Iran’s Bitterness and Bewilderment Over How to Make Peace with Trump
On a whirlwind trip to New York this week, Mahmoud Pezeshkian, the President of Iran, looked exhausted. His country has been at war with the United States and Israel for seven months. Dark, puffy bags sagged under his eyes. His tone—at the opening of the U.N. General Assembly, on the sidelines of negotiations with U.S. envoys, in meetings with other world leaders, and at briefings for nuclear specialists, think-tank experts, and members of the media—alternated between bitter, biting, and bewildered.
The scenes were often surreal. Since February 28th, when the war began, Pezeshkian has frequently run his government from an underground location, to avoid the fate of his former boss, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and dozens of other politicians and military officers, all killed in air strikes. This week, however, the U.S. Secret Service and the New York Police Department provided Pezeshkian protection in coördination with his own security detail of Revolutionary Guards, an Iranian military branch that has repeatedly been targeted during the war. It was the first time that the President of a country at war with the United States has been allowed to pay a visit.
In New York, Iran made a new bid to end the conflict during indirect talks with U.S. envoys. The proposal, which would expedite a resolution in a mere seven days—peace on steroids—called for the U.S. to lift economic sanctions and end its blockade of Iranian ships, and for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz to all international shipping, the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said on Thursday. It “would be much better” if the process were completed before the U.S. midterm elections in November, he continued. But Tehran is “in no hurry.”
The proposal also outlined an end to hostilities between the U.S and Iran, a ceasefire in Israel’s campaign in Lebanon, the release of an estimated twelve billion dollars in frozen Iranian assets, and the resumption of negotiations on the future of Iran’s controversial nuclear program. These reflected the main points in the so-called memorandum of understanding negotiated in Islamabad in June and signed, from afar, by Presidents Trump and Pezeshkian. That deal broke down in July, when Iran struck three ships that were passing through an “unauthorized” route in the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. responded with fresh rounds of punishing air strikes.
The new proposal was relayed to the U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner during three hours of indirect talks, mediated by Qatar. Witkoff described the meetings as “encouraging, constructive and successful.” Trump called them “very good.”
Earlier in the day, however, Trump had mused, during a speech on the U.N. floor, about whether he should “annihilate the Islamic Republic, and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again.” Trump said that he was willing to drive Iran “into Hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations” if it does not agree to end the war on his more ambitious terms, which include sweeping steps to dismantle any remaining aspects of a nuclear program that could be used to make a weapon. On Friday night, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had indeed rejected Iran’s proposal, and that he expects to resume bombing the country after the midterms, though an unnamed U.S. official said that Washington and Tehran continue to negotiate.
Ali Vaez, the deputy director of Middle East programs at the International Crisis Group, who attended the briefings with Pezeskian and Araghchi, told me that Iran had engineered a “heads I win, tails you lose” proposition. “If Trump accepts, Iran locks in a deal on favorable terms,” he said. “If he rejects it, Tehran gets to argue that Washington—not Iran—is the obstacle to diplomacy.” Danny Citrinowicz, an Iran expert who spent decades with Israeli defense intelligence, wrote, on X, “That makes the central question for Washington not simply whether it should accept or reject Iran’s latest proposal. The more consequential question is: What happens the day after Washington says no?”
Pezeshkian insisted this week that Iran would not “bend the knee” to U.S. pressure, whatever the cost. In his own speech at the U.N., he angrily waved a picture of Khamenei. He held up a second picture, of victims of a U.S. strike on an elementary school in Minab, in which more than a hundred and fifty people were killed, most of them children. He held up a third, of the Lamerd Sports Hall, where young players had been practicing volleyball when a U.S. missile, untested in combat, killed more than twenty and injured around a hundred. The missile, called a PrSM—for precision-strike missile—detonates midair and spreads thousands of small tungsten fragments in all directions. The U.N. reported this month that the attacks on the school and the sports hall—which, like the assassination of Khamenei, took place on the first day of bombing—could be considered war crimes.
Dressed in a black shirt to signify mourning, Pezeshkian made his own threats, too. “No one in this region will have security alone,” he said. “Either we build it together, or we will have to live under insecurity together.” Iran has now carried out hundreds of drone and missile strikes, impacting fourteen countries. “We are not afraid of fighting, of war,” he told the assembly. Large sections of chairs in the hall were empty as delegations filed out in protest of Iranian aggression.
For all the defiant rhetoric of its officials, Iran is hurting more than it has since Iraq’s brutal invasion in 1980, which dragged on for eight years and killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians without changing anything politically or on the ground. Its economy has shrunk by ten per cent since the start of this war. Its oil exports have declined by more than eighty per cent. Its currency, the rial, which traded at around six hundred thousand to the dollar a year ago, has plummeted. Now a single dollar is worth 2.3 million rials. Inflation hit almost eighty-five per cent last month. Electricity cuts are common. New U.S. sanctions on all major Iranian airlines just went into effect. Tehran’s leverage today is not holding the world’s third-largest oil reserves but instead controlling access to the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway through which roughly twenty per cent of global energy transits, including much of the oil and gas products of the neighboring Gulf countries.
