Iran ceasefire: too many brokers, too little leverage

Pakistan, with China’s help, brokered it. Turkey and Egypt shuttled the proposals. Qatar had been working the phones for weeks.

When the ceasefire between the United States, Israel and Iran was announced on April 7, Pakistan had stepped forward as the lead mediator, pulling the disparate threads together. Within hours, attacks had resumed. Both sides declared victory. Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah continued as though the deal didn’t exist, because for that front, it didn’t.

This is diplomacy now: a single broker in the spotlight, yet no one is responsible for the final outcome.

The machinery still generates the same paper trail of summits and communiqués. But something has changed in how it functions. The post-Cold War moment produced occasional bursts of genuine great-power brokerage — ugly and imperfect, but decisive when it worked.

What exists today is different: a permanent facilitation industry that has grown large and fragmented, even when one actor eventually takes the lead. It keeps itself busy. It rarely finishes anything.

Sudan, Gaza, and Ukraine are three recent examples. For Sudan, the different factions have mastered the art of forum shopping, using Jeddah, Cairo, the African Union and Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) as rival tracks for leverage and hiding spots. Gaza has followed an all-too-familiar cycle.

Qatar secures a pause, Egypt extends it and Turkey claims credit for mediating. Then, the pause ends. Even Qatar’s own minister of state publicly acknowledged by mid-2024 that more efforts do not necessarily bring the parties closer together, especially when the talks serve “narrow political interests.”

Ukraine presents a connected story. Years of initiatives by Turkey, the African Union and Swiss-hosted summits eventually consolidated into a single dominant track led by Washington. Yet even that consolidation did not resolve the underlying impasse.

The Iran conflict interrupted the process, but that impasse predated it and would have persisted regardless. Even with one leader in charge, the underlying impasse remained — for very different reasons.

The opening example makes the same point in sharper relief. Pakistan became the lead broker — precisely what the standard critique of fragmented diplomacy calls for — and the ceasefire still collapsed within hours. The reason is that Pakistan, like Qatar and Turkey before it, had access but not leverage.

And in the end, leverage is secondary to willingness: no mediator, however unified and capable, can manufacture a settlement from parties who have not yet decided that peace costs less than continued fighting.

The central problem is no longer the number of mediators. It is that the parties to most of these conflicts have not yet reached the point where they are willing to absorb the costs of a real settlement. Until that threshold is crossed, even the most skillful brokerage cannot produce more than a temporary pause.

Washington’s withdrawal created a gap that Qatar, Turkey, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Indonesia stepped into.

Facilitation is a key part of any sound foreign policy strategy, even when it doesn’t always lead to resolution: it helps build relationships and demonstrates engagement. Sometimes it yields achievements such as prisoner exchanges or humanitarian corridors, that validate the effort.

However, access alone does not ensure leverage. Even though multiple channels allow parties to choose the most appropriate forum, facilitators need clear deliverables. The system often prioritizes quick wins over the difficult concessions usually needed for lasting peace.

Sustainable resolutions have traditionally relied on one party facing credible coercive pressure or recognizing that ongoing conflict is more costly than compromising on key demands. This is a fundamental condition that no mediation framework, regardless of its design, can replace.

Spoilers recognize that when no single actor oversees the process, delays become a tactic. They wait, restart attacks hours after a ceasefire is declared and observe the response. This week, the response to the Iran ceasefire was disorganized.

JD Vance called the truce “fragile.” That was the generous reading. It was arranged by actors who lacked the leverage to make it stick, through a process with no enforcement mechanism and no party willing to bear the full political cost of one.

The Strait of Hormuz barely reopened. Follow-on talks were scheduled for Islamabad. Then the strikes resumed — or proved difficult to stop — and the talks briefly receded into the conditional tense.

Middle powers are not wrong to try. Their access is sometimes the only access there is. The quiet backchannels and humanitarian corridors they offer can help prevent worse outcomes, even if they seldom make headlines.

But access without accountability leads nowhere. Over time, the process itself becomes the issue because it allows the underlying conflict to unfold independently, while diplomacy proceeds alongside it, neither connected to it nor able to halt it.

What is missing is a lead actor ready to unify efforts and accept the political consequences of accountability for results. The US has historically brought a combination of coercive tools, security guarantees and economic incentives that middle-power facilitators have so far been unable to replicate.

That does not mean American leadership guarantees success — the Ukraine track demonstrates otherwise. But without that combination, even a unified process remains entirely dependent on the parties’ willingness to settle, with no external force capable of shifting the calculus.

The ceasefire over Iran may yet hold. But if it doesn’t, it will confirm the truth beneath all these cases: no process, however well-led, can close a gap the parties themselves have not yet chosen to close.

Eric Alter is a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs and a former UN civil servant.