The Trump administration has entered advanced negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran, signaling a potential agreement that would see Tehran limit its uranium enrichment to below weapons-grade levels, permit enhanced IAEA inspections, and accept phased reductions of its enriched stockpile. In exchange, Washington is reportedly prepared to lift a calibrated set of economic sanctions. These terms, nearly point for point, mirror the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that President Trump spent the better part of a decade condemning as a strategic capitulation.
This moment requires analytic clarity. What is unfolding is not a new strategy but the return of an old pattern: the United States oscillating between coercive diplomacy and tactical accommodation with a regime whose core orientation remains structurally incompatible with long-term resolution. The Islamic Republic is not merely a rational state with negotiable interests; it is a revolutionary regime, committed to ideological expansionism, proxy warfare, and the managed pursuit of nuclear latency. It has outlasted four decades of sanctions, strikes, and summits not despite its inflexibility, but because of it.
The strategic reality, one repeatedly obscured by successive American administrations, including the current one, is that no permanent nuclear deal with Iran is possible under present conditions. Agreements can be struck, yes. They can be useful in tactical terms, even stabilizing in the short run, but they cannot be sustained. They will be violated, reinterpreted, or collapsed as soon as the internal or regional balance shifts. The logic is not diplomatic, but structural.
The United States must stop seeking closure. There will be no final agreement, no normalization, no reintegration of Iran into a “rules-based order.” There is only the long-term management of a chronic threat and the realist reorientation of U.S.-Iran policy: from resolution to containment, from strategic illusion to strategic endurance.
Since 1979, Iran has functioned not as a status quo actor but as a revolutionary state. Its internal legitimacy, derived from a fusion of clerical authority, revolutionary mythos, and anti-Western resistance, depends upon the perpetual performance of ideological antagonism. In this respect, the Islamic Republic cannot afford normalization, because normalization would erode the very sources of its domestic cohesion and regional influence. This is not rhetorical hyperbole; it is the structural logic of the regime.
Iran’s foreign policy apparatus—from the Supreme Leader’s office to the IRGC Quds Force—operates not within a Westphalian framework of mutual recognition and equilibrium, but through a strategy of asymmetric disruption. This includes the cultivation of armed non-state proxies (e.g., Hizbullah, the Houthis, PMF in Iraq), the instrumentalization of Shiite identity politics, and the leveraging of nuclear latency as both deterrent and bargaining chip. These are not negotiating positions to be traded away; they are embedded mechanisms of strategic survival.
Thus, the notion—now shockingly revived in the second Trump administration—that Iran could be induced to accept permanent limits on its nuclear capacity, or to forgo its regional proxy network in exchange for sanctions relief and international reintegration, reflects a fundamental misreading of Iran’s behavior. The issue is not simply a matter of regime preferences but of regime identity. What the West sees as stability, Tehran often sees as vulnerability. What Washington understands as compliance, Tehran experiences as strategic exposure.
From this perspective, Iran’s record of partial compliance, calibrated violations, and delay tactics in diplomatic negotiations is not a deviation from norms; it is the norm. Agreements are treated not as binding compacts but as temporary instruments of pressure management. The JCPOA was exemplary in this regard: it allowed Iran to relieve economic pressure, deepen its regional footprint (especially in Syria and Yemen), and continue R&D on advanced centrifuges under the guise of legal ambiguity. The current Trump administration’s attempt to reengineer a similar framework, however differently branded, will face the same fate unless it is situated within a more durable containment architecture.
Strategic patience is not a virtue in this context; it is a vulnerability. As long as Washington persists in approaching Iran as a rational actor seeking normalization, it will remain trapped in a cyclical logic of short-term agreements, violated red lines, and periodic escalations. The only viable posture is one that treats Iran’s revolutionary character as enduring, and its negotiation behavior as inherently opportunistic rather than cooperative.
Over the past year, regional transformations have only reinforced the case against any renewed diplomatic entente with the Islamic Republic. The erosion of Iran’s forward posture in Syria, culminating in the Assad regime’s collapse and the emergence of a new leadership seeking normalization with the West, has significantly undercut Tehran’s strategic depth in the Levant. Hizbullah’s partial military withdrawal from southern Lebanon reflects both Israeli deterrent pressure and diminishing power over Iran’s key proxy. Meanwhile, the Houthis remain active but increasingly isolated, unable to translate asymmetric capabilities into regional leverage. Most tellingly, the Arab Gulf states have embarked on a strategic recalibration, pivoting from confrontation to cautious entente with Iran—motivated not by trust in Iranian intentions, but by fatigue with escalation cycles and hedging against American volatility. In this landscape, a new JCPOA-style agreement risks misreading the region’s trajectory: it would not stabilize the Middle East but re-empower Iran at the precise moment when its regional project is weakening. Worse still, it would signal to both allies and adversaries that Washington remains trapped in a pattern of strategic amnesia, treating symptoms as solvable while ignoring the structural pathology of a regime that survives through perpetual crisis.
The past year has offered the most unambiguous demonstration in decades of the scale and immediacy of the Iranian threat. The October 7, 2023, massacre by Hamas, coordinated with and materially enabled by Tehran, was not an isolated eruption of violence but part of a broader campaign of regional assault on the United States and Israel. In the months that followed, Israel was subjected to a multi-front assault: Hizbullah launched hundreds of rockets and antitank munitions across the northern border; the Houthis targeted Eilat and Red Sea shipping lanes with Iranian-supplied drones and cruise missiles; and in an unprecedented escalation, Iran itself launched direct missile and drone attacks on Israeli territory from its own soil. Though Israel’s air defenses and regional intelligence alliances successfully neutralized much of the assault, the signal was unmistakable: Iran has crossed the threshold from proxy warfare to overt confrontation. That this escalation has occurred precisely as Washington reengages Tehran diplomatically only sharpens the contradiction at the heart of current U.S. policy.
