What Will End the War?

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The Morning

What Will End the War?

We look at the state of the cease-fire.

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In Beirut yesterday.

Credit...

Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times

By

Sam Sifton

I am the host of The Morning.

April 9, 2026,

6:38 a.m. ET

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How steady is the cease-fire in the Middle East? Israeli missiles have continued to fall on Lebanon, Iran threatens a military response, and shippers are confused about the status of the Strait of Hormuz. The United States and Iran don’t even agree on what it will take to

open

peace talks.

Both sides have declared victory in the conflict. The United States has destroyed most of Iran’s navy and reduced its ability to shoot missiles across the region. But President Trump’s other goals

remain unrealized

. Iran still has uranium to make a bomb someday; it still guides regional militias like Hezbollah; its regime still holds power and crushes dissent.

And Iran, for its part, now has total control of the strait.

What could end the war?

White House officials say talks are expected to begin between the two nations on Saturday, brokered by Pakistan. They are likely to be contentious.

Among other things in

its 10-point proposal

, Iran wants to maintain its control of the strait, the narrow passage through which a fifth of the world’s oil usually flows. Iran’s chokehold on it during the war has damaged the global economy. “It is very unlikely that Washington or Iran’s Gulf Arab neighbors would accept this,” my colleague Erika Solomon reports.

Iran also wants Americans gone from the region. It wants reparations to pay for damages. And it wants the U.S. to accept Iran’s right to enrich uranium.

That’s not going to happen. The United States has bases across the Persian Gulf states, Israel and Iraq. The administration is unlikely to pay to rebuild Iran. And as for its nuclear ambitions, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said at a news conference yesterday that the United States could send Special Operations troops to seize the fissile material. “If we have to, we can do it in any means necessary,” he said.

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