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Seven months after the start of the war, where do negotiations between Iran and the United States stand?
There have been discussions on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, but in my view there are not real talks underway. The exchanges led by Oman, especially with regional countries, concern exclusively the Strait of Hormuz. Pakistan hopes to spur negotiations, but they have little chance of succeeding, because they cannot resolve the United States’ dilemma.
What is the dilemma?
Iran believes it won the war in the first forty days and emerged considerably strengthened. It has taken control of the Strait of Hormuz and thus could exercise substantial pressure on global energy markets. The United States could not settle this issue by military means and, as Donald Trump acknowledged in Évian, they were close to exhausting their strategic reserves. He feared appearing as the president who precipitated a recession. The Iranians thus think they forced Washington to sign a favorable protocol with Pakistan in June.
And in practice, they are right: the protocol was favorable to Iran, at least in its wording. The problem in Tehran on the nuclear dossier as well as in these negotiations is that it manages to secure Western agreement on certain measures but cannot ensure their implementation. The American administration can sign anything; it will not necessarily carry it out.
So Washington was not satisfied with this protocol?
No, it is now very clear. The United States had not achieved their military objectives and had to make many concessions to secure the reopening of the Strait. Donald Trump faced sharp criticism in his own camp, among Republicans as well as among advocates of the traditional Democratic foreign policy line. At the first opportunity, i.e., the first time the Iranians violated the protocol, he relaunched the war, using it as a pretext to alter the balance. When that did not yield results, he shifted to economic pressure: tougher sanctions and a blockade.
We thus find ourselves in a situation where the Iranian regime seeks to preserve the protocol and repeats that the United States must return to and implement it. The National Security Advisor Mohsen Rezaei, as well as the chief negotiator and president of the Parliament, Mohammad Ghalibaf, maintain the same message. It’s the message they have transmitted to the Pakistanis and to the Qataris. The United States, for its part, wants something else: not necessarily the total capitulation of Iran, but at least not the initial protocol.
What do the United States want?
Victory, or at least for the president to be able to claim it. Yet no negotiation currently allows for that. There is no scenario in which you sit at the table with the Iranians, secure the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and the president walks away with something.
The glass is half-empty for Donald Trump and half-full for Iran.
How could the war end in this case?
It would have to end around a negotiating table, but we are not there yet. President Trump believes he can change Iran’s calculus, either by intensifying economic pressure or by resuming hostilities. And the Iranians themselves think they can force him to admit that the situation will not improve and that he must sign the protocol. This explains the attack on the Saudi oil pipeline, the Houthis’ maneuvers toward the Bab-el-Mandeb, and Iran’s direct attacks on American warships. Even though the target missed, the message is clear: they are ready to restart and intensify hostilities.
You say that the main players in the process – the president, the chief negotiator and the national security adviser – all defend the protocol. How do you explain this cohesion?
In the West, and especially in the United States, there is a strong emphasis on Iran’s internal divisions. When Massoud Pezehkhian speaks of the population’s economic suffering, one might think he takes a position very different from that of the Revolutionary Guards. But Mohammad Ghalibaf and Massoud Pezehkhian are elected figures, in Parliament and in the presidency: they are expected to reflect the people’s position and speak to what the population experiences. The Revolutionary Guards are fighters: they are not responsible for the economy, but for war.
The real division in Iran is between those who want to negotiate with the United States and those who deem dialogue pointless, on the grounds that the Americans would always betray their interlocutors.
On what does this mistrust rest?
The Americans signed the JCPOA in 2015 and, once they achieved what they wanted, they withdrew and intensified economic pressure. Since 2025, on two occasions, Iran has engaged in talks with Washington, first in Muscat, then in Geneva, and the United States went to war while discussions were ongoing. Iranian representatives visited Islamabad and even proposed to open the Strait of Hormuz: the response was a blockade. Then they signed the protocol and, at the first opportunity, the United States returned to war. For this part of the regime, each time Washington says it wants to discuss, it is about to go to war.
The glass is half-empty for Donald Trump and half-full for Iran.
Vali Nasr
Others believe it is necessary to keep talking; Ghalibaf speaks of “fighting and negotiating at the same time.” But in reality, there is currently no Iranian agreement on the table that would spark genuine debate. When Pezehkhian says one should reconsider Iran’s position, the response is: “But on what agreement? Are you saying we must capitulate?” And he replies: “No, I am not talking about capitulation.”