The Trump administration’s posture toward Iran has undergone a marked transformation, shifting from a doctrine of “maximum pressure” to a more ambiguous, and arguably incoherent, approach that blends tactical accommodation with rhetorical deterrence. During his first term, President Trump famously withdrew from the JCPOA, reimposed sweeping sanctions, and authorized the targeted killing of Qassem Soleimani, framing Iran not as a negotiating partner but as a systemic threat to regional order. Yet in his second term, the Trump White House has gravitated toward a form of managed ambiguity that permits diplomatic engagement under the guise of tactical realism, even as the underlying regime structure remains unchanged.
However, the present negotiations, involving, one could speculate based on recent official Iranian statements, phased sanctions relief, limitations on uranium enrichment, and expanded inspections, replicate, in substance, the core logic of the JCPOA: the temporary deferral of nuclear escalation in exchange for economic normalization. This is not a strategic innovation but a return to transactional diplomacy, motivated less by a coherent regional vision than by a desire to avoid military entanglement ahead of the 2026 midterm elections and to neutralize Iran as a domestic political liability given the rising anti-Israel and isolationist sentiment in the MAGA coalition. Unlike the 2015 agreement, however, this new framework lacks even the fiction of multilateral consensus; it is being pursued unilaterally, with little European input and in isolation from regional allies.
To fully understand the Trump administration’s pivot toward a JCPOA-style framework, it is necessary to consider the domestic political constraints reshaping American foreign policy. First, there is the competing priority of dealing with China and adjusting the U.S. trade position globally. Secondly, the contemporary Republican coalition, especially its populist-nationalist wing, has grown increasingly hostile to what it sees as “neocon” expansive U.S. security commitments abroad, particularly in the Middle East. While support for Israel remains strong among traditional conservatives and Evangelicals, there is a rising undercurrent of anti-interventionist, and at times explicitly anti-Israel, sentiment within segments of the MAGA base and popularized by various high-profile pundits and influencers. This development complicates the administration’s strategic calculus: preserving deterrence against Iran now requires navigating a domestic environment increasingly hostile to perceived entanglements and “wars for Israel.” Hence, the embrace of a “deal” is not because it serves long-term strategic goals but because it deflects criticism, avoids escalation, and neutralizes Iran as an electoral liability. In this sense, Trump’s shift is less a policy failure than a symptom of deeper structural drift in American grand strategy, wherein domestic political exhaustion dictates geopolitical accommodation.
More concerning is the reintroduction of what might be called “optics-based deterrence,” a strategy that relies on the performance of strength without the institutional credibility to back it. President Trump has publicly floated threats of military retaliation should Iran breach the emerging deal’s terms, while letting his advisors speak of Iran’s right to low-level enrichment. Such contradictions are not mere tactical hedges; they signal to Tehran that Washington’s red lines are negotiable, its deterrence reactive, and its strategic horizon limited by electoral timeframes.
This evolution reflects not a maturation of U.S.-Iran policy but a return to the very pathologies the Trump administration once decried: short-termism, preference for symbolic over structural gains, and the failure to align means with stated ends. In this context, the pursuit of a JCPOA-lite not only misreads the nature of the Iranian regime but invites a recurrence of the very cycle the original withdrawal sought to break.
If the past decade has demonstrated anything, it is that there is no “solution” to Iran, only the question of how best to contain, constrain, and corrode its capacity to project power. Any effort to resolve the Iranian nuclear file through a permanent diplomatic arrangement fails not merely because of Iran’s duplicity, but because such a framework misapprehends the nature of the threat. Iran is not a state in need of reintegration; it is a regime that thrives in protracted ambiguity, sustained by crisis and ideological mobilization. The United States must therefore abandon the periodic temptation of grand bargains and pivot to a doctrine of strategic endurance.
Such a doctrine begins by acknowledging that Iran policy must be uncoupled from illusions of transformation. Agreements, if pursued, must be tactical instruments of pressure management, not vehicles for regional stabilization or regime moderation. Compliance must be verified through coercive oversight, not mutual trust. Sunset clauses, reversible sanctions, and enrichment allowances should be rejected as inherently unstable constructs that incentivize Iran to wait out constraints rather than dismantle them.
Second, Washington must institutionalize a permanent pressure architecture: economic, military, cyber, and informational. Sanctions should no longer be treated as leverage to be traded, but as tools of attrition, designed not only to retard nuclear capability but to constrain the broader machinery of Iranian influence, from IRGC finance networks to soft power assets embedded in NGOs, religious institutions, and media outlets. Intelligence operations should prioritize disruption of Iran’s command-and-control infrastructure across the region and the world.
Third, the United States must reaffirm its commitment to allied regional deterrence, particularly with Israel, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, through integrated missile defense systems, shared intelligence frameworks, and agreed upon joint red lines regarding Iranian escalation. Containment must be regional, not rhetorical.
Finally, Washington must embrace a long-term information strategy aimed at undermining the regime’s domestic legitimacy. The Islamic Republic is not invulnerable; it is ideologically brittle, internally contested, and economically fragile. U.S. policy must support the forces of dissent.
Strategic endurance is not a passive doctrine; it is a deliberate refusal to indulge in cycles of hope and disillusionment. A post-agreement Iran strategy must begin with this realism: there is no endgame. There is only the patient architecture of denial, disruption, and deterrence, until the regime, by its own contradictions, collapses under the weight of its ambitions.
