The expression on Benjamin Netanyahu’s face on 7 April as Donald Trump announced that the United States would begin “direct talks with Iran” suggested physical pain. Israel’s prime minister insists that Iran’s nuclear facilities must be blown up “under American supervision, with American execution”, and that the Islamic Republic must submit to a “Libya-style” solution which, in the case of Colonel Gaddafi, not only ended his nuclear programme but led to his overthrow and execution. On 12 April, Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s exiled crowned prince, who had been priming his supporters for Trump-inspired regime change pending his own regal homecoming, told Fox News that Iran “cannot be a true partner in peace” and that America should not squander its opportunity “to bring the regime down”.
Negotiations between Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, and Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, got going on 11 April in the pleasantly low-key setting of Oman. On the insistence of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, who draws the line at eyeballing the enemy, the meeting was “indirect”, with the teams in separate rooms and messages relayed through the Omanis. Araghchi and Witkoff did however “bump into one other” at the close of official business, in the Iranian’s account, and “exchanged amenities”, evidence for the “direct” talks that Trump regards as a superior sort of negotiation. Araghchi told Iranian TV that the Americans want to “reach a deal in the shortest possible time”, adding with the gentle smile of an older civilisation, “of course, no easy task”.
Fresh from imposing more sanctions, threatening military action and moving stealth bombers and an aircraft carrier to within striking distance of Iran’s main nuclear sites, Trump now proclaims his desire that Iran become “a wonderful, great, happy country” — albeit one without nuclear weapons. The President’s belief that epochal change is in his gift remains unassailable, even after the debacles of Ukraine and tariffs. It is this belief, and his indifference to precedent and history, that so alarm Netanyahu and Pahlavi while giving his Iran diplomacy an outside chance of success.
The Iran-US feud started with the 1979 revolution that overthrew the crown prince’s father, Shah Mohammad Reza, America’s main client in the region, replacing him with an Islamic regime whose zealots occupied the US embassy in Tehran and held its staff hostage for well over a year. In the Eighties, the Reagan administration supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in its eight-year war against Iran, while the Iranians established Hezbollah in Lebanon to resist Israeli and American hegemony; a bomb attack on a US military compound in Beirut in 1983 killed 241 marines. With the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq of the early 2000s, hostilities reached the borders of the Islamic Republic; in Washington DC prominent neocons told me the mullahs would be next.
But the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan discredited the principle of regime change through occupation. And, for the past 20 years, Iran and the US have waged a squalid war that has featured bombings, cyber attacks, assassinations and proxy campaigns across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen — not to mention the thousands of statutes, executive orders and designations that the US has issued against Iran, and which together constitute the most comprehensive sanctions regime in history.
Early in his first term, Donald Trump withdrew from a nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA, that had been negotiated by the Obama administration and European powers, under which Iran received sanctions relief in return for capping uranium enrichment and accepting stringent inspections. Trump’s subsequent policy of “maximum pressure” crippled Iran’s economy — according to the IMF, gross official reserves fell from $123 billion in 2018 to $4 billion two years later — but did not dissuade Khamenei from continuing to develop his nuclear capabilities: insurance, as he sees it, against regime change.
According to the UN’s nuclear watchdog, Iran has “dramatically” accelerated its uranium enrichment to up to 60% purity, easily within reach of the 90% purity necessary for a weapon. The country is now capable of producing enough fissile material for several bombs in a few weeks, though it could take months to perfect a weapon and its means of delivery.
Vali Nasr, an Iran expert at Johns Hopkins University, believes that the Iranians received an assurance in Oman that Trump will not insist that they dismantle their programme: but instead agree that they may go back to enriching at lower levels, suitable for civilian use, while accepting tough inspections in return for sanctions relief. If this sounds like the JCPOA that Obama approved, and that Trump described as the “worst deal in the world”, that’s because it is. “Trump can claim that he got better terms,” Nasr said on 14 April, but “the best we can get is that Iran goes back to terms that look like the first nuclear deal”.
