Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, announced in a social media post on Friday that the Strait of Hormuz was now “completely open” and would remain so as long as the ceasefire in Lebanon – currently set to last 10 days – was in effect. “THANK YOU!” Donald Trump responded minutes later, before clarifying in a subsequent post that the US’s naval blockade was still “IN FULL FORCE AND EFFECT” and would continue “UNTIL SUCH TIME AS OUR TRANSACTION WITH IRAN IS 100% COMPLETE.” Still, the financial markets responded with unconstrained euphoria. US stocks shot up.

Oil prices fell back below $90 a barrel. The prospect of a protracted war and a global recession began to fade. Both Iran and the US seemed ready to declare victory and negotiate a path out of this conflict, even if the ceasefire could yet collapse and, if not, the subsequent negotiations could drag out over many months to come.

For now, Tehran can claim to have stood up to the world’s most powerful military and to have forced the US to abandon its fantasy of imposing regime change from the air. Trump administration officials, including the vice-president, are now sitting down to negotiate, over many hours, as equals with their Iranian counterparts. Trump has even mused about flying to Islamabad to sign any deal with Iran himself, pronouncing the US-Iran relationship, “very good”.

Most importantly, Tehran has demonstrated that it can – and will – close the Strait of Hormuz, holding global energy markets hostage and imposing a significant cost on the US, and other countries around the world, if these negotiations break down, and during any future conflict. This gives Iran a powerful form of leverage that was hypothetical before this war and has now been proven beyond doubt. Yet Trump will also claim that his decision to go to war against Iran and impose a naval blockade has brought an intransigent regime to the negotiating table, even if they were already negotiating before this conflict.

The previous supreme leader is dead, along with dozens of senior officials and military commanders. The Iranian economy, which was under serious strain and had brought protesters to the streets in huge numbers in the preceding months, has been further damaged. The toll of this war, in both the civilian lives lost and the destruction of infrastructure, has been devastating.

Trump is probably right to claim that the Iranian regime wanted to find a way to end the fighting, if only to halt the damage and give the military time to regroup and rebuild. Even the closure of Hormuz was a time-limited tactic, which was already testing the patience of Iran’s strategic partners like China, which did not want an endless blockade of the strait and the collateral damage this would cause to the global economy. For the US, in particular, this is a pyrrhic victory – if there turns out to be much to celebrate at all.

The ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon could collapse, negotiations with Iran could break down, and the conflict could resume, along with the closure of the strait at any moment. Reopening a waterway which was not closed before this war is not much of a prize to boast about. Even in Araghchi’s conciliatory social media message announcing that the strait was open, he noted that commercial vessels could now pass through “on the coordinated route as already announced by Ports and Maritime Organisation of the Islamic Republic of Iran”.

Presumably, this means that all ships will still have to coordinate their passage with Tehran, giving Iran continued oversight of the strait, which did not exist before the war. Trump has claimed that Iran will now “get all Nuclear ‘Dust’ created by our great B2 Bombers” – implying that Tehran is prepared to hand over the stockpile of highly enriched uranium that is believed to be stored, at least in part, in the network of tunnels beneath the Iranian nuclear complex in Isfahan. If this is true, then the Iranian regime will presumably expect to extract a high price in the form of sanctions relief.

The Iran nuclear deal agreed under the Obama administration in 2015 took two years to negotiate. Having torn up that deal in 2018, and with it the accompanying provisions for international monitoring and safeguards – not to mention launching a war on Iran during two previous rounds of negotiations and arguably only further incentivising the regime to seek the bomb – the Trump administration now faces an uphill struggle to negotiate similar terms to those that were on the table before this war. Still, if the ceasefire holds, the strait reopens, however cautiously, and the forthcoming negotiations succeed in ending this war, that is preferable to continuing a conflict in which all sides stand to lose. Even if it is not much of a victory. [Further reading: After Iran, America may turn against Israel]