The Mirage of the Signed Agreement: Why Peace Deals Fail to End Deep Conflicts

In January 2025, a US-brokered ceasefire in Gaza lasted barely 58 days before Israel launched a devastating wave of airstrikes, killing over 400 people overnight. Simultaneously, the US and Iran agreed to yet another ceasefire in April 2026, only for the US strikes to resume within weeks, leaving the truce on what Trump called “life support.” The pattern was similar; it's a reminder of what diplomacy alone cannot do. Signed agreements create pauses and not peace. In conflicts carrying the weight of decades of historical grievance, identity, and geopolitical interest, no document bears that load.

Illustration by The Geostrata

The US-Iran standoff and the Israel-Palestine conflict illustrate with painful clarity why. The terms “ceasefires” and “peace agreements” are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same. A ceasefire halts active hostilities, whereas a peace treaty formally ends a state of conflict under international law. But conflict resolution, being the genuine transformation of relationships between countries, is something else entirely. As the United States Institute of Peace notes, “A signed peace agreement is rarely the conclusion of a peace process but an important stepping stone.

At a minimum, a peace agreement should stop the violence and ideally should address the roots of conflict.” Most agreements achieve the minimum. Almost none achieve the ideal. The result of this is what is called “frozen conflict,” where active armed conflicts have been brought to an end, but no peace treaty or other political framework resolves the conflict to the satisfaction of the combatants. The war is paused, but the wound is not healed. Legally, the conflict can start at any moment. 

WASHINGTON AND TEHRAN: NEGOTIATING AT THE SURFACE

The wound between Washington and Tehran predates most policymakers. In August 1953, the CIA, in collaboration with British intelligence, orchestrated the overthrow of Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, restoring the Shah to power. Operation Ajax was the first time the United States used its intelligence apparatus to topple a civilian government; the consequence took decades to detonate. When the Shah regime collapsed in 1979, and revolutionary guards stormed the US embassy, the 444-day hostage crisis permanently severed diplomatic relations.

The antagonism that followed as proxy wars, sanctions, and competing regional visions further increased the rupture. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was the most serious attempt to interrupt this cycle. The deal required Iran to cap its nuclear activities in return for the lifting of international sanctions. It also removed the immediate threat of a nuclear-armed Iran and reduced the prospect of conflict with regional rivals. For a moment, this seemed like a genuine diplomatic achievement.

But the JCPOA was a technical agreement, not a political transformation.

It addressed uranium enrichment while ignoring Iran's ballistic missile programme, its support for Hezbollah and Houthi forces, or the fundamental ideological incompatibility between the Islamic Republic and the Western-led order. When President Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, claiming it failed to curtail Iran's missile program and regional influence, the architecture collapsed. Iran ignored nuclear limitations. By June 2022, Iran's breakout time had effectively reached zero. The JCPOA stands as an example of what happens when a deal hovers over structural antagonism rather than engaging in it.

ISRAEL-PALESTINE: NEGOTIATING AROUND THE WOUND

The Israel-Palestine conflict at its core is not a policy dispute but a conflict over land, identity, and legitimacy rooted in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the mass displacement of Palestinians in 1948, and decades of military occupation. No framework built only on security arrangements can resolve a dispute about who has the right to exist, govern, and define the narrative of a place. The Oslo Accords of 1993 generated genuine hope. On the south lawn of the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat shook hands before President Clinton.

Israel and the PLO granted each other mutual recognition for the first time. The accord compelled Arafat, at least for the moment, to recognise Israel without achieving any of the Palestinians' demands, like self-determination, statehood, East Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital, and the right to return. Oslo failed in part because it did not address the fundamental asymmetry between the parties, where Palestine was recognised as a state, and Israel was recognised as a representative body of a national movement. Settlement expansion continued throughout the Oslo years.

The second intifada erupted in 2000, killing over 1000 Israelis and more than 3000 Palestinians, scarring both societies that persist to this day. The 2020 Abraham Accords chose a different path of normalisation between Israel and the Arab Gulf states. But critics argue that the agreement did not significantly address the Palestinian issue, the resolution of which had been considered a prerequisite to formal relations with Israel. 

A common thread with both conflicts is that the solutions proposed have been too narrow for the problems underlying.

In the US-Iran case, every agreement has been a technical negotiation conducted in the shadow of a political rupture that began in 1953, never directly addressed. In Israel-Palestine, the parties have negotiated borders and security arrangements while ignoring questions of sovereignty and refugee return. Both conflicts are also held in place by the interests of outside powers, who benefit from managed hostility more than genuine resolution. Gulf states, Washington, Moscow and Tehran all have equities in keeping these conflicts at a simmer. For them, making peace is more inconvenient than waging war. 

PEACE WAS NEVER IN THE DOCUMENT

The liberal peace framework assumes that rational actors with shared interests can negotiate their way to a table outcome, but these conflicts are not purely rational enterprises. They are sustained by memory, myth, and martyrdom and by the way communities construct meaning around their suffering. A Palestinian child born after Oslo has inherited the Nakba as a lived political reality, not history. An Iranian politician invoking 1953 is not being rhetorical; they are speaking to a wound that their electorate feels viscerally.

The political conditions that created these ruptures have changed enormously, but the grievances remain the same because grievances do not dissolve with time when they are continuously reinforced by new injuries. Occupation did not end after Oslo. US sanctions did not end after the JCPOA.

The agreement arrives, and then the condition that made the conflict necessary continues, which is precisely why the agreement fails.

Conflict resolution scholar John Paul Lederach draws a sharp distinction between peacekeeping, the management of violence and peace building, which he describes as the long-term transformation of relationships, institutions, and the social fabric that makes violence possible. Most international agreements operate at the peacekeeping level. They stop the fighting but do not rebuild what was broken.

As the UN itself acknowledges, peacebuilding requires sustained action across the broadest range of activities, with reconciliation, institution building, and restoration of trust taking generations and cannot be contracted to a signing ceremony. However, the value carried by ceasefires and peace agreements is not to be dismissed. They save lives and create space for trust to be rebuilt. But they must not be mistaken for solutions to the problems that make conflict recur.

The US-Iran conflict and Israel-Palestine conflict have resisted resolution, not because negotiators were insufficiently clever, but because the agreement on offer never matched the scale of what was broken. A document cannot carry the weight of a coup, an expulsion, a war, and decades of dehumanisation. The danger is not that we keep trying to make peace but that we confuse the attempt for the achievement and are relieved by the spectacle of a handshake or a ceremony, turning away from the harder and longer work that genuine peace actually demands. 

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BY NISHQA

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