Trump’s Narrow Iran Window Is Closing
While the president’s attention is elsewhere, the Iran situation threatens to boil over.
Punishing Iran was not on Donald Trump’s mind when he entered the White House in January. Rather, he had gone out of his way to declare his desire for a deal by avoiding insulting rhetoric, disavowing regime change and declaring nuclear weapons as his only red line. Similar signals came from Iran. Direct talks with Trump was Tehran’s new line. Yet this unique window of opportunity is closing fast, mainly because Trump isn’t paying attention. Iran policy is once again falling into the hands of the neocons who sabotaged Trump’s hope to reach a deal with Iran during his first term—with war lurking around the corner.
As I wrote in this magazine in August of last year, despite his bombastic rhetoric and military threats, Trump genuinely aimed for a new deal with Iran. But he was given disingenuously bad advice by Iran hawks such as Mike Pompeo and John Bolton who wanted to drive matters toward war. The neocons deceived Trump into thinking that ramping up sanctions would break Iran and force it to capitulate to American demands.
To Trump, this sounded reasonable. He wanted a deal, and squeezing Iran before the negotiations made perfect sense. Maximalist demands were just part of the game, and Tehran would surely understand this. But Pompeo and Bolton knew all along—as did anyone who understood the dynamics in Iran and the strategic culture of the clerical government—that demanding Iran’s capitulation combined with suffocating sanctions was the perfect strategy if the goal was war, not talks.
Trump’s rhetoric on Iran in 2024 was strikingly different. Gone were the hints of regime change, maximalist demands, and petty insults. Instead, he focused on his desire for a deal and peace. His vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, made a strategic case against war with Iran, stating on The Tim Dillon Show that “our interest is very much in not going to war with Iran,” and that U.S. and Israeli interests on Iran are distinct. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could not have been pleased.
Trump’s public rebuke of Iran hawks like Pompeo, John Bolton, and Nikki Haley, the firing of Bolton protégé Brian Hook, and Don Jr.’s vow to exclude neocons from a second Trump administration show that he has realized he was sold a bad policy and is now approaching Iran differently. This was further underscored when he signed a presidential memorandum formally reinstating maximum pressure on Iran while playing down the decision and declaring that he was “torn” and “unhappy” to sign it.
As much as Trump wants a deal with Iran, it has been clear in recent weeks that Iran isn’t a priority. With Ukraine, Gaza, and spats with Mexico and Canada, the Iran crisis isn’t urgent enough yet.
And anything that isn’t a priority falls to others in the Trump administration who may not share his “America First” foreign policy. The deprioritized Iran file is currently in the hands of the National Security Council, which is dominated by more hawkish voices (some in the Trump circle call it the Neocon Security Council). The default policy they follow, as outlined in the memorandum Trump didn’t want to sign, mirrors the same approach Pompeo and Bolton pushed in 2018.
In fact, there is hardly any overlap between what Trump said he wants and what the memorandum lays out. While Trump only lists a nuclear weapon as his red line, the memorandum reflects many of Pompeo’s infamous 12 demands of Iran designed to kill a deal. It doesn’t just declare that nuclear weapons for Iran are off limits, but also “a nuclear weapons capability,” that is, nuclear enrichment as a whole rather than only weapons-grade enrichment, which is the demand Israel has pushed on the U.S. precisely to kill any prospects for diplomacy. Moreover, it puts the nuclear issue on par with denying Iran intercontinental ballistic missiles as well as neutralizing “Iran’s terrorist network.” Finally, it launches a campaign to drive Iran’s oil exports to zero and reimpose UN sanctions on Iran through the snapback provision provided by Barack Obama’s nuclear deal.
The massive discrepancy between Trump’s stated goals and the policy laid out in the memorandum has given Tehran pause and prompted Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to pour cold water on the idea of direct talks with the U.S. Iran’s reformist president has also disavowed his campaign promise to start talks with the U.S. Iran’s concerns are twofold: first, that neocons in the White House will sabotage any diplomatic efforts, as they did in 2019–2020, and second, that Trump will start with nuclear talks but shift to issues Iran deems off-limits once negotiations begin.
