The ceasefire even hands Tehran something the war never could. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is already presenting the two-page document as a text that "consolidates Iran's battlefield victories and the people's presence in the streets". Short, vague and eminently sellable as a triumph.

So both sides arrived at the table by the same reluctant route. The harder question is whether they can stay at the table.

A senior American official conceded this week that the Iranian system is complicated: most of the leadership wants to sign, "but not everyone". That qualification carries more weight than it appears to. Who, exactly, is still firing on shipping in the Gulf? April's ceasefire was duly agreed in Tehran, yet the strait never properly reopened and the flare-ups never stopped – and Mr Trump's "Project Freedom" escort scheme, meant to guide stranded vessels through, reportedly survived barely a day before missiles and drones struck near the UAE's energy infrastructure at Fujairah and hit a South Korean tanker.

Whether that reflects hardliners acting against the leadership, proxies operating beyond its full control or a deliberate ambiguity Tehran finds useful, the lesson is the same: a document agreed at the top does not necessarily silence the guns below it.

The gap on the substance is wider still. Iran's 14-point draft reportedly enshrines a right to enrich, demands the wholesale lifting of sanctions, treats its missile programme as untouchable and floats war reparations of $300 billion. Washington's terms, depending on the official and the day, run from strict enrichment caps to none at all, the dismantling of Fordo, Isfahan and Natanz, the surrender of highly enriched uranium and unfettered access to suspect sites. Tehran spent decades building those facilities precisely so they could not be bargained away under duress.

Its commentators have already dismissed the leaked American conditions as "White House market manipulation" and "more of a wishlist than a reality" – the language of a leadership preparing its public to refuse, not to compromise. One side's victory document is the other's instrument of surrender.

So who actually came out ahead? On the surface, the answer is Iran. The framework reportedly on the table, if its terms hold, would be more generous than anything Mr Obama signed – enrichment acknowledged, sanctions lifted, missiles left alone – conceding what Tehran could not extract in pre-war diplomacy. The regime absorbed the heaviest blows in its history, persuaded the US to stop, and is still standing, enriching and in power. If that is defeat, it will take another.

Yet one detail should trouble the celebrants in Tehran. By Mr Pape's own logic, Iran's smartest move was to wait – keep Hormuz closed, let inventories reach their August cliff and negotiate from the peak of its leverage. Instead, it agreed to call off the attacks on shipping and let the strait reopen weeks before that leverage matured, surrendering its single best card early.

Regimes do not give up a winning hand on the eve of the payout unless the alternative is worse. The bombs, in other words, were biting harder than Tehran cares to admit.

Both sides arrived at the table by the same reluctant route. The harder question is whether they can stay at the table

That is why the shooting is probably over even though the deal is not. Iran is halting because it could no longer absorb the strikes; America is stopping because it could no longer afford to deliver them. Mutual exhaustion is not a flimsy basis for a ceasefire, but it settles only the easy question whether to keep fighting and leaves the hard one untouched. What follows is not peace so much as a long phase in between: the guns quiet, the comprehensive deal stuck just out of reach and the two sides trapped in the gap.

That gap will be a grind. A full accord means enrichment numbers, inspection regimes and sanctions timetables, and on every one of them the opening positions sit far apart. It also gives the spoilers their chance.

Israel, heading into elections, has every reason to keep the framework unfinished and quiet ways to do it – a timely leak about covert enrichment, a deniable strike that invites retaliation, a private word to friendly senators about the holes in any verification regime – none of which requires opposing peace out loud.

So expect months of stalled talks, manufactured crises and the occasional flare-up, all without a return to open war. And that is the real limit of the sales pitch. Mr Trump can market the ceasefire all summer, and his circle will. But a comprehensive deal would require Tehran to dismantle what it spent decades building, or Washington to bless an Iran that enriches uranium and keeps its missiles – and neither is a transaction any salesman, however gifted, can close.

The guns have gone quiet. The argument has only just begun.