Trump, Iran, and the Power of Seeing Things as They Are
Another round of U.S.–Iran nuclear talks came and went in April 2025, this time in Oman. As usual, pundits dusted off their familiar lines about “progress” and “remaining gaps,” while critics lined up to remind us why no deal with Iran is ever worth signing. These critics tend to sound less like analysts and more like ghostwriters for John Bolton, repeating the same stale argument: that Iran is so steeped in ideological hatred of the West that it simply cannot be trusted. For them, the lesson of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is not that diplomacy once worked—it’s that it never could have, and never will.
But this argument doesn’t just oversimplify Iran. It misunderstands diplomacy itself. It also misreads the past.
The 2015 JCPOA was not a hallucination. It was a verifiable, functioning agreement that significantly curtailed Iran’s nuclear activity for years, with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) repeatedly affirming Iran’s compliance. The collapse of the deal did not result from Tehran’s duplicity but from Washington’s own unilateral withdrawal in 2018. The U.S. broke the deal—not because Iran violated its terms, but because the first Trump administration decided that no amount of Iranian compliance could offset its continued defiance of American expectations.
This is why U.S. President Trump—if he approaches the problem not as a culture war but as a strategic negotiation—could very well make a deal. In fact, he already did. The 2018 withdrawal from the JCPOA wasn’t a rejection of Iran’s behavior as much as it was a repudiation of Obama-era diplomacy. But Trump has always prided himself on the “art of the deal,” and if he chose to engage Iran not as a moral adversary but as a state with interests, constraints, and leverage, there is no reason he couldn’t negotiate a new agreement. The president’s decision to fire National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, due to his coordination with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in pushing to attack Iran ahead of the talks, is surely welcome news for those seeking to avoid further unnecessary conflict.
Iran does not need to become America’s friend—it only needs to see a clear path toward survival and benefit. Trump’s transactional instincts, if freed from ideological rigidity, could serve him well. A realist approach—grounded in pressure, incentives, and verifiable limits—might succeed where moral grandstanding fails.
Critics of renewed talks often paint Iran’s leadership as monolithic and ideologically immovable. They argue that it makes no difference whether Iran is governed by a so-called reformist or a hardliner, because the regime’s “fundamental nature” does not change. But this framing reduces the complexities of a multilayered state to a cartoon villain—an ideological theocracy bent on resisting the “liberal international order” at all costs. It also ignores history.
Iran’s political system is authoritarian, but it is not immune to strategic logic. The Islamic Republic has long been responsive to shifts in regional threat perception, domestic unrest, and economic pressure. It has pivoted when necessary. After 9/11, Iran actively assisted the U.S. in toppling the Taliban—its own bitter enemy—before being lumped into the “Axis of Evil.” From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, Iranian leaders repeatedly offered diplomatic overtures to Washington. The JCPOA itself emerged from years of behind-the-scenes negotiations involving both moderate and conservative factions inside Iran.
None of this suggests that Iran is a Jeffersonian democracy. But it does show a pattern of rational, often cautious foreign policy decisions, shaped not by blind theology but by hard security concerns. Iran has consistently pursued strategic depth in a hostile neighborhood—one in which it is surrounded by U.S. military bases, threatened by regional rivals, and haunted by the memory of an eight-year war with Saddam Hussein, backed by both Washington and Moscow. Its actions—while often provocative—are not proof of irrationality.
The core problem with the anti-deal crowd isn’t just their hostility to Iran—it’s their hostility to complexity. It’s reality, and as Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis says, “reality can be a terrible adversary.” They invoke “taqiyya,” a religious concept of dissimulation, as if it were state policy. They repeat that Iran’s leaders view Israel not as a geopolitical rival but as an eternal theological enemy, beyond reason. They reduce every Iranian diplomatic gesture to a trick. Yet these assertions are not analysis. They are dogma dressed up as realism.