Though Iran’s regional position has weakened following the fall of Bashar Al Assad in Syria and the weakening of Hezbollah, the picture is different on the nuclear front. Iran has dramatically expanded its program—the International Atomic Energy Agency reports that Iran has amassed around 275 kilograms of 60 percent highly enriched uranium. That’s enough for six nuclear weapons, and Iran produces enough fissile material for a bomb every 30 days. Though weakened, Iran is nowhere near the point of capitulation, nor is its suffering economy on the verge of collapse. Not only will the return to maximum pressure prompt Tehran to invest further in its nuclear program, but perhaps more importantly, regional developments have strengthened voices in Iran who favor building a bomb rather than using the nuclear program as a bargaining chip with the U.S.
At a time when the U.S. under Joe Biden armed and protected Israel as it engaged in what an increasing number of experts deems to be a genocide, when Israel is grabbing territory in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria without any pushback whatsoever from the West, and the global order seems to be falling into “every man for himself,” demanding Iran’s nuclear capitulation instead of a balanced deal will set the stage for war.
Trump’s statements over the course of the past year suggests that he understands this. But as long as Iran isn’t the priority—Trump hasn’t even appointed an Iran envoy yet, leaving the Iranians unclear about who they should reach out to—a default neocon approach will be in place that will shut the window for Trump’s plans for diplomacy.
Bolton and Pompeo are no longer in the White House their shadow continues to block Trump’s path to peace.
By June, this crisis will be acute and potentially unresolvable. The snapback provisions in the Iran deal expire in October, and the Europeans will likely trigger them in June, prompting Iran to announce its withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). With a mandatory 90-day notice, Iran won’t be able to formally exit the treaty until October, leaving just three months for negotiations. If talks fail, UN sanctions will be reinstated, and Iran will fully exit the NPT. At that point, war will only be a matter of time.
Israel remains the wild card. Since the mid-1990s, it has worked to make Iran a top U.S. national security priority, regularly threatening military action against Iran’s nuclear program. The real goal, however, was to either harden Washington’s stance on Iran or draw the U.S. into a war Israel would initiate, as Israel lacked the capacity to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities itself.
With Iran’s deterrence weakened and the Biden administration lifting nearly all restraints on Israel—policies Trump is likely to continue—the Netanyahu government is now more willing to strike Iran independently. Israel believes it can manage the aftermath without dragging the U.S. into the mess. Nevertheless, the window for Israel to trigger war remains open only as long as Trump’s attention is elsewhere and Washington’s default policy blocks diplomacy. As a result, keeping Iran off Trump’s direct agenda has become Israel’s preferred strategy.
But Israel is miscalculating. It couldn’t eliminate Hamas right next door to Israel even after the U.S. poured more than $23 billion into the Israeli war machine. And the U.S. still has to clean up that mess. In fact, Trump’s focus on Gaza is one of the reasons he is distracted from the Iran issue. Even weakened, Iran still retains the capacity to rain down hundreds of advanced missiles on Israel and American bases in the region—missiles that in October 2024 penetrated all layers of Israel’s air defenses and forced Netanyahu to request THAAD batteries from Biden.
Israel can certainly outgun Iran. It has dramatically shifted the regional balance in its favor in the past 15 months. Nevertheless, it still can’t destroy Iran’s nuclear program without creating a massive mess that would drag the U.S. into war. Trump may be distracted from Iran at the moment, but if war breaks out, Iran will draw U.S. resources away from other strategic priorities, from East Asia to the Mexican border.
In his inaugural address, Trump declared, “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.” He has repeated this goal almost daily. People close to him insist that he eyes the Nobel Peace Prize. He has a unique opportunity to strike a deal with Tehran, one no other U.S. president has had. But if he delegates Iran policy to the hawks in the NSC, opportunity will turn into crisis and his legacy may shift from peace to war.
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