As Iran and the United States prepare for a third round of talks in Geneva Thursday, a candid comment by the chief American negotiator, Steve Witkoff, underscores the depth of reciprocal misreadings that is keeping both sides far apart.
The U.S. military – with two aircraft carrier battle groups and scores of jet fighters and refueling tankers now deployed across the Middle East – has assembled the largest American fighting force since the 2003 Iraq invasion, albeit not one geared toward ground combat.
U.S. President Donald Trump says he wants Iran to dismantle, weaken, and limit its strategic capacities, and has threatened Iran with military strikes and even regime change if it does not accept his terms.
Why We Wrote This
The United States has amassed the largest force since the war in Iraq. Iran threatens an all-out response to any attack, even if limited. As they prepare for nuclear diplomacy in Geneva to avoid conflict, each side appears to be misreading the other.
Mr. Witkoff told Fox News on Feb. 22 that Mr. Trump was surprised that Iran had nevertheless budged little and remained defiant.
“I don’t want to use the word ‘frustrated,’” Mr. Witkoff said about Mr. Trump, after speaking with the president that morning.
“He’s curious as to why they haven’t – I don’t want to use the word ‘capitulated’ – but why they haven’t capitulated,” he said. “Why, under this sort of pressure, with the amount of sea power, naval power that we have over there, why they haven’t come to us and said, ‘We profess that we don’t want a weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do.’”
On Tuesday, Iran hand-delivered a counterproposal to Omani negotiators, with options to limit its nuclear program.
Mr. Trump has said Iran “must” not have the capability to build a nuclear weapon – an ambition that Iran has repeatedly said it rejects, even as it has enriched uranium to a level approaching weapons-grade. But Iran also refuses to discuss its support for regional militia allies or the range of its ballistic missiles, which can easily strike Israel.
Seeking to deter the U.S., Iran’s leaders have vowed an all-out response to even a limited strike. Mr. Trump has suggested he might order such a first strike to further raise pressure on Iran to accept his demands, with the prospect – if Iran does not accede – of a larger campaign later this year aimed at regime change.
But analysts say U.S. expectations that military deployments alone can force the Islamic Republic to capitulate illustrate a fundamental misreading of Iran’s hard-line leadership.
“It seems President Trump has a framework for how he conducts negotiations. … There is an assumption that pressure applied [leads to] at least some form of retreat or concession from the other side,” says Farzan Sabet, an Iran expert at the Geneva Graduate Institute.
“In dealing in business in his prior life, or with allies, or even quasi-adversarial states, it’s possible [pressure] works,” says Dr. Sabet.
“But with the Islamic Republic, where we’re dealing with a revolutionary anti-American state – which is quite robust, resilient in the face of foreign pressure, and has a very high level of resolve – there is not that clear chain of logic, where pressure applied equals change in behavior and concessions,” he says.
What is on the table?
As a result, in an underscoring of the sides’ reciprocal misunderstanding, Iran seems to be approaching the Geneva talks as an opportunity to negotiate beneficial compensation – and prevent an attack – even as the U.S., for its part, is delivering an ultimatum.
At the talks, Iran wants the U.S. sanctions that have hammered its economy to be lifted. Its citizens’ economic grievances in late December sparked the antiregime protests that spread nationwide and were crushed in a two-day crackdown in January. Human rights organizations say at least 7,000 people were killed.
Yet it is not clear what scale of sanctions relief – if any – that the U.S. has put on the table, or what other incentives are being offered, aside from not launching military strikes.
“The dynamic resembles a high-stakes poker game,” wrote Danny Citrinowicz, a former head of the Iran branch for Israel Defense Intelligence, now with the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, Israel, on the social platform X.
“Washington has raised the bet – deployments, public warnings, escalatory rhetoric – on the assumption that Tehran, facing weaker cards, will ultimately fold,” wrote Mr. Citrinowicz. “But Iran’s leadership operates under its own sunk-cost logic. After years of defiance and domestic messaging centered on resistance, backing down under visible U.S. pressure carries regime legitimacy costs that may outweigh material losses.”
Associated Press, Council on Foreign Relations
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Jacob Turcotte/Staff
That appears to be the calculation of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has stared down multiple threats, as president and then leader, throughout the Islamic Republic’s 47-year history.
“Khamenei will not accept ‘unconditional surrender,’ not because he misreads the balance of power, [but] because, in his worldview, surrender is not a policy outcome,” wrote Arash Reisinezhad, a visiting professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, in Foreign Policy.
The starting point is not centrifuges for enriching uranium or missiles, he wrote, but an identity of “resistance” encapsulated in the 1979 Islamic Revolution that “continues under new forms.”
“In the Islamic Republic’s internal memory, hesitation, not repression, precipitated collapse,” wrote Dr. Reisinezhad. “The lesson absorbed by Khamenei’s leadership is stark: Retreat under pressure invites further pressure, concession signals fragility, and fragility accelerates downfall.”
Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA/Reuters
The June war
Israel, after battling Iran’s regional proxies for nearly two years in a conflict that had already pulled in Tehran, launched a surprise attack against Iran last June. That triggered a 12-day war that saw Israel target Iran’s nuclear and missile infrastructure and assassinate senior commanders and scientists. The U.S. joined the battle and struck Iran’s deeply buried nuclear facilities, effectively halting uranium enrichment.
Iran launched more than 500 ballistic missiles and hundreds of drones at Israel in response, and a volley of missiles at an evacuated U.S. base in Qatar. It is believed to have thousands more missiles, including advanced models that can evade Israel’s still-depleted missile defenses.
Yet Iran – perhaps too blithely, in its own misreading – dismisses the destructive power of the American arsenal now arrayed against it. Mr. Khamenei’s social media accounts last week posted an artificial intelligence-created video of Iran blowing up and sinking a number of U.S. warships, including the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier.
“If Iran surrendered the remainder of its nuclear program for this current crisis to be defused, it’s giving away what it considered long-term strategic assets for nonattack,” says Dr. Sabet in Geneva.
“But even if the Trump administration makes commitments, that does not preclude a future American attack,” he says. “And it certainly doesn’t preclude a future Israeli attack, on the missile program, or proxies … much, much sooner than that.”
