Waleed Aly

One of those substantive disputes is Iran's nuclear program.

Are the parties any closer to coming up with a formulation that will actually satisfy them?

Or is this one of those intractable, insoluble points of controversy that it seems a war like this can only ever circle around but never really solve?

Yeah, that seems wise.

But on any version of that, wouldn't that take us back to something like what we had before?

Iran, a signatory to a nuclear non-proliferation treaty that is subject to inspections.

Nonetheless, it has a nuclear program that it wants to try to develop, even if it's on hiatus for a little while.

I suppose...

What I mean in saying that is, if an agreement like that were to be reached, what will the war have achieved?

Coming up, who's more desperate for a deal, America or Iran?

Greg, you mentioned the pressure he's facing from Republicans on the home front.

Could that be why he's now thrown in this idea of getting a lot of these Arab states around Iran to sign what's called the Abraham Accords, which normalises relations with Israel?

This wasn't a feature of any of the rhetoric surrounding the war beforehand.

It doesn't seem there'd be any prospect really of them signing it here and certainly not after the war in Gaza.

But by raising it as part of negotiations as something that maybe the opponents of Iran in the region, America's allies in the region might sign up to, their grand bargain will have been struck.

Is that the kind of image or message that Trump's going for here?

I mean, you said that any deal is likely to return things to a situation kind of like the deal that Obama struck with Iran before and that Trump had criticized as being a terrible deal.

So perhaps there's not much to be gained on the deal itself, if it turns out the way you say.

Geopolitically, if the Abraham Accords are a non-starter, what will have been achieved for the US or Israel by this deal?

And so as for the deal, in some ways this comes down to who's more desperate to strike a deal, who can go longer with the status quo out of the two, the United States and Iran.