When there was a serious agreement on the table, like the spring protocol, the debate occurred. At the National Security Council, the vote was twelve in favor and one against. We do not know who voted against, but we know that all the Revolutionary Guards commanders voted for it. This agreement then failed, and Iran did not reap any benefits. From the regime’s perspective, the question is not whether to be for war or diplomacy, but whether one can trust the United States and whether there exists any agreement to which one could realistically adhere.
Is it the perception of threat that binds the regime together?
Yes. Everyone shares the same reading of the American objective: Washington seeks to break the country, militarily or through economic pressure. There are thus only two possible responses: capitulate, i.e., do as Trump says, become like Venezuela or Syria and accept his terms; or fight in the hope of changing his calculation. No Iranian politician would accept capitulation. They do not see themselves in the same position as Tokyo or Berlin in 1945. The only option left is resistance.
So there is no debate?
If there is any debate, it certainly concerns what precisely to demand from the United States. I was intrigued by reports that Iran presented seven points to the Qataris as conditions to end the war. Five have been revealed: the end of the war against Iran, the lifting of the blockade and sanctions, the unfreezing of Iranian funds… All of this was already in the protocol. However, the word “Lebanon” does not appear. I don’t know if it appears in the remaining two points, but perhaps this is why the Iranians talk about “seven”: domestically, it allows them to claim to have addressed the Lebanon issue when that is not the case.
Some say you should not waste time with the Qataris, others that you should present them with the conditions and see what they can achieve. These seven points were transmitted by Mohsen Rezaei, not Pezehkhian. Those who advocate not negotiating at all are not directly represented in the decision-making apparatus.
In your book Iran’s Grand Strategy. A Political History, you link this approach of Ali Khamenei’s resistance to his upbringing, to history and to his identity as a Third-World fighter, akin to Ho Chi Minh. Does this idea survive him, even without an actively engaged Supreme Leader today?
Yes. The Iranian revolution is one of the three great revolutions of the 20th century, alongside the Chinese and Soviet revolutions. If we go further back, the fourth in magnitude would obviously be the French Revolution.
All these revolutions share a phase initially marked by ideology and extremism: it is molten lava erupting from a volcano. In the October Revolution and Mao’s seizure of Beijing, anti-imperialism and early anti-Americanism formed central elements of the ideology.
For this part of the regime, whenever Washington says it wants to discuss, it is about to go to war.
Vali Nasr
In Iran there was religion, class struggle, and anti-imperialism. Strangely, the West focused only on the religious aspect: for a long time, everything was explained by the fact that it was a government of mullahs, a theocracy transplanted into the modern world. But there is another, very modern facet that links Iran to the Chinese and Soviet revolutions. Class struggle is no longer the main dynamic; anti-imperialism remains.
This conviction could have led Iran down another path after the death of Khomeini and the end of the Iran-Iraq War.
A powerful faction wanted to pursue what social sciences call “routinization,” or, borrowing Crane Brinton’s term, the thermidorian phase of the revolution: to normalize it. It was partly Habashi Rafsanjani, who served as president for eight years, from 1989 to 1997, who pushed to prioritize economic development and reconstruction. Against him, Ali Khamenei, initially the weaker, believed the mission should stay anti-imperialist.
What underlies this conviction?
It rests on a particular reading of history, according to which Iran has been mistreated by imperialism from the early 19th century up to the revolution. It may seem exaggerated, but 19th-century Iran, like Thailand, the Ottoman Empire, or Egypt, though not directly colonized, experienced Russian and, to a lesser extent, British, French and Belgian influence. It lost territories to Russia and to Britain. In the eyes of the revolutionaries, the Pahlavi era was no better: Reza Shah would have been installed by the British, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi would have been a puppet of the Americans, and the 1953 coup would have been orchestrated by Washington and London. I do not share this view.
But that was the reading of the revolutionaries, both secular left and religious; the Marxists-Leninists who believed they would inherit the revolution subscribed to it. For Khomeini, one of the revolution’s great achievements was to have given Iran genuine independence. I even think that at some level he believed Iran had to be Islamic because only Islam could guarantee that independence. You find this theme in Sunni Islam as well: the leader of the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front had said the National Liberation Front had achieved physical independence but still needed cultural independence from France.
This conviction manifested itself in the construction of the state?
It was this independence that he sought to protect for forty years. Iran was to be Islamic, to possess a militia, the Basij, the Revolutionary Guards; it was necessary to impose ideology on the population. When society became more liberal and more open to reconciliation with the West, he invested in institutions, notably the university and the Haqqani seminary in Qom, to train technocrats steeped in ideology.
