The United States needs a deal with Iran, but Iran needs the United States as an enemy.
That’s the brutal diagnosis from one of America’s leading Iran experts in a new analysis warning that any peace deal President Donald Trump strikes with Tehran is almost certainly doomed before it starts.
Writing in The Atlantic on Friday, Carnegie Endowment senior fellow Karim Sadjadpour argues that Trump and Iran’s clerical regime are locked in a structural deadlock neither side can escape. After the war Trump launched earlier this year, both sides have lost too much to settle for terms the other can stomach.
“To justify the immense costs of conflict to American taxpayers, Trump must demand far more from Tehran in any deal than he would have before the war began,” Sadjadpour wrote. “Conversely, having lost hundreds of billions of dollars and its top leadership, Iran’s theocracy must demand far more—and concede far less—than it ever would have previously.”
The analyst described America as the “attention-deficit superpower, pinballing from isolationism to interventionism in Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba, having hollowed out the State Department.” Iran, however, remains an “obsessive-compulsive revolutionary state.”
“Fighting America is not the regime’s policy; it’s the regime’s identity,” he wrote.
While Trump expected the war to last days, Iran’s leaders have been preparing for it for nearly five decades. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has openly compared his negotiating approach to bazaar haggling, telling readers in his 2025 memoir that “he who gets tired and bored quickly will lose.” Sadjadpour noted that Trump has twice grown bored with diplomacy and turned to military force.
His grim conclusion: “America seeks resolution. Iran is committed to revolution.”
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