Siamak Naficy
Another round of U.S.–Iran nuclear talks came and went in April 2025, this time in Oman. As usual, pundits dusted off their familiar lines about “progress” and “remaining gaps,” while critics lined up to remind us why no deal with Iran is ever worth signing. These critics tend to sound less like analysts and more like ghostwriters for John Bolton, repeating the same stale argument: that Iran is so steeped in ideological hatred of the West that it simply cannot be trusted. For them, the lesson of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is not that diplomacy once worked—it’s that it never could have, and never will.
But this argument doesn’t just oversimplify Iran. It misunderstands diplomacy itself. It also misreads the past.
The 2015 JCPOA was not a hallucination. It was a verifiable, functioning agreement that significantly curtailed Iran’s nuclear activity for years, with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) repeatedly affirming Iran’s compliance. The collapse of the deal did not result from Tehran’s duplicity but from Washington’s own unilateral withdrawal in 2018. The U.S. broke the deal—not because Iran violated its terms, but because the first Trump administration decided that no amount of Iranian compliance could offset its continued defiance of American expectations.
This is why U.S. President Trump—if he approaches the problem not as a culture war but as a strategic negotiation—could very well make a deal. In fact, he already did. The 2018 withdrawal from the JCPOA wasn’t a rejection of Iran’s behavior as much as it was a repudiation of Obama-era diplomacy. But Trump has always prided himself on the “art of the deal,” and if he chose to engage Iran not as a moral adversary but as a state with interests, constraints, and leverage, there is no reason he couldn’t negotiate a new agreement. The president’s decision to fire National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, due to his coordination with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in pushing to attack Iran ahead of the talks, is surely welcome news for those seeking to avoid further unnecessary conflict.
Iran does not need to become America’s friend—it only needs to see a clear path toward survival and benefit. Trump’s transactional instincts, if freed from ideological rigidity, could serve him well. A realist approach—grounded in pressure, incentives, and verifiable limits—might succeed where moral grandstanding fails.
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