All these groups that later became problematic for him, starting with Ahmadinejad, he played a decisive role in their creation. After Rafsanjani, he believed he could install his own president, and he was stunned by Khatami’s election in 1997. He then propelled Ahmadinejad, who came from nowhere, with the idea of building a society in line with his vision. It failed.
Domestic Iranian politics does not reduce to a simple opposition between Islam and secularism, or between dictatorship and democracy. These are real, but it is also a struggle between what Khamenei’s security-national framework demanded and what the people wanted. It was already the case under Rafsanjani. Khamenei was not against development, but he believed the country’s primary task was resistance—because development would mean opening the doors to the West and becoming like Turkey, Argentina or Brazil. “What difference would there be then with the pre-revolutionary period?” he wondered.
During his first public appearance after the January massacres, he stated: “For forty-seven years, the United States has sought to defeat the revolution to subjugate the country again.” To him, the January uprising was foreign interference, just as Putin views color revolutions or Erdogan views uprisings. It was a new front opened by the United States. The institutions he created were all built around this defense of Iran: the Revolutionary Guards, the intelligence services, the Basij, the foundations. They intervene in elections, create publishing houses, universities, indoctrination institutions. They are the ones who ultimately control Iran.
Has the war reinforced this logic?
The United States and Israel have attacked Iran twice, and there are Donald Trump’s statements: on September 22, at the United Nations, he said that the main question for him was when, or whether, he would blow up the entire country. We can call that hyperbole, but for the average Iranian or regime supporters, it is proof that Khamenei was right and that the United States and Israel want to dismantle Iran.
Not everyone believes that. Many intellectuals and activists think there is another path: become like China or Turkey, not being the slave of the West without locking into permanent resistance. But the forces that currently control Iran believe that everything Khamenei has said has proven true. And all the institutions he put in place to defend Iran against a US invasion are now in action: the missile arsenal, the drone programs, the state and military organization. He had been preparing for this for a long time.
We have this conversation while the war rages on and its outcome remains uncertain. But it is the culmination of forty years of resistance. Once it ends, I think there will be reflection on what a “third Islamic Republic” could look like. Even if Khamenei was right, many questions are now on the table.
What place does Ali Khamenei occupy in Iranian history?
For better or worse, he is probably one of the most consequential Iranian leaders of the last two centuries. He is, first, the third-longest reign since the Qajar era: Nasreddin Shah ruled for forty-nine years, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi for thirty-seven, Ali Khamenei for thirty-six years as Supreme Leader, not counting his presidency.
He is also, in my view, the most significant of the two revolution-era leaders. Khomeini is a historical figure akin to Lenin: the charismatic leader who made the revolution possible, but not the one who governed in the long run. It is Ali Khamenei who built the Islamic Republic. The bureaucratic phase of the revolution, which in Iran would correspond to the periods of Stalin, Khrushchev and up to Brezhnev, took place under him. He organized the Islamic Republic around the idea of resistance. Islam matters, of course, but it was not the driving force. The way he organized the Revolutionary Guards and the state institutions fits into this grand battle against the United States. That helped defend the Islamic ideology of the state, but I do not think that is what motivated him.
I illustrate this with an example in my book. During the protests surrounding Mahsa Amini’s death, I listened to about twenty of his speeches. In none of them did he talk about the hijab or truly about Islam; the word appeared only to designate the Islamic Republic. He spoke repeatedly of the threat to national security: the United States and Israel used this issue to weaken Iran and to gain control. And when the situation worsened, the regime largely abandoned the hijab. The top priority was to defend Iran against Israel and the United States, not the hijab. Will they revisit this issue? I doubt it strongly.
Could the war change the nature of this regime?
A state built up over more than forty years cannot change overnight. But this war has been heavy enough in its consequences to alter its essence. We see the country becoming more militarized, more uncompromising, more bellicose, but also more technocratic and less religious. How Mojtaba Khamenei intends to govern afterward? We will discover only when we reach that point. Even he does not have full latitude to implement radical measures: the Iranian state is far more intricate than, say, Saudi Arabia. Like Mohammed bin Salman, it would take a decade to transform a Saudi state built on multiple pillars into an autocratic regime: sidelining the clerics and other princes, centralizing decision-making, and reshaping the royal family’s loyalty structures. Iran too will take time to evolve.
This obsession with foreign interference has left a blind spot: the domestic situation, the country’s viability as a society and as an economy. You also co-authored How Sanctions Work. Isn’t economic collapse the major weakness of this resistance strategy?
Warfare comes at a cost, and the question is always how much cost a population is willing to bear. In the midst of a war, the population does not yet pose the big questions, even if we are approaching them.
