When India's extended neighbourhood, the Gulf, is calm, India's economy enjoys an invisible subsidy. When it is tense, India receives a fresh invoice. That is why the United States-Iran engagement through the Oman channel matters to Delhi even if India is not in the room. The realistic hope is not reconciliation. It is something rarer in West Asia: predictability.
This negotiation is shaped by four fears and four interests. Each side is trying to reduce one risk without paying for another.
Washington wants an Iran that cannot sprint to a bomb. The Trump administration prefers diplomacy, but it is negotiating with escalation still on the table. President Trump is letting the talks continue while maintaining maximum pressure and reinforcing the regional posture by deploying a carrier strike group. This is coercive bargaining: talk seriously, or prepare for pressure that will not stay financial.
Tehran wants sanctions relief and the political dignity of having its right to enrich acknowledged. It is willing to bargain over ceilings, sequencing, and monitoring. But it has drawn a line around missile capability. For Iran, missiles are not an add-on. They are deterrence in a region where hostile intent is assumed. Tehran warns that any American strike would trigger theatre-wide retaliation, including against US bases in the Gulf and Israel. That is how it prices deterrence, turning escalation into a regional bill.
Israel is focused on one idea: warning time. A nuclear agreement that trims enrichment while leaving delivery systems and regional networks intact looks, in Tel Aviv, less like a settlement and more like a postponement. A narrow nuclear deal reduces one danger while leaving another alive. Israel, therefore, pushes for missiles and the proxy ecosystem to be in frame, or for coercion robust enough to roll back Iran's capacity.
The Gulf states sit closest to the blast radius. They want de-escalation that protects ports, pipelines, cities, and investor confidence without rewarding coercive tools. They lean toward diplomacy because they pay first for escalation, but they prefer constraints that bite. They want the crisis defused, not Iran empowered.
Taken together, the overlap sits mainly on uranium enrichment. It thins quickly on missiles and proxies. That is why the Oman channel points to a thin deal: not a grand bargain, not Armageddon. That thinness is not a weakness; it is the only bargain available. The alternative is a sharper crisis. As President Trump warned, "Otherwise, it's going to be very traumatic."
Enrichment is where progress is most realistic, because it is measurable. Cap levels, reduce stockpiles, neutralise the most sensitive material, restore tight monitoring, and sequence partial relief. If Washington can tolerate bounded enrichment, and Tehran can accept low ceilings, small quantities, and tight IAEA oversight, an agreement is possible.
Even on the nuclear file, the hinge is not enrichment alone. It is verification. The IAEA has described large declared stockpiles and a continuity of knowledge problem. That combination, scale plus uncertainty, turns every promise into a credibility challenge. Enriched uranium you can measure can be capped, blended down, or shipped out. The quantities you cannot account for are a crisis. Verification gaps turn any ceiling into a guess, and guesses do not survive crises. Ask the deal to carry every grievance, and it collapses. Here, the choice is between a workable compromise and a beautiful failure.
Missiles are where the thin deal hits reality, and where the overlap disappears. The United States has, at times, signalled that it would prefer missiles and proxies in the frame. Iran refuses. Israel wants to shrink the warning time and insists missiles and proxies be in frame. The Gulf wants constraints because it lives with vulnerability every day. This is where diplomacy runs into doctrine.
Missile capability is harder than centrifuges to verify because it can be dispersed and is dual-use. Moreover, missiles sit inside deterrence logic rather than inside a negotiable technical programme. At best, you get informal risk reduction measures: hotlines, notification norms, or tacit restraint.
A missile inspection regime strong enough to satisfy Washington and Israel would look like strategic nakedness in Tehran. You can negotiate centrifuge numbers. You cannot negotiate a nation's sense of vulnerability.
One more truth sits awkwardly beneath the rhetoric. In the Western narrative, support for the Iranian people is voiced loudly. In real negotiations, it recedes quickly. When nuclear risk, missiles, and sanctions relief are on the table, the Iranian people become a secondary priority in hard power bargaining. Washington may still speak of protestors and repression, but the negotiating priority becomes containment and verification. Human rights rhetoric, in Tehran's ears, often sounds like regime change pressure by another name. Israel prioritises threat reduction. Gulf states prioritise stability.
This is not cynicism. It is the logic of crisis diplomacy. The bigger the security stakes, the smaller the space for moral clarity.
India's interest is clear. Avoid panic in the Gulf. We should not romanticise a deal, nor should we posture against one. A thin, verifiable nuclear stabilisation, even if it leaves missiles untouched, is still valuable. It reduces the probability of a regional scare that spikes energy prices, disrupts shipping, and unsettles the Indian diaspora across the Gulf. The downside of conflict there far outweighs any plausible upside.
The talks may move to Geneva, for discretion and convenience, but the Oman channel endures. Geneva is geography, Oman is the channel.
The Oman channel, however, will not deliver trust. It may deliver something useful: fewer surprises. A verifiable nuclear stabilisation buys time and lowers the temperature. On missiles and proxies, the space for agreement is thin. Some threats cannot be negotiated away, only managed. That is why the nuclear file matters.
For India, the verdict will come not from a communique but as the shipping insurance premium, the petroleum price, and the quiet safety of its diaspora.
(The writer was a Permanent Representative of India to the UN and now serves as Dean, Kautilya School of Public Policy)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
