US and Iran Agree on 60-Day Roadmap to End Their War
Mediators Qatar and Pakistan say the Bürgenstock talks produced working groups and a Lebanon deconfliction cell, even after Iran's walkout over a Trump threat.
The United States and Iran ended their first round of high-level talks in Switzerland early Monday with a roadmap toward a final deal within 60 days, a fragile step toward winding down a war that has run for more than 100 days.
Mediators from Qatar and Pakistan, who brokered the marathon session at the Bürgenstock resort above Lake Lucerne, said the two sides had agreed to keep the Strait of Hormuz open through a new communication line and to set up a "deconfliction cell" aimed at halting the fighting in Lebanon. Technical talks are to continue at the resort through the week.
"Encouraging progress has been made, including the creation of a mechanism for further technical talks," the mediators said in a joint statement, which also announced a High Level Committee to oversee working groups on Iran's nuclear program, sanctions and dispute resolution.
For a reader far from the Gulf, the stakes sit in the shipping lane. Roughly a fifth of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas moved through the Strait of Hormuz before the war, and Iran had moved to choke it off again on Saturday in retaliation for Israeli strikes in Lebanon. Keeping it open, even on a 60-day clock, is the difference between a manageable conflict and a global price shock.
Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, cast the outcome as a win, listing concessions Tehran said it had secured and naming the part most likely to break first.
Post by @araghchi
The agreement, built on a memorandum of understanding the two governments signed last week, nearly collapsed before it began. Iran's delegation walked out on Sunday after President Donald Trump threatened fresh attacks while Vice President JD Vance, leading the U.S. team, was sitting across the table from Iranian officials.
"Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble," Trump wrote on social media, referring to Hezbollah. "If they don't, we'll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!" Iran's lead negotiator, parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, answered that Tehran's armed forces "are ready to respond to them in a different manner."
That this followed yesterday's abrupt walkout — and the cautious opening of the Bürgenstock talks a day earlier — is itself the news: the channel held under pressure that has broken it before.
Plenty remains unresolved. The mediators listed Iran's nuclear program as one of several topics without giving detail; Vance said negotiators were focused on securing Tehran's enriched uranium stockpile to make it "effectively impossible" to rebuild a weapons program, while Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian insisted his country "will never back down from the right to enrich uranium." Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his troops would stay in southern Lebanon "as long as necessary."
Araghchi called the Lebanon deconfliction cell the agreement's "first real test." It is a fair description of the whole arrangement. A roadmap is a promise to keep talking; whether the guns in southern Lebanon go quiet over the next two months will decide whether this round is remembered as a turning point or another pause.