One of Khamenei’s greatest challenges has been that, as he built a state oriented toward resistance, and this resistance became more conflictual and costly, he was losing broad support. Society wanted another direction: a gradual opening to the West and greater cultural and political freedoms. It wanted the revolution to follow the path of the Chinese revolution. Khamenei pushed in the opposite direction.
This tension surfaced once again during Ahmadinejad’s re-election in 2009. The population had voted en masse for Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a leftist revolutionary, radical, socialist by background, who reinvented himself as a spokesperson for openness, including toward the West. The deep state created by Khamenei had to resort to fraud, triggering the first major political uprising, the Green Movement.
The absolute priority was to defend Iran against Israel and the United States, not the hijab.
Vali Nasr
Since then, the contradiction between the idea of needing an ideological society to wage the anti-imperialist war and the direction in which Iranian society is moving has only deepened. It resurfaced with the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising, during which the youth essentially declared: “Leave us alone, we do not want to be religious.” The state had to retreat: Khamenei gave up turning the hijab into a minimal condition of anti-imperialist struggle. When a figure like Ali Larijani publicly suggested returning to the Shah era when hijab was optional, it showed that the regime had already lost part of its popular support.
Khamenei then leaned on the 20% of the population who still vote or strongly support the regime, against the 80% who are apathetic, in a gray area or openly hostile. In this sense, the Islamic Republic as he conceived it is no longer viable.
And economically?
The economic erosion is of a different nature than the political-cultural erosion, and it has continued to worsen with the hardening of sanctions. At the outset of his tenure, sanctions were milder and the country could function. The middle class even expanded significantly: the existence of artists, intellectuals, seculars eager to westernize is in fact a consequence. This middle class, which grew under Rafsanjani with the rise of the private sector, voted for Khatami. It continued to grow under Khatami, but inequalities allowed Ahmadinejad to win the presidency. The 2009 movement was a middle-class movement, and that same class also played an important role in the January uprising.
But as economic pressure intensified, and especially after the 2018 “maximum pressure” sanctions, that middle class dwindled. Hassan Rouhani believed that if the JCPOA had been implemented for ten years, it would have grown by 35% and would have become the engine of change. Instead, between 2018 and 2020, 20% of Iran’s middle class fell below the poverty line.
Can economic pressure provoke a mass uprising, as Washington hopes?
A theory holds that the poorer a population becomes, the less capable it is of rising up. The 1979 revolution was led by the middle class: as people become richer, they demand greater cultural and political rights and learn to organize. Today, Iranians are angered and growing poorer, but they are too overwhelmed to effectively protest.
The American theory, voiced by Mike Pompeo, posited that Iran would have to choose between feeding its people and staying as it is. Scott Bessent’s discourse also targets regime change through economic pressure: if you strangle the population enough, they will rebel. But I believe that even without this pressure, Iranians had already begun questioning the cost of resistance. The cost being isolation: travel restrictions, detachment from the world. Why not be like Turkey?
We see the country becoming more militarized, more uncompromising, more bellicose, but also more technocratic and less religious.
Vali Nasr
With the intensification of pressure since 2018, and now this new hardening, the debate has changed in nature. It is no longer simply about the resistance’s own cost: it is about how much cost the United States is willing to impose on the confrontation with them, with the West, with Israel. The question is no longer whether that cost is good or bad, but whether it is bearable, and for how long.
Khamenei even thought the resistance was beneficial. Iran manufactured everything itself, not only missiles, but medicines; it built an entire industrial base. In some respects, it boasted supply chains far more robust than many regional countries that embraced globalization. It could thus defend the “resistance economy.” That argument no longer holds. The question is no longer whether it is wise to do without trade with the United States, but whether the current costs are sustainable.
Trump somehow aimed to put this resistance policy to the test. It is increasingly at the heart of the debate. When Pezehkhian says, “We must pay the salaries, we lack money,” what is he really saying? “I am not saying capitulation, but perhaps we need to rethink resistance as a path forward.”
And Mojtaba Khamenei?
He might conclude that this path is still far from being laid out. Does he really want to lead a country that keeps getting poorer? That would be his legacy. But after forty years, the problem is that what the United States demands of Iran also costs a great deal. It is not simply a military capitulation: a shift in foreign policy would be required, effectively becoming an al-Charaa. When the two options are so costly, I do not know who will choose what, or when.
Turn to American strategy. Are further bombardments still possible? What are today’s war aims from Washington’s perspective, and what role do the midterms play?
