Is Iran war diplomacy ramping up, as Qatar, Oman, Pakistan officials visit?

Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani is visiting Tehran on Thursday for talks about de-escalating tensions and reviving failed negotiations between Iran and the United States. His visit comes amid a flurry of high-level delegations travelling to Tehran in recent days, with mediators rallying to persuade the warring sides back to the negotiating table despite continued hardline posturing on both sides. Sheikh Mohammed, who is also Qatar’s foreign minister, will meet with “a number of Iranian officials” in Tehran to discuss ending hostilities and to “create the conditions conducive to dialogue”, a spokesperson said.

He will also address the issue of the critical Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf, and “the need for it to return to the status quo before February 28”. The narrow waterway has been mostly closed to shipping since early March, when Iran closed it, and shipping traffic, which carried more than one-fifth of global oil and gas supplies before the war, has collapsed, sending global energy markets into crisis. Qatar is a key behind-the-scenes negotiator between Washington and Tehran and was pivotal in securing a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in June that briefly paused hostilities, but the deal has since expired.

Here’s what else we know about the renewed push for talks: On Monday, Pakistan’s army chief Asim Munir met with several high-ranking officials in Tehran, including Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s chief negotiator. He also met with General Mohsen Rezaei, the recently appointed secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. On Tuesday, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi met his Iranian counterpart Abbas Araghchi in Tehran to discuss the Strait of Hormuz, which has become the biggest flashpoint in the conflict.

The two countries have been negotiating how to jointly govern the shared passageway for weeks. Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi on the same day announced the two sides had agreed to a new temporary shipping route in the strait that would see vessels enter through Iranian waters, and give Tehran partial control over exit routes. However, Iran emphasised that the strait will not reopen until the US lifts sanctions and unfreezes Iran’s assets.

Officially, the US and Iran are still at war and have each declared the other side as defeated, despite both suffering economically and politically from it. Amid US news reports that the US may be running low on vital interceptor missiles and equipment in the Middle East, the Trump administration has shifted to a strategy of economic pressure on Iran, announcing new sanctions this week and threatening other countries which continue to do business with it with secondary sanctions. A major obstacle is the closed Strait of Hormuz.

Iran wants to continue controlling the waterway, which flows through the territorial waters of Iran and Oman, as it has done in the course of the conflict, but Washington opposes this stance and wants to return to the pre-war arrangement under which all shipping passed freely through the strait. While Trump declared this week that all seamines had been removed from the strait, experts warn that some may have been missed, meaning this remains an additional risk to ships. The US, meanwhile, is also continuing its naval blockade on Iranian ports in and around the strait, hampering Iranian oil exports.