Iran must have missed the memo.
In mid-2025, if it had offered Washington a complete freeze on uranium nuclear enrichment for three years and the transportation of its highly enriched uranium out of the country in exchange for lifting financial sanctions, US President Donald Trump probably would have jumped at the opportunity, ignoring Israeli objections.
This seems to be what Iran is offering the US now, including at Tuesday’s talks in Geneva.
But the world is not the same as it was in mid-2025.
Most importantly, Iran is much weaker, and its leverage is gone.
Two critical events have changed everything, and the Islamic Republic appears dedicated to living in an alternate reality as if they had not transpired.
First, in June 2025, Israel and the US destroyed most of Tehran’s operational nuclear program, including not only three major nuclear sites, but dozens of others; it also killed most of Iran’s top nuclear scientists.
In that same operation, the IDF destroyed around half of the ayatollah’s ballistic missile apparatus and the vast majority of its radar and anti-aircraft defenses, as well as blowing up dozens of its top commanders and some of its key IRGC bases.
Put bluntly, Iran hasn’t been able to enrich uranium now for eight months, and there are no signs it will be able to do so in the near future.
If all it is giving away is what the United States and Israel already achieved in the June 2025 strikes, what is it offering?
If it would take it a few years to rebuild enough centrifuges to enrich uranium in any meaningful volume, then a deal now seems more like just a public relations excuse that Iran can use domestically for the next few years to explain why it has not returned to its nuclear program.
By destroying so much of Tehran’s other sources of threats and power, Jerusalem and Washington also showed that it could be done, and potentially without the catastrophic costs which many had worried the Islamic Republic could impose on anyone who might dare to attack it.
If Trump was afraid to attack before, due to the potential cost, and he was willing to take a deal short of eliminating Iran’s nuclear program, why would the ayatollahs think the US president would make the same calculation now when it seems that the cost of attacking is much lower?
Iranian protests weaken regime, grant US attack legitimacy
That summarizes only one of the events that have changed the balance of power.
Starting on December 28, the largest protests the ayatollahs have ever faced erupted, leading them to order the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Basij to kill thousands of demonstrators – with reports varying from 5,000 to up to 36,500.
These protests and the crackdown have weakened the regime in a myriad of ways and granted Trump far more legitimacy for attacking Iran.
Whatever his true agenda might be, Trump can add the claim that he had to intervene to prevent a larger genocide by the regime against its own people.
So how could Iran possibly ignore these new realities? Does it not realize that without a deal, Trump could decide to topple the regime or, at a minimum, re-bomb its nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities?
Most analysts seem to believe that those Iranian leaders still alive who are running the regime – and most of the top leaders from mid-2025 other than Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were killed during that war – have entered a fanatical phase where they deny how badly their decades of meticulous strategy have crumbled.
Unable to accept how far they have fallen, they are said to be trying to hang on to the situation before June 2025 as if nothing had changed.
Of course, it is still possible that they will offer Trump enough on the nuclear program – such as an extended nuclear enrichment freeze followed by a consortium for uranium enrichment occurring outside of Iran, which Tehran would participate in, and possibly some private unofficial commitments on ballistic missile limits – to avoid war.
But absent such a shift by Khamenei – or a stunning surrender by Trump of his leverage – Iran appears to be running headfirst into a major conflagration.