Nothing riles Trump like comparisons with his Democratic predecessors and, having hinted that the US would accept Iranian enrichment for civilian purposes, on Tuesday Witkoff insisted that “Iran must stop and eliminate its nuclear enrichment and weaponisation programme… a deal with Iran will only be completed if it is a Trump deal”. Whether Witkoff will insist on the new, tougher conditions, when the two sides meet again on Saturday, cannot be known; what is certain is that his words will please Netanyahu and hardliners in the US while confirming Khamenei in his belief that the US cannot be trusted.
“Iran has ‘dramatically’ accelerated its uranium enrichment to up to 60% purity, easily within reach of the 90% purity necessary for a weapon.”
In the 85-year-old ayatollah, Trump has a negotiating partner who will never pay him the compliment of a face-to-face meeting and whose hatred for the “Great Satan” does not distinguish between Democrats and Republicans. Khamenei’s personal animus for Trump goes back to a drone strike that the president ordered on Baghdad Airport in January 2020. The strike killed Qassem Soleimani, a military strategist and commander greatly beloved of the Supreme Leader, who had moulded Iran’s regional proxies, its “Axis of Resistance”, into an outstandingly effective instrument of overseas power.
Soleimani’s indispensability was underscored after Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 threw the Axis of Resistance into a tailspin. If Soleimani had been around to influence events, it is unlikely that Hezbollah would have launched its subsequent rocket attacks on Israel, which served only to provoke Netanyahu into assassinating the group’s leaders and obliterating its networks. Nor would Iran have allowed the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, its main regional ally, to fall tamely last December. Israel had already launched its most damaging airstrikes on Iran to date, and flaunted its penetration of the country’s intelligence services by assassinating Hamas’s political chief while he was staying in a government guesthouse in Tehran.
Foreign humiliations have played out against a domestic backdrop of soaring inflation, a plunging currency and a population that uses every opportunity, from women leaving off the mandatory hijab to a rumble of protests on quotidian government failures, to register its revulsion with its leaders. To the question of why the very same Khamenei who last month rejected Trump’s demand for talks, calling his overture “a deception of public opinion”, went on to dispatch his foreign minister to confer with Steve Witkoff, the answer is surely that proffered by Reza Pahlavi: “the regime has never been as weak.”
In the distinction between a tightly-monitored civilian programme and outright dismantlement of the nuclear scheme may lie the difference between war and peace. Khamenei will not easily give up the deterrent value of nuclear ambiguity — and expose himself to the hostility of hardliners in the US, who will try to persuade Trump to go for regime change. He will brandish his drones and ballistic missiles, which last year reached Israel, albeit doing little damage, and hope that Trump’s aversion to costly foreign wars does the rest.
On 8 April, Abbas Araghchi asked in the op-ed pages of the Washington Post whether Trump wants to “become another U.S. president mired in a catastrophic war in the Middle East — a conflict that would quickly extend across the region and cost exponentially more than the trillions of taxpayer dollars that his predecessors burned in Afghanistan and Iraq”. The foreign minister went on to evoke his country’s “unparallelled” scope for trade and investment. “It is the US administrations and congressional impediments, not Iran, that have kept American enterprises away from the trillion-dollar opportunity that access to our economy represents.” Back in 2016, when the JCPOA was in force ,and it looked as though capitalism’s last big frontier, as Iran was billed, would be breached, I advised foreign investors on commercial opportunities in the country. In the event, most walked away because they doubted whether America was sincere about sanctions relief. For all the ostensible commitment of a Democratic administration to facilitating investment in Iran, its heart wasn’t in it.
Nixon in China is the analogy Trump’s people reach for whenever he canters into the diplomatic unknown. But the more salient comparison is with the leader he is not. Not for Trump the conviction Zionism and institutional loyalties of Joe Biden, who from his position on the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee felt keenly America’s agony during the hostage crisis of 1979-81, and for whom, in the words of an Iranian official quoted by Trita Parsi, a prominent Iranian-American who has long lobbied for detente, “offering us sanctions relief was as painful as peeling off his own skin”. Trump doesn’t do history. His institutional loyalty is in negative territory. What matters to him is face and business.
And here, in the words of Ali Vaez, another veteran observer of US-Iranian relations, is another reason to be very cautiously optimistic about the new diplomatic process. “What is different,” he told CNN on 12 April, “is that President Trump has the authority and the power to deliver on sanctions relief in ways that President Obama never could and President Biden never would.”
