For nearly five decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been preparing for a war that Donald Trump expected would take days.
As virtually every American president since World War II has learned, a monopoly on focus can outlast a monopoly on power. America under Trump is the attention-deficit superpower, pinballing from isolationism to interventionism in Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba, having hollowed out the State Department. The Islamic Republic is an obsessive-compulsive revolutionary state—a regime with a half-century fixation on resisting America, rather than advancing the welfare of its own people. Fighting America is not the regime’s policy; it’s the regime’s identity.
The deadlock is both ideological and structural. 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. 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. Neither side can afford a deal that the other might accept. And in a zero-sum negotiation, Iran’s monomaniacal focus is a greater currency than American military power.
Trump may pause his war against Iran. But the Islamic Republic’s 47-year ideological war with “the Great Satan, America, and its trained beast, the Zionist regime”—in the recent words of Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader—will continue in earnest. U.S.-Iran negotiations yield zero trust and zero closure. A win-win scenario does not exist. Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, threats to close the Strait of Hormuz, regional proxies, and missile programs will menace the Middle East so long as the Islamic Republic is in power.
[Eliot A. Cohen: Words of war]
Tehran is transparent about its negotiating tactics. “The Iranian negotiation style is generally known in the world as the ‘bazaar style,’ which means continuous and tireless bargaining,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote in his 2025 diplomatic memoir. “This method is a process of interaction that requires great patience and time,” and thus, “he who gets tired and bored quickly will lose.” Trump has twice grown bored with diplomacy and resorted to military action against Iran.
The first phase of any deal would require Tehran to de-mine the Strait of Hormuz and cease harassing vessels traversing it, and the United States to lift its blockade proportionally—restoring, in theory, the prewar reality of an unfettered international waterway. For Tehran, the strait has become its greatest source of leverage. Iran’s implicit control over it—and the global economy—is both a potential fixed-revenue stream and a deterrent against future attacks. “This time, papers and signatures are not guarantees,” Ali Akbar Velayati, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, said. “The objective guarantee for preserving any agreement is the Strait of Hormuz.”
A coordinated reopening of the strait could be a prelude to successful nuclear negotiations, but it could also prove merely an intermission in fighting. The resumption of traffic through the strait would bring down oil prices—a crucial strategic objective in itself for the U.S., because it would make a return to war, if necessary, more sustainable, one senior official told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters. Similarly for Tehran, the pause would provide much-needed cash and an opportunity to refortify its military.
Trump-administration officials believe that once the strait is reopened, Tehran will have a hard time closing it again: “It’s a card they can only play once,” the senior official said. Tehran appears confident taking opposite bets: that it has established a de facto Strait of Hormuz protection racket, and that the closer Trump gets to the U.S. midterms, the less appetite he will have to restart the war. For both sides, a tactical pause may relieve economic pressure and make reaching a broader diplomatic compromise feel less urgent, rather than more so.
The most difficult negotiation is the nuclear one. Trump will seek a commitment from Tehran to never pursue nuclear weapons, including a freeze on long-term enrichment, removal of its 400-kilogram stockpile of highly enriched uranium, and the establishment of an invasive inspections regime. But Tehran has drawn an obvious lesson from modern history: The regimes that gave up their weapons programs—in Iraq, Libya, and Ukraine—made themselves vulnerable to foreign intervention. North Korea, meanwhile, has survived behind a nuclear shield.
A former Iranian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid government scrutiny, told me that Tehran retains the knowledge and now has the will to build nuclear weapons in short order. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claims to have as many as 30 underground “missile cities,” likely built with North Korean assistance, some reportedly buried deeper than the nuclear facilities already destroyed. Like Gaza, Iran is becoming a place where the authorities and their weaponry thrive underground while citizens languish aboveground.
The U.S. official told me that Washington expects to know “within a few weeks” whether this peace process has legs. The Trump administration plans to present Tehran with two possible paths. The first would require Iran to abandon its nuclear-weapons program, its regional proxies, and its foundational hostility toward America and Israel in exchange for hundreds of billions of dollars in Persian Gulf investment that could make Iran “one of the richest countries in the world.” The second path would be to preserve the status quo: Iran’s revolutionary ideology would remain intact, but at the cost of a continued naval blockade, crushing sanctions, and the potential renewal of war.
The Islamic Republic has never been willing to trade its revolutionary principles for prosperity. As recently as May 26, Mojtaba Khamenei used the hajj—Islam’s most universal gathering—as an occasion to warn that the “terrorist” U.S. military was no longer safe in the Middle East, and that the “cancerous tumor of Israel” would soon experience the “final days of their wretched existence.” And the Trump administration appears to have little illusion about Iran’s priorities. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said during a recent state visit in India that “Iran would rather invest in the rapists and murderers of Hamas” than in its own people.
[Arash Azizi: Why Iran’s leaders think they’ve won]
Over the past 47 years, Tehran has made major compromises only twice. The first was its 1988 decision to end the Iran-Iraq War—after eight years and an estimated 200,000 Iranian deaths—a concession that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini likened to drinking poison. The second was the 2015 nuclear deal with the Obama administration. In both cases, when faced with overwhelming economic and diplomatic pressure, a viable diplomatic exit, and no demands to change its revolutionary identity, Tehran showed itself capable of tactical compromise.
“Iran never won a war,” Trump tweeted in January of 2020, “but never lost a negotiation!” This aphorism has become received wisdom, yet it misses a central fact: Any government willing to immiserate its own population rather than compromise can look like a tough negotiator. Today, the U.S. naval blockade is costing Iran an estimated $450 million a day. With Iran’s inflation nearing 70 percent, its currency collapsing, and its dire shortages of feedstock and medicine, the regime’s defiance resembles the strategic victory of Monty Python’s Black Knight.
“The main principle of bargaining is practice: repetition, repetition, and repetition,” Araghchi wrote, “so much that the other side of the deal, as they say, “gets numb” and gives its consent.” Up until now, Tehran’s negotiating style has not numbed Trump into consent but agitated him into conflict. Yet conflict, like negotiation, has not resolved the fundamental problem that has confounded every American president since 1979: The United States needs a deal, but the Islamic Republic needs the United States as an adversary. America seeks resolution. Iran is committed to revolution.
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