On the morning the world expected an escalated American assault on Iran, the news instead was a ceasefire — on Iran's terms, for two weeks. To war historian and author Amaresh Misra, a longtime commentator on West Asian affairs, that sequence amounts to a capitulation the scale of which the world has rarely seen. Speaking with Nous Network's Bushra Khan Fahad, Misra laid out ten conditions he said Iran secured from the Trump administration: no further US attacks; continued Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz; permission to continue uranium enrichment; removal of primary and secondary sanctions; the dropping of UN Security Council and IAEA Board of Governors proposals against Iran; compensation for war damages; withdrawal of American forces from the region; and a ceasefire extending to fronts including Hezbollah's resistance in Lebanon.
A war Israel could not win by assassination
Misra traced the war's origin to a 28 February assassination attempt on Ayatollah Khamenei, in which he said Israel played the leading role, followed by over a hundred assassinations of Iranian military commanders, IRGC officials and politicians — a campaign, he argued, built on the mistaken premise that killing enough leaders would collapse the regime. It didn't. When Mossad targeted Ali Larijani, the official who had helped contain January's protests, on the theory that his assassination would bring protesters back onto the streets, the opposite happened: crowds that came out were pro-government, gathering before iftar during Ramadan. "Assassination is not politics," Misra said of Israel's strategy.
He described the conflict as a hybrid war fought simultaneously on military, civil and psychological fronts — citing crowds forming human chains around energy infrastructure Trump had threatened to bomb, with musicians performing outside them, and a campaign in which 14 million Iranians reportedly registered to volunteer for their country within hours. A US claim of sending 155 aircraft to rescue a single downed pilot, he argued, backfired as an admission that the underlying mission — seizing Iran's enriched uranium — had failed; American military officials, he said, effectively conceded that even repeated special-operations attempts could not touch the enriched material without a ground invasion of several hundred thousand troops, which was never realistically on the table.
Reading the ten conditions
Misra read the granular terms as confirmation of Iranian leverage rather than a negotiated compromise. Control of Hormuz, he said, would now run jointly through Oman and Iran, with Russia and China positioned behind them and the US excluded — a striking reversal for a chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of global trade passes, and one Iran had threatened to close entirely if its energy infrastructure was struck. Iran, he noted, had also signalled it could close the Bab-el-Mandeb strait, controlled by Yemen, which would have cut off Europe's trade route to Asia entirely; between the two chokepoints, some 60% of world trade was at stake, a pressure point he said unsettled Washington more than any single military exchange.
On sanctions, Misra called the willingness to discuss compensation remarkable in itself — an American acknowledgment of the human and material cost of a war he characterized as illegally initiated. He also pointed to the economics of the war itself: Iran, fighting with comparatively cheap drones and domestically produced missiles, spent roughly a tenth of what the US and Israel spent — about a billion dollars a day each, by his estimate — while also profiting from a Trump-authorized release of 178 million barrels of oil that he said netted Iran roughly $14 billion.
"This is an earth-shattering moment"
Misra argued the ceasefire's true significance lies beyond its immediate terms: a shift toward China, Russia and Iran jointly challenging dollar-denominated trade through the strait, with oil potentially priced outside the dollar and BRICS currency-basket proposals gaining ground faster than anyone anticipated. "This is an earth-shattering moment," he said, comparing it to claims that a past US administration had ended the Russia-Ukraine war: this time, he argued, it was Iran's neighbourly pressure, not American diplomacy, that stopped the fighting.
He was candid that the two-week window does not guarantee permanence — but predicted it would likely extend week by week rather than collapse into renewed strikes on power plants, since any resumption would now require a ground offensive the American public does not support. He warned Israel remains the least predictable actor in the equation: isolated within the ceasefire framework, domestically unpopular even among Trump's own Republican base according to surveys he cited, and, in his words, "desperate" enough to attempt a tactical strike of its own. He noted Israel had already said it would not honour a separate Lebanon ceasefire, and described Hezbollah as inflicting sufficiently heavy losses — over a hundred Merkava tanks destroyed, he said — that Israeli forces may be pushed to withdraw from southern Lebanon regardless of what happens on the Iran front. On Gaza, he said Hamas has emerged strengthened and has explicitly refused disarmament, a red line Iran also supports.
Misra predicted the ceasefire's ripple effects would land hardest on the Gulf states hosting American bases — Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE, which he called acutely vulnerable, contrasted with Oman's already-warm relationship with Tehran. He cited a US missile that missed its target and struck Basra, killing civilians and prompting crowds to storm Kuwait's consulate and tear down its flag, as a sign of how fragile Gulf state positions have become. In principle, he said, Washington has already agreed to begin withdrawing American troops from the region — a process he expects to take months given the logistics, but one that marks the retreat of a decades-old symbol of US power in the Middle East.
India's missed moment
Misra's sharpest remarks were reserved for India's absence from the diplomacy. Pakistan, he said, emerged as a credible peacemaker in a role India could have played had it positioned itself as a neutral actor rather than visibly aligning with Israel and the US — a stance he said cost India credibility as a leader of the Global South and a BRICS member, and left ordinary people facing fuel and gas shortages as a consequence of a foreign policy failure. He noted Modi spoke with Iranian officials during the war and that Trump called Modi, apparently hoping for Indian mediation, but that Iran did not consider India a credible mediator given a history of incidents he declined to itemize. "India's foreign policy has completely failed," he said, adding that any genuinely nationalist Indian should be able to accept that conclusion rather than treat it as a partisan claim.
Reframing an old line about a Pope who was once credited with ending a war, Misra closed by saying that this time it was not a pope but a neighbour who stopped one — a comment he offered as the clearest signal yet that India needs to reconsider its alignment with Washington and Tel Aviv in favour of closer ties with Iran, Russia and China, or risk being left further behind as the regional order resets over the coming two weeks.
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