Omani Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi said “significant progress” had been made during Geneva talks he mediated between the United States and Iran, with Tehran offering assurances it would not seek nuclear material to build an atomic bomb. He called this a “very important breakthrough” and went public with the claim. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi also reported “progress” and “mutual understanding.”
Despite those statements, the US and Israel attacked Iran early the next morning. US President Donald Trump justified the airstrikes by citing “threats” from Tehran and announced the start of “major combat operations,” saying the objective was to defend Americans by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made similar arguments, stressing that Iran must not be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons capable of threatening humanity.
Observers now question whether the parties simply misunderstood the state of the talks or whether the official reasons for the attack were plausible. Marcus Schneider of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s Beirut project called a misunderstanding unlikely, describing Oman’s efforts as a last-ditch attempt to prevent a war that now appears to be beginning. He said the Americans showed “significantly less enthusiasm” about the negotiations. Diba Mirzaei, an Iran expert at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies, also doubted fundamentally different interpretations of the talks; she suggested Oman’s public statements highlighted what was at stake and aimed to underline the opportunity the US would forfeit by attacking.
Analysts pointed to the vast initial differences between US and Iranian positions. Schneider argued the negotiations were doomed because Washington’s demands amounted to “complete surrender,” something Iran would never accept. He also rejected claims that Iran posed an immediate threat to the US, calling such assertions implausible and characterizing a full-scale war as a “war of choice” by the US.
Mirzaei noted the US had deployed significant military forces to the region for weeks, making it unlikely the buildup was merely posturing. She described Trump’s approach as one of escalation—using pressure to elicit concessions—and warned that this logic makes reaching a viable agreement far harder. Schneider suggested the US may have misjudged the ideological nature of Iran’s regime, expecting it to give in under pressure. He also saw the near-simultaneous Israeli and US strikes as a coordinated tactical and political choice, likely timed to appeal to domestic constituencies.
Both experts concluded the attacks have made diplomacy far more difficult. Iran is neither Venezuela nor the Iraq of 2003, and the current dynamics mean any future agreement will be much harder to achieve.
This article was originally written in German.