Vikas Swarup is a former diplomat and the author of Q&A, which was adapted into the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire. His most recent novel is The Girl with the Seven Lives.
Somewhere in the Persian Gulf this week, a supertanker captain loading crude at Ras Tanura will plot a course straight through the Strait of Hormuz instead of the long detour around it that has defined global shipping for the past four months.
That single, modest act of normalcy is what most of the world will actually be celebrating on June 19, when American and Iranian officials sit down in Geneva to sign a memorandum of understanding that runs, by Vice President J.D. Vance’s own admission, to barely a page and a half.
Few people will ever read the memorandum. Millions will feel its consequences.
But the document on the table in Geneva is not merely about reopening the Strait of Hormuz. It is the first serious attempt by Washington in nearly half a century to ask whether Iran has to remain America’s permanent enemy. For forty-seven years, since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Washington and Jerusalem alike have treated Iran’s regime as ideological, irrational and unreformable — fit only to be contained, isolated and periodically bombed. Hawks in both capitals built careers on that premise, certain Iran would never change and could only be met with force.
Force was tried, and tried twice recently. In June 2025, the US and Israel launched a twelve-day air campaign meant to obliterate Iran’s nuclear programme outright. Eight months later, they escalated dramatically: a sustained assault that killed Iran’s supreme leader and much of the country’s military leadership, while drawing a third of the US Navy into the Gulf. If overwhelming force could have compelled surrender, this was the moment. Instead, it produced a costly war, roiled energy markets, unnerved America’s Gulf partners, and ended not in Iranian collapse but in a negotiated understanding with the very regime it had sought to break.
What is remarkable is that Trump and Vance seem to have absorbed that lesson rather than explain it away. The 2015 JCPOA was a narrow transaction: Iran mothballed centrifuges, the world eased sanctions, and nothing else about the relationship changed. This MoU reads differently. It treats the nuclear file as one part of a larger bargain in which Iran is offered a path back into the global economy — sanctions relief, reconstruction financing — in exchange for behaving like a state the rest of the world can do business with. Trump has even accepted, for now, language that addresses Iran’s uranium stockpile only “conceptually,” deferring the hardest questions to follow-on talks rather than letting them hold the whole deal hostage. That is not the posture of a president looking for an excuse to walk away. It is the posture of one who istrying to bank a strategic shift before Washington’s permanent war lobby can dismantle it.
That lobby is already mobilising, on both sides of the Atlantic. In Washington, the neoconservative foreign-policy establishment and the AIPAC-backed flank of Congress have spent two decades treating any opening to Tehran as an act of appeasement and are assailing the Trump deal. In Jerusalem, the response has been equally fierce. Avigdor Liberman has called it a diplomatic disaster worse than Obama’s. Itamar Ben-Gvir has denounced it outright. Netanyahu, careful not to rupture relations with Trump, has nonetheless made clear that Israel was not a party to the deal and intends to retain complete freedom of action in Lebanon.
Their alarm is understandable. What is at stake is not simply one agreement but an entire strategic framework. For two decades, Israeli objections have functioned as something close to a veto over American policy towards Iran. Every administration that flirted with diplomacy, from Obama’s nuclear deal to Biden’s failed effort to revive it, ran into resistance that was as strong in Washington as it was in Jerusalem. What makes this moment different is that the resistance is no longer decisive. Trump has given Netanyahu almost everything a pro-Israel American president could give: recognition of Jerusalem, recognition of the Golan, the killing of Qassem Soleimani, strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and ultimately a war that eliminated Iran’s supreme leader. That record is precisely what now lets him override Netanyahu on a deal Jerusalem opposes. It also reflects a broader shift in American politics, where the Gaza war has eroded the bipartisan consensus that long insulated Israel from meaningful pressure in Washington.
The other half of this paradigm shift must come from Tehran. A durable opening is possible only if Iran begins to behave more like a normal state and less like a revolutionary one, scaling back its regional militancy, becoming less repressive at home, and accepting that missile cities buried beneath its mountains are no substitute for a functioning economy. The lesson of the past year should be obvious: ideological defiance and strategic overreach have imposed enormous costs on ordinary Iranians while delivering diminishing returns.
If Iran does make that transition, the implications will not stop at its borders. A less threatening Iran would steadily erode the rationale for a regional order built around permanent confrontation with it. Israel, too, would face pressure to adapt. For decades, its security doctrine has rested on military dominance and the containment of hostile neighbours. But durable peace cannot be built on perpetual mobilisation. A Middle East in which Iran is less revolutionary and more integrated is also a Middle East in which Israel will increasingly be judged not by its ability to defeat its adversaries, but by its willingness to coexist with them. In that sense, a reformed Iran would ultimately require a reformed Israel.
None of this guarantees success. Memoranda collapse, hawks regroup, and the Middle East has seen more than its share of false dawns – Oslo, the Iraq invasion, the Arab Spring, the Abraham Accords all promised a “new Middle East” and delivered something narrower. But Geneva deserves to be taken seriously precisely because it follows the test that mattered most: an actual war, fully resourced, that failed to produce the outcome its architects promised.
Trump has earned the right to try something else. And that tanker captain at Ras Tanura, plotting a straight line through Hormuz instead of a detour around it, has earned the right to hope it lasts.
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