By Haifa Al Khaifi and Jesal Asher-Rajda
On February 3, 1994, President Bill Clinton lifted the trade embargo the United States had held against Vietnam since the fall of Saigon nineteen years earlier. Nobody in Hanoi or Washington priced the outcome accurately. Bilateral trade that year was barely worth totting up. By 2022, it had reached $139bn, a roughly 300-fold increase, and Vietnam had become one of the United States’ most important trading partners in Asia, according to the US Embassy in Hanoi. The lesson took thirty years to prove itself, but it did: the distance between “sanctioned” and “essential trading partner” can close further, and faster, than either side expects once the sanctions actually lift.
The reason that is worth remembering has less to do with Vietnam specifically than with a principle underneath it: once economies become interdependent, that entanglement changes what governments can afford to do to one another, and it does not require friendship to work. The United States and China spent 2025 in open strategic and technological rivalry, restricting each other’s chips, contesting each other’s alliances, and still traded $414.7bn in goods with each other over the year, according to the Office of the US Trade Representative, down sharply on the year before under tariff pressure but still one of the largest bilateral trade relationships on earth. Commercial engagement and geopolitical rivalry, in other words, are not opposites. In the modern economy they are closer to the normal condition.
Which is worth holding in mind when the country under discussion is Iran, because for the first time in years this is no longer an entirely theoretical conversation. Since Israeli and American strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader on February 28 and Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in response, the war has moved through an April ceasefire, a June Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that both sides have since declared void, weeks of renewed strikes, an expanding front with Houthi threats against Saudi Arabia, and, as this goes to print, fresh mediation with no ceasefire yet agreed, the same pattern of resolution announced and then not arriving that has defined this conflict from the start.
What survives that collapse is the template: for the first time, sanctions relief and the release of Iran’s frozen overseas assets, estimated by analysts at more than $100bn, were written down as an explicit, timetabled trade for compliance on Iran’s nuclear programme, not just a vague aspiration, a sixty-day clock that never ran its course. The UK, Germany and France have separately said they would still support lifting certain sanctions under a satisfactory new agreement, and Oman, Qatar, Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey are all still actively working the problem rather than walking away from it. None of it is resolved, and the June deal’s collapse is proof of how easily any successor can fail too, but the arrangement itself now exists on paper, agreed once already by both sides even if it didn’t survive contact with Hormuz. That is no longer a hypothetical for a newsletter to muse about. It is a specific, previously-negotiated deal waiting for the politics to catch up with it a second time.
The trust nobody can legislate
Ask anyone who has spent serious time in the region what an outside power’s security guarantee is worth to Tehran, and the answer is consistent: not much, and for reasons that have nothing to do with sincerity. A guarantee is a promise about someone else’s future behaviour, unenforceable by the party it is meant to protect. Capital invested is different. If, once Iran opens, a broad enough set of the world’s major economies build a genuine foothold inside the country, then a disruption to that relationship becomes something every vested party, not just one government, has a direct interest in preventing. That is a structural incentive rather than a diplomatic one, and it does not depend on any single sponsor’s word being trusted.
Political constraints would not disappear overnight, of course. Any government weighing deeper engagement with Iran will have to balance strategic, security and domestic political considerations, a tension that runs through Washington’s own position as visibly as anyone’s. But history, including the US-China example above, suggests commercial engagement and geopolitical rivalry are not mutually exclusive; they routinely coexist, however uncomfortably.
There is an older version of this argument, and it was not built on a whim. The European Union did not begin as an economic project; it began as a war-prevention project that used economics as its mechanism. France and Germany, after two conflicts in a generation, calculated that making their economies too interdependent to unwind was the fastest way to make a third war unthinkable. It worked well enough that Europe has had fewer wars in the past eighty years than in any prior period of comparable length in its history. Applied to Iran, the same logic is not fanciful: a country whose economy is woven into enough outside interests is a country its neighbours have more tools to de-escalate with than a ceasefire alone provides.
What actually changes if it happens
It is worth being concrete about what “Iran, open” would mean in practice, because the numbers involved are large enough to be worth imagining properly rather than gesturing at. S&P Global expects Iran’s economy to contract by roughly 6.2% this year, with its debt-to-GDP ratio climbing toward 36%; Tehran itself has put the direct cost of the war at some $270bn. Oil production fell to a five-year low of 2.3mn barrels a day in May, from 3.2mn before the war, and had only recovered to about 2.4mn by June, still close to a quarter below pre-war levels. Iran’s own crude price, which briefly approached double its pre-war level in May, has since swung down and back up again with the rest of the market, the least stable number in this whole picture, not the most. Against that backdrop, upwards of $100bn in frozen assets, roughly a quarter of Iran’s entire GDP, is not a technical footnote. It is a balance sheet repair large enough to fund reconstruction, stabilise the rial, and put real capital behind a market of some ninety million people sitting at the hinge between the Gulf, Central Asia and South Asia, largely untouched by two decades of the infrastructure boom its neighbours have enjoyed. That is the scale of opportunity a genuine settlement would unlock, for Iran and for whoever is already positioned to work with it.
Why the window has a shape, not just a size
None of this is any single country’s decision to make. But it is every country’s own history and existing relationships that will decide who benefits from it first, and a few are worth naming as illustrations rather than as the whole story. Oman is one instructive example: it already holds a comprehensive economic agreement with India and free trade arrangements with both the United States and the United Kingdom, and it is the party both Washington and Tehran keep routing through even when they will not deal directly with each other.
Oman mediated several rounds of formal US-Iran talks in 2025, before this war began, and in the most recent days it was Oman that carried a Gulf-backed proposal on managing Hormuz transit between the two sides, a proposal Tehran ultimately rejected, but which no other country was positioned to table in the first place. That is the point, and it is a structural role, earned over years, not a single achievement to take credit for. The advantage is being the channel through which the region’s hardest conversations actually pass, whatever any one of them yields, and it is a more durable kind of advantage than being first to show up once a deal is actually signed. Pakistan offers a different version of the same asset. It has no historic trading relationship with Iran to speak of, but its Prime Minister and Army Chief personally brokered the April ceasefire and have hosted round after round of talks in Islamabad since, becoming, through sheer consistency of effort rather than geography or commerce, one of the only intermediaries both Washington and Tehran still trust enough to use. Neither country invented this relationship capital for the moment; both built it, in one case commercially and in the other diplomatically, well before there was any prospect of it paying off, and both are better positioned for whatever comes next because of it.
What this is not
To be clear about the limits of this argument: nothing here assumes the current round of mediation succeeds where the June MoU didn’t, or that a comprehensive ceasefire is close, which nobody involved is currently claiming. This is not a forecast. It is a positioning question, asked in the conditional, because the conditional is exactly where preparation has to happen, before the fact is confirmed rather than after.
Vietnam in 1994 rewarded patience nobody could see the value of at the time. Whatever the Iranian version of that moment ends up looking like, and however the current mediation actually resolves, the advantage will go to the countries and companies that already have built, or are still building, relationship capital. The question worth sitting with now, while the outcome is still unwritten, is simply who is doing that work today.
Haifa Al Khaifi has worked in the energy sector globally at C-suite level for more than three decades. She now works in the private sector, and continues to sit on several international boards as an Independent Director and Strategic Advisor. She is also a private investor backing female founders with equity
Jesal Asher-Rajda is Executive Director of Al Ansari Group, where she leads governance, transformation, and strategic growth. Her career spans international consulting, family business leadership, and board service, with a passion for developing leaders, mentoring the next generation, and giving back to the community
SOURCES
© 2021 Apex Press and Publishing. All Rights Reserved. Powered by Mesdac