Midterm elections serve as a lever of pressure on Donald Trump, which Iran is trying to exploit, notably through fuel prices. I don’t know if that will work.
The broader problem is that Khamenei long believed he could maintain a “neither war nor peace” arrangement with the United States: “Leave us alone, we want to be a normal country on our own terms, not part of your world order.” That is no longer tenable. Since Israel attacked Iran and the February war began, it is impossible. Some in Iran may long for an agreement that would revert to that “neither war nor peace.” But Donald Trump does not think that way: he contemplates American victory. He stated before the United Nations General Assembly: “The spoils go to the victor.” Even if he signs an agreement and claims a small victory, I do not see the United States leaving Iran in peace now.
There are nevertheless precedents of normalization.
Vietnam, indeed. The Soviet Union and China defended and armed it, but the issue was resolved, unlike Cuba or Venezuela. About a decade after Saigon fell, Vietnam began normalizing relations with the United States, for reasons of its own. It did not take long. Iran would presumably want a situation where economic pressure is sufficiently eased for it to manage the state as it wishes. But I do not think Washington will be satisfied today. The United States wants victory, and that is why the risk of a new military offensive remains real.
Would sanctions not suffice?
Economic pressure could break Iran, but it could take a long time, and timing matters. A country can also wither economically without collapsing. Take Venezuela: when Trump came to power, about a quarter of the population had left the country and another quarter were on the way out. The United States ended up intervening to change the regime, notably to curb the exodus. The sanctions alone did not have the expected effect on Maduro, not on Cuba either. It becomes clear that sanctions work only up to a point, and beyond that, the United States may not prevail without resuming war. I thus think there will be a new military episode before returning to the negotiating table.
What signals should we watch in the weeks and months ahead?
There are many. The situation has clearly deteriorated: the Houthis, the attack on the oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia. The United States supplies Israel with two-thousand-pound bombs that it does not need in Gaza or Lebanon; they are meant for Iran. The Iranians believe troop and matériel movements around their territory signal a major operation. The Israeli and American elections are approaching. And nerves run high in neighboring countries. Many say the atmosphere resembles February more than June, when the protocol was signed. Trump also seems to think there is little point in negotiating and that it will be necessary to destroy everything; he has returned to that kind of threat. We are traversing a dangerous moment.
Is a breakthrough still possible?
It reminds me of what Senator George Mitchell said about the Easter Friday Agreement negotiations: days of dark discouragement, then, suddenly, a breakthrough. So one cannot rule it out. I think it is unlikely, however, because the positions are too far apart with respect to what Trump needs to shout victory. And a temporary agreement that does not grant him that victory would merely postpone the problem.
Today, Iranians are angry and getting poorer, but they are too overwhelmed to really protest.
Vali Nasr
Many indicators suggest he might be tempted to at least a new, more intense round, in the hope that it will be enough. We do not know what is being discussed in Rezaei’s office. The Iranians would fight to the end, but perhaps they too think this situation offers no escape. At this stage, a breakthrough between Iran and the United States would be a “black swan.”
What role does Israel play?
That is what distinguishes this conflict from many others. Israel is not interested in the U.S.–Iran relationship: it wants the United States to finish off Iran. Israel has realized it cannot achieve this alone. It tried in June 2025; the regime did not fall; in 2026 it acted alongside the United States, and the regime still did not fall.
The Israeli trend, as seen in Lebanon and Gaza, is not to try something else. Israel concludes that the force employed was not sufficient and thus argues that the United States should not settle for an agreement that would bring economic relief to Iran and give the Islamic Republic time to rebuild: “Now that you are there, finish the job.” This debate thus is not limited to Trump and Iran. Israeli public opinion weighs in, and it is that voice that played a decisive role in convincing Trump, in February, that war would be swift and decisive.
Do you see signals within Iran itself?
Many reports point to arms trafficking toward Iran, especially toward Kurdish areas. Last week, several senior Sunni officials were assassinated in Iran by security forces, I emphasize this. Israel and the United States are trying to recreate a January scenario: intensify economic pressure to inflame public anger to trigger a new mass uprising, then bomb, perhaps more intensely than before. It is almost the same recipe, but from an Israeli perspective, the ingredients must be stronger. I do not know if this is accurate, but it is part of the debate. And once again, the sale of two-thousand-pound bombs to Israel has only one objective: Iran.
There remains the possibility of a “Japanese moment,” as after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the Japanese said: “It’s over.” Or, conversely, the Iranians could inflict enormous damage in the region before that point. That is why Arab governments are so anxious: collateral damage could be far greater than anything we have seen so far.