Diplomatic efforts to ease tensions between Iran and the United States remain deadlocked despite continued exchanges of messages and mediation attempts, raising fears of a renewed military confrontation as both sides step up their threats and preparations.
Qatar and Pakistan have continued efforts to bring Tehran and Washington back to the negotiating table, but little progress has been made as tensions escalate in the Strait of Hormuz, where Iranian attacks on vessels attempting to use non-Iranian shipping routes have increased.
The diplomatic stalemate comes amid growing US threats and reports of a possible Israeli attack on Iran ahead of Israel's parliamentary elections on 27 October.
Iran, meanwhile, has placed its military on heightened alert, conducting new missile tests in recent days and threatening to unveil additional weapons.
Tehran has also warned Washington and regional governments that another round of war could trigger retaliation across a wider geographical area, including potential ground incursions.
The renewed fighting between Yemen's Houthi movement and Saudi Arabia has further complicated the regional situation, with observers linking the escalation to the wider confrontation between Iran and the US and Israel.
Russia's mediation efforts falter
Russia entered the diplomatic efforts around a week ago, with the Kremlin announcing that President Vladimir Putin had conveyed Tehran's proposals for ending the war with the United States to US President Donald Trump.
According to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Putin discussed his forthcoming telephone conversation with Trump during a meeting with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in Turkmenistan last week, on the sidelines of a summit of Commonwealth of Independent States leaders.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said on Monday that Pezeshkian had clearly outlined Tehran's position to Putin, including its seven-day proposal for resolving the conflict and other issues surrounding the negotiations.
However, Baghaei stopped short of describing Russia as a formal mediator.
"Technically speaking, in the strict sense of the word, Pakistan and Qatar are still playing the role of actual mediators between Iran and the United States," he said.
He added that Tehran welcomed diplomatic efforts by friendly countries, noting that consultations with Moscow on the nuclear issue and other matters were longstanding.
Iranian analyst Ali Gholhaki told The New Arab that Russian diplomacy was proceeding with "weak and lacklustre steps".
He argued that Moscow was attempting to link efforts to resolve the Iran-US conflict with negotiations over the Russia-Ukraine war, hoping that both disputes could be addressed simultaneously.
This, he suggested, explained Russia's more active diplomatic involvement.
Gholhaki said Iran had demonstrated flexibility, but warned that the current regional military positioning suggested another war was considerably more likely than a diplomatic settlement.
He said a new wave of military escalation could erupt at any moment, although Washington appeared reluctant to become embroiled in a full-scale war before the US congressional midterm elections in November.
According to Gholhaki, the Trump administration would prefer to postpone any expansion of the military confrontation until after the vote.
What could another Iran-US war look like?
Iranian military analyst Mehdi Bakhtiari told TNA that another war was a strong possibility, although he expected any confrontation to be relatively short and extremely intense.
He argued that Washington might attempt another military campaign to secure concessions from Tehran and overcome the strategic difficulties it had encountered in its confrontation with Iran.
Bakhtiari said the US and Israel had already fought two wars against Iran, inflicting substantial damage and losses but failing, in his assessment, to achieve their strategic objectives.
Instead, he argued, they had encountered new challenges, particularly the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz and the resulting rise in global energy and fuel prices.
He suggested that another military campaign could differ significantly from previous confrontations, with attacks potentially concentrating on Iranian nuclear facilities and the country's southern regions.
A central objective, he said, would likely be securing the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.
Bakhtiari also warned that Iran had prepared new military strategies for such a scenario.
These could include intensified attacks on US naval vessels, particularly destroyers, following incidents in recent weeks in which Iranian forces had fired towards American warships.
He also raised the possibility of Iranian attacks against a larger number of US military bases across the region, particularly in the United Arab Emirates.
According to Bakhtiari, Iranian military planners believe that targeting US interests in the UAE could significantly increase the costs of further escalation for Washington.
He said Iran's military establishment had spent recent weeks rebuilding its missile and air defence capabilities in preparation for a potential confrontation at sea.
Bakhtiari added that both Iran's political elite and wider public increasingly regarded another round of fighting as likely.
Deep divisions over terms for peace
Masoud Foroughi, former editor-in-chief of the conservative Iranian newspaper Farhikhtegan, said the approaching US and Israeli elections were closely connected to calculations about the military confrontation with Iran.
Speaking to TNA, he argued that the war had not ended in the conventional sense but had instead changed its form and geographical scope.
From Tehran's perspective, he said, the conflict would end only when Washington accepted that military force could not fundamentally alter Iran's political system or its behaviour.
Washington, by contrast, was seeking what he described as Iran's complete surrender, whether through military pressure or diplomacy.
Foroughi said the gap between the two sides' demands was so wide that negotiations under current conditions were unlikely to bridge it.
He compared the situation to two parties standing 50 kilometres apart without any means of communication, arguing that even a distance of one kilometre would be too great for them to hear one another.
As a result, he said, the outcome would continue to depend largely on developments on the ground and each side's political, economic and social ability to withstand pressure.
Foroughi argued that the increasingly aggressive rhetoric from Washington and Tehran was intended to influence each other's strategic calculations.
Regardless of whether Trump intended to launch another direct military campaign before the November elections, he said, the administration was seeking to maintain sufficient pressure to force Iran to reconsider its position.
He concluded that diplomacy would only become effective when the costs of continuing the war became sufficiently high to compel Washington to halt its military campaign.