Let us recall that despite the post-1979 regime’s clear anti-Israeli ideology, the geopolitical rationale for Iranian-Israeli collaboration—established under the Shah—persisted after the Revolution, as both states continued to face common threats. When Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, Israel, fearing an Iraqi victory, responded by supplying Iran with arms and spare parts for its American-made weaponry, at a time when Iran was acutely vulnerable due to a U.S. arms embargo—an embargo that Israel willingly circumvented. And as early as 1986, Iranians looked for possibilities of a reconciliation with the United States, exploring covert channels arranged and facilitated by Israel. But, of course, details of the “Iran-Contra affair” were in time leaked to the public, temporarily embarrassing those involved. Because of the Iran-Contra affair, both sides shied away from further attempts at dialogue and rapprochement for many years—especially Republicans in the U.S. and conservatives in Iran.
However, the end of the Cold War also marked the end of the Israeli-Iranian “cold peace.” The mutual threats that had long fostered covert cooperation—the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—effectively disappeared. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the defeat of Iraq, a new regional environment emerged in which both Iran and Israel felt more secure, yet also increasingly unrestrained. In the absence of Iraq as a counterweight to Iran, some Israeli policymakers began to view Iran itself as the primary strategic threat.
The Islamic Republic did not invent proxy warfare, regional maneuvering, or soft power. In reality, such practices were well established under the Shah. The Shah and his secret service, SAVAK,—far from being a beacon of liberalism, operated much like today’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), engaging in both internal repression and external covert operations to cultivate allies and destabilize adversaries. SAVAK supplied weapons to Lebanese Christian Maronites, and declassified CIA archives reveal that it also provided funding and military support to Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga forces. The Shah’s support for the Lebanese Shia was funneled through the Pahlavi Foundation (Bonyad-e Pahlavi), which, after the revolution, evolved into the Alavi Foundation. This backing included financial transfers via Iranian and Arab ayatollahs as well as religious seminaries. The Shah, who styled himself Aryamehr (“Light of the Aryans”), pursued these alliances strategically, viewing them as tools to counter Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arabist influence. As one justification put it: “We should combat and contain the threat [of Nasserism] on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean [Lebanon] to prevent the shedding of blood on Iranian soil.” The rationale closely mirrors the geopolitical logic invoked by the Islamic Republic today.
Iran’s regional posture has far more to do with geopolitics than with scripture—and the truth is that its political elite—like other elites—operate within constraints. They face pressures from rival factions, public discontent, and external threats. Even their most ideologically loaded slogans (“Death to America”) often play to a domestic audience more than to any actual foreign policy. This doesn’t mean they are secretly pro-Western, but it does mean they are not cartoon ideologues. They can calculate. They can compromise. And, as history shows, they have.
It is one thing to be cautious. It is another to be trapped in your own myths. If we insist on reading Iran through the lens of immutable hostility and civilizational clash, we guarantee perpetual standoff. If we treat culture as destiny and ideology as an iron cage, then we strip diplomacy of its very premise: that people and states change course under pressure and circumstance.
What the United States needs is not a moral victory, but a working strategy. It needs to stop demanding Iran “act like a normal nation” and start recognizing the deeply abnormal conditions that have shaped both sides of this relationship. It needs to stop imagining that Tehran’s identity must be dismantled before progress can be made, and instead ask what is possible in the world we actually live in.
Diplomacy is not about trust. It’s about verification. And compromise is not capitulation—it’s the point. If Iran can come to the table, then so should the U.S. Not because you believe they’ve changed, but because you know the alternative: more war, more proxies, and no end in sight.
This is why President Trump—should he approach the matter as a strategic negotiation, even if transactional, rather than a cultural conflict—may well succeed in reaching an agreement. Iran is not the monster we’re told to imagine. It is a state—a deeply flawed, often repressive, and sometimes dangerous one—but still a state. And states can be dealt with.
Let’s try that again.
