It’s been mentioned that consider is like glass: As soon as it’s shattered, not anything will ever be the similar. When it comes to the iconic hostility between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the USA over the last 47 years, even this metaphor could also be an underestimation.
The tone of the connection is indicative of this reality.
In 2020, Iran’s best chief denounced President Donald Trump as a “clown” who most effective pretends to enhance the Iranian other people whilst in the end plunging a “poisonous dagger” into their backs.
And in a U.S. model of this hostility, Trump’s particular envoy Steve Witkoff mentioned on Feb. 23, 2026, in regards to the president’s way to Iran: “I don’t want to use the word ‘frustrated,’ because he understands he has plenty of alternatives, but he’s curious as to why they haven’t … I don’t want to use the word ‘capitulated,’ but why they haven’t capitulated.”
The warfare that started on Feb. 28, 2026, hews to a well-known however bad trend. Deep, historic distrust, incompatible strategic pursuits, home political constraints on either side, miscommunication and misperception, zero-sum considering and repeated diplomatic overreach progressively driven the connection between Iran and the U.S. towards open warfare.
Rhetoric, no longer truth
When Tehran refused to yield to Trump’s calls for, he described Iranian leaders in blunt phrases: “They’re sick people. They’re mentally ill. Sick people. They are angry. They are crazy. They are sick.”
For a deeper figuring out of Iran, policymakers in Washington will have seemed to the insights of John W. Limbert, a prominent diplomat with 4 many years of enjoy in Iranian affairs and a hostage right through the Iran hostage disaster.
In 2008, as a part of a U.S. Institute of Peace find out about of Iranian negotiating taste, Limbert defined 15 rules for American citizens looking for a hit negotiations with Iranian opposite numbers. Amongst his maximum necessary observations was once that every aspect has a tendency to suppose the worst in regards to the different, viewing its adversary as “infinitely devious, hostile, and duplicitous.”
Little proof means that such hard earned knowledge has knowledgeable fresh rhetoric.
As an alternative, American leaders’ and media’s discussions of Iran over the last few many years have steadily trusted a well-known narrative: the portrayal of Center Jap leaders as irrational or “lunatic” figures − first, progressive chief Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Saddam Hussein, adopted through Moammar Gadhafi, Bashar Assad, and now Ali Khamenei.
This narrative with ease overlooks inconvenient information.
Attending to breakdown
It was once Trump who withdrew the USA from the 2015 nuclear settlement with Iran right through his first time period. It was once additionally the USA that right through renewed negotiations in 2025 and 2026 selected to bomb Iranian objectives two times whilst talks had been nonetheless underway.
Nor had been the negotiations ever strictly bilateral. There was once at all times an unoccupied chair on the desk metaphorically reserved for a ghost player: Israel. In my opinion, High Minister Benjamin Netanyahu skillfully used political leverage and diplomatic drive to form the method publicly and privately.
When it got here to Iran, Trump steadily violated a elementary idea of international relations: asking Iran to concede with none reciprocity. In the meantime, Netanyahu would many times transfer the purpose posts − saying that Iran was once at the verge of obtaining a nuclear weapon, insisting it had no proper to counterpoint uranium by itself soil, challenging the dismantling of its nuclear infrastructure, calling for the removal of its ballistic missile capacity, and in the end advocating regime alternate.
The level to which Israeli drive formed successive American insurance policies is a query historians and investigative newshounds will proceed to discuss.
Iranian Very best Chief Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivers his Friday prayer sermon in Tehran, Iran, on Nov. 5, 2004, in entrance of an image of the past due progressive founder Ayatollah Khomeini.
AP Photograph/Vahid Salemi, Record
But accountability for the breakdown can’t be put on Washington and Jerusalem by myself. Iranian leaders contributed considerably to creating the warfare with the USA so intractable.
A corrupt, repressive and economically suffering regime relied closely on performative anti-American politics for home legitimacy. Tehran matched American and Israeli tension with intransigence and strategic overreach of its personal.
Proscribing inspections through the World Atomic Power Company, failing to supply credible solutions about previous nuclear actions, establishing secret amenities and making an attempt to barter from a place of weak point in the end proved disastrous when coping with an impatient and impulsive American president.
The unknown unknowns
What comes subsequent?
If regime alternate does no longer happen in Tehran, the 2 facets will virtually indubitably in finding themselves negotiating once more as soon as the fog of warfare dissipates.
The hostility between them is not going to disappear, and diplomatic niceties would possibly transform rarer. But international relations hardly calls for consider; it calls for pursuits.
I consider that long run talks are due to this fact more likely to be transactional quite than transformational. Technical and felony parameters will nonetheless wish to be negotiated. Hawks and doves will proceed to compete for affect in each capitals.
And the oldest rule of bargaining will stay unchanged: Whilst you lack leverage, achieve it – then negotiate.
