Iran keeps surprising President Donald Trump with its intransigence.
Trump keeps expecting the surviving members of the old regime to capitulate to his demands in the face of the overwhelming beatdown administered by the U.S. military over 40 days, which he insists amounts to an unqualified victory.
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“We’ve won, let me tell you, we’ve won,” Trump has said repeatedly. “Their Navy is gone, their Air Force is gone, their antiaircraft is gone, their radar is gone, and their leaders are gone.”
So it’s understandable that when Vice President JD Vance arrived in Pakistan, he didn’t see any need to compromise, because, like Trump, he believes the United States has all the cards.
Vance didn’t come to haggle. He came to lay down the law.
“We’ve made very clear what our red lines are, what things we’re willing to accommodate them on and what things we’re not willing to accommodate them on,” Vance said after 21 hours of talks. “And they have chosen not to accept our terms.”
The Iranian negotiating team was led by Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and included Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. The same man who, in late February, was in the middle of negotiations with Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, when Trump ended the talks on the advice of Witkoff, and pulled the trigger on Operation Epic Fury two days later.
Despite the punishing air campaign that struck more than 13,000 targets, Iran is not acting like a vanquished enemy.
Instead, it seems to see itself as having withstood the worst the U.S. and Israel could do, and come out the other side with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps firmly in control, enough missiles and drones to threaten shipping, half of its fleet of fast attack boats intact, and hundreds of mines available to deploy in the Strait of Hormuz.
The U.S., on the other hand, has spent an estimated $1 billion a day on the war, has lost more than three dozen aircraft, suffered 13 dead, and has almost 400 wounded U.S. service members.
While Trump says that Iran keeps calling and begging for a deal, it increasingly looks as though Trump is the one who is most anxious to wrap things up.
The major sticking point is the same one Araghchi was negotiating with Witkoff and Kushner seven weeks ago.
“Iran will not have a nuclear weapon,” Trump told reporters after talks broke down. “There is no way that they are going to. They still want it.”
Iran insists it’s not true “they still want it, and it has repeatedly pledged to abide by the language of the original 2015 agreement negotiated by the Obama administration, which states that “under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.”
The actual issue is one that Iran considers a matter of national pride, its right as a sovereign nation to enrich low levels of uranium for peaceful energy generation under international safeguards.
“Negotiations will only succeed when the rights of the Iranian people are recognized and respected, Araghchi said. “If there are doubts about the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program, we are ready to answer them. The only path forward is diplomacy.”
The U.S. fears that allowing enrichment would simply leave a path open to a weapon sometime in the future, a North Korea scenario.
“We know what happened with North Korea,” NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said in a Washington speech in support of Trump’s decision to go to war. “There can be a moment where you’ve negotiated so long that guess what? North Korea got its hands on a nuclear capability, and then it is too late.”
Vance reportedly proposed a full suspension of all Iranian nuclear activity for a period of 20 years.
When Iran countered with five years, Vance left the negotiations and announced at a news conference that the U.S. was leaving the talks.
The Iranians were taken by surprise.
Up until then, the talks had been cordial, almost friendly, and it seemed progress was being made.
“Iran engaged with the U.S. in good faith to end the war. But when just inches away from “Islamabad MoU,” we encountered maximalism, shifting goalposts, and blockade,” Araghchi posted on X.
Vance said the real reason he cut off the negotiations was that he figured out that despite the talks being at the highest level in 47 years, the Iranians didn’t have the authority “to cut a deal.”
“They had to go back to Tehran, either from the supreme leader or somebody else, and actually get approval for the terms that we had set,” Vance said on Fox News.
“I think the president believes he can get this done in one big fix. And that’s not how this process works. I wish it did,” Wendy Sherman, who negotiated the 2015 deal, said on CNN. “One of the problems that I think the Trump administration has had is … they wanted at the beginning for Iran to simply capitulate. But quite frankly, in any negotiation, even with adversaries, even if you find people odious, they have to feel like they got something or you can’t get the deal done,” said Sherman, a former deputy secretary of state.
“Call it winning, call it negotiating, call it giving them something. But there has to be a deal, and a deal means both sides have to get something out of it.”
That is not Trump’s negotiating style.
In an interview with the New York Post, Trump dismissed any compromise that might look like a win for Iran.
“I don’t want them to feel like they have a win,” Trump said, while indicating that Vance apparently didn’t have the authority to make a deal without running any concessions by Trump.
The proposal to suspend Iranian enrichment for 20 years? Trump’s not a fan.
“I’ve been saying they can’t have nuclear weapons,” he told the New York Post, “So I don’t like the 20 years.”
For now, Trump is counting on plan B (which some have suggested should have been plan A) — a blockade of Iranian ports to inflict enough economic pain to force acceptance of Trump’s maximalist demands.
It’s estimated that by denying Iranian ships access to the Strait of Hormuz, Iran is losing about $430 million a day, or $13 billion a month in oil and energy revenue.
If the blockade is sustained for months, or even weeks, it could crater the Iranian economy, which is already experiencing inflation at over 45%, and has seen its currency plummet to the point where it would take 1.3 million rials to buy one U.S. dollar.
“I think we have to show some patience,” says Michael Allen, a former national security special assistant to President George W. Bush. “We seem to be in a hurry.”
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“We have to stick to our guns. We have to stick to this blockade of Iranian ports, let that further constrict the regime,” Allen said on CNN, while warning that rushing to get a quick deal could backfire.
“The Iranians are tough, they don’t want to capitulate, their backs are against the wall, and they’re playing for keeps,” Allen said. “If you want a deal bad enough, you’re going to get a bad deal.”
Jamie McIntyre (@jamiejmcintyre) is the Washington Examiner‘s senior writer on national security.
