Talking to Tehran: Why US returned to the negotiating table as Iran was at its weakest

A year earlier, Trump had withdrawn the United States from the nuclear deal negotiated under then-president Barack Obama, and by mid-2019, Washington had reimposed sweeping sanctions. In the weeks before the tweet, Iran shot down a US drone and attacked oil tankers in the Gulf. The US surged forces to the region, and Trump approved – but then aborted – retaliatory strikes at the last minute.

If the stated goal today is to change Iranian policy, and if Iran – by Trump’s own assessment – has “never lost a negotiation” but also “never won a war,” then wouldn’t military pressure, rather than negotiations, be the more logical path to follow to achieve that change?

The return to negotiations – reviving the nuclear file while setting aside what has taken place on Iran’s streets – gives the impression that a moment of great regime vulnerability has been squandered. All of a sudden, the two sides are talking about centrifuges and enrichment levels, when many assumed the focus had shifted decisively to the awful nature of the regime and its violent suppression of its own people.

Making sense of this apparent reversal requires stepping back from the talks themselves and looking at what preceded them: the expectations raised by Trump’s warnings to the ayatollahs not to kill protesters and his assertion that “help is on its way;” the limits Washington ultimately placed on its own pressure campaign; and the reasons diplomacy with Iran so often contracts to the nuclear issue alone.

The story begins with the protest moment itself – a period in which Trump’s unusually blunt public warnings to Iran’s leaders, coupled with exhortations to the protesters to “keep protesting – take over your institutions,” were widely interpreted inside Iran as signaling that this time might be different.

For protesters risking their lives in the streets, those words fed the belief that the US was, at last, prepared to stand behind them – not only rhetorically, but in ways that might impose real costs on the regime for violently crushing dissent.

That impression proved wrong, painfully so. As they have at every moment of mass unrest since 1979, Iran’s rulers responded with overwhelming force, violently suppressing the protests and killing, according to various estimates, thousands – possibly tens of thousands – of people.

And the American cavalry did not arrive. US forces amassed in the region in the form of a naval and air armada, but for the protesters, it came too late. By the time the massive force was arrayed, the momentum on the streets had already been broken.

The collapse of those expectations reflected not indifference in Washington, but, rather, a conscious decision to pull back from confrontation and manage escalation, even if it meant – as it did – leaving Iran’s internal repression largely unanswered, at least until now.

Trump, in effect, faced a dilemma. Having thrown down the gauntlet with his warning to Iran’s leaders not to kill protesters, and with his declaration about help being on its way, he could not afford to look like Obama, who in 2012 set a red line in Syria regarding the use of chemical weapons – and then chose not to enforce it. At the same time, Trump also could not risk looking like George W. Bush, who, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, drew the United States into a Middle East war without a clear endgame.

In the weeks that followed the first Iranian protests in late December, even as a massive US military buildup was taking place in the region, the administration appeared to recalibrate.

It feared an uncontrollable regional escalation, something Washington’s Muslim allies in the Middle East warned against. It recognized that it lacked a credible “day after” scenario to implement if the ayatollahs were to be overthrown. And it encountered resistance within the administration itself to drawing the US into yet another open-ended Middle East conflict.

All of this ultimately led the administration to step back from anything resembling a regime-change strategy – an approach that had been implicitly suggested by rhetoric and posture, but never formally adopted as policy.

With regime change off the table, and the US not itching for a direct military confrontation, Washington was left with the familiar fallback option of diplomacy. But when it comes to Iran, diplomacy always collapses back to the nuclear file – the narrowest, most technical, and most negotiable of all the disputes between the two sides.

In fact, according to Iran’s foreign minister, that is the only issue the Islamic Republic is willing to discuss. While the United States would also like to address Iran’s proxy network, its ballistic missile program, and its human rights violations, Tehran is insisting that the talks remain confined to the nuclear issue alone.

That, too, raises obvious questions. Wasn’t Iran’s nuclear program set back significantly during the June war? Why is this suddenly once again at the center of the agenda?

While Trump has repeatedly spoken of obliterating key nuclear sites, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the program was set back significantly, Iran is believed to be covertly trying to rebuild elements of its nuclear capacity – concealing enriched uranium stockpiles and advanced centrifuges that were not destroyed

In other words, the nuclear issue has not disappeared. There appears to be a critical difference between destroying facilities – Natanz and Fordow – and eliminating all nuclear capabilities, something that, by most assessments, was not achieved.

Yet even if the return to the nuclear file can be explained, it does not resolve the deeper unease surrounding these talks. What is absent from the negotiating agenda is not another enrichment level or inspection regime, but accountability for what took place inside Iran itself.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio sought to ease these concerns, saying at an event in Washington on Wednesday, attended by Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, that for the talks to “actually lead to something meaningful,” they would have to include discussions not only on Iran’s nuclear program, but also on “the range of their ballistic missiles, their sponsorship of terrorist organizations across the region,” and “the treatment of their own people.”

The problem, however, is what happens if Iran is unwilling to discuss anything beyond the nuclear file.

That, precisely, is the concern in Jerusalem – a concern relayed to US negotiator Steve Witkoff during a nearly four-hour meeting this week with Netanyahu and Israel’s top security chiefs, including Defense Minister Israel Katz, IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir, Mossad Director David Barnea, and IAF Commander Maj.-Gen. Tomer Bar.

According to reports of the meeting, the Israelis stressed a very strict set of redlines that any agreement would have to meet: zero uranium enrichment, the removal of Iran’s existing enriched uranium stockpile, a halt to its ballistic missile program, and an end to its support for regional proxies.

Missing, at least according to the readouts and media accounts of the meeting, was any discussion of regime change – an idea that, while never formally adopted as policy, was very much in the air in early January.

More broadly, Israel views these negotiations – at this moment – as offering Iran a way off the ropes. From Jerusalem’s perspective, protesters rose up, the regime survived through mass repression, tens of thousands were killed, and now, instead of sustained pressure, come talks.

Israel’s objection, in this telling, is not to what is being discussed but to when – why now?

The fear is that negotiations could serve to rehabilitate a regime that has just demonstrated extraordinary brutality, and one that large segments of its own population openly abhor. If a nuclear deal leads to sanctions relief and an improvement in Iran’s economic situation – the very economic distress that helped fuel the protests in the first place – then the regime may emerge not hobbled, but strengthened: free to destabilize the Middle East and terrorize its own people another day.

Trump once said that Iran never loses a negotiation. Yet here he is, entering negotiations with Tehran once again, apparently believing that this time will be different, and that Iran can be bested at the negotiating table.

It’s a gamble, and if the diplomacy narrows all talk about Iran once again to centrifuges and enriched uranium, while its repression at home and destructive designs across the Middle East fall off the agenda, then the risk is not simply a bad deal, but the legitimization of a regime that has learned how to survive crisis after crisis.