The Iranian government has been forced to implement sweeping cost-cutting measures, which were reflected in Pezeshkian’s bare-bones visit. For decades, Iranian Presidents have reserved three or four floors at a fancy hotel, priced in the stratosphere during the week of the UNGA. This time, he stayed at the town house of the Iranian Ambassador. His meetings were held in a small conference room. No ballroom with crystal chandeliers, no elaborate floral arrangements at draped tables. The U.S. State Department banned Iranian diplomats from “buying wholesale club memberships or luxury goods,” warning by tweet, “New York-area retailers: be on guard, don’t become complicit in these violations.” There seemed little chance of that on this trip.
“Iran wants a deal because its economy is reeling under crushing U.S. sanctions,” Robert Malley, who was a lead negotiator of the 2015 nuclear deal under President Barack Obama, and who also attended the briefing by Pezeshkian and Araghchi in New York, told me. But the two sides have learned different lessons from past negotiations. In his view, Iran believed the first ceasefire “was good in principle,” but that, given U.S. unreliability, it should front-load any future deal with concessions, such as economic relief, before agreeing to reopen the strait. “The problem is that the Trump Administration drew a very different lesson,” he said. It viewed the first deal as “inherently flawed,” and concluded that “Iran should first be strangled economically to force it to concede. With such diametrically opposed assessments, it’s unfortunately hard to imagine an agreement emerging anytime soon.”
But the U.S. has also taken big hits. The war has so far cost some forty-four billion dollars, the Pentagon reported to Congress in early September. Outside estimates put the expense at well over a hundred billion dollars. The average price for a gallon of gas is around $4.50, and $6.50 for diesel. Some critical U.S. bases in the Middle East are no longer viable because Iran has effectively targeted them, the former C.I.A. director and Army general David Petraeus told the Cipher Brief last month. Among them is Al Udeid Air Base, in Qatar, the forward headquarters of U.S. Central Command for operations in countries including Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The conservative Hudson Institute reported this month that the U.S. has had some success in taking out Iranian missiles and their launchers, but that “Tehran’s decentralized drone ecosystem can regenerate more rapidly.” The nature of warfare in the Middle East has changed faster than the U.S. can keep up.
The obstacles—for this or any future negotiations—are many. Pezeshkian faces criticism from hard-liners who oppose any diplomacy. Kayhan, an ultraconservative newspaper associated with the Supreme Leader’s office, said that “New York is not a place for smiles and negotiations.” An editorial warned, “Care must be taken that no signal is given during the New York trip that could be interpreted by the enemy as weakness on the Iranian side.” It instead called for the General Assembly to be a “court for U.S. crimes.” The Fars News Agency, which is associated with the Revolutionary Guards, said that Pezeshkian should not have gone to New York at all. The Presidency in Iran is a dangerous job. Since the 1979 Revolution, all who have held the role have faced dark fates, from impeachment and political isolation to travel bans and house arrest. Some have been silenced from even speaking to the media or appearing in public.
Sadegh Zibakalam, a former University of Tehran political scientist charged multiple times for propaganda against the state, posted this week that Iran’s problem “is neither with America, nor with the Arabs, nor even with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu. Our problem is with our own hard-liners who seized all power for thirty-six years and now aren’t willing to relinquish even a hair’s breadth of it—even at the cost of dragging ninety million Iranians through the mud.”
Israel is another deep uncertainty. Netanyahu, who faces a tough reëlection bid next month, has vowed to continue military operations in neighboring Lebanon until Hezbollah, an Iranian ally, is disarmed and no longer a threat. In his own combative speech to the U.N., he called the wars on Iran and in Gaza a “battle against the barbarians.” Launching the war on Iran had been “one of the easiest decisions I’ve had to make as Prime Minister, because if we hadn’t done it, we’d all be dead.”
Defanging or changing the regime in Iran has been Netanyahu’s political credo for decades. He, too, faced walkouts and many empty seats in the vast hall that holds delegations from almost two hundred member states. “If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t yet left this hall,” he said, “please do so now.” The Iranian delegation, which had walked out, left on its table a framed picture of General Qassem Soleimani, the Revolutionary Guard commander in charge of Middle East operations who was killed in a U.S. air strike in 2020.
Trump already faces opposition to the Iran war among many in his own Republican Party, but trying to find a face-saving way to end it quickly could anger allies, too. This week, as Pezeshkian was making his pitches across New York, Senator John Kennedy, the Louisiana Republican, said, “I think that the people running Iran are reptiles.” He told Fox News that Iran, China, Russia, and North Korea were “the same hooker in different dresses. They all lie like timeshare salesmen. You can’t trust them. I wouldn’t turn my back on any of them, even if I thought and knew they were two days dead.” He made the comment as Trump welcomed the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, at the White House.
Daryl G. Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, characterized Iran’s proposal as a “can’t-ignore option that could help Trump find the off-ramp from the disastrous military quagmire” that he and Netanyahu set in motion. Trump, of course, found a way to ignore it. Sanam Vakil, the director of the Chatham House Middle East program, noted, “Trump’s rejection of the latest diplomatic opening is hardly surprising. Meaningful concessions to Tehran before the midterms were always going to be difficult, particularly if he believes mounting economic pain and sanctions gives Washington the upper hand.” Regardless, any diplomatic efforts that pause the fighting and release the choke hold on global energy supplies are just the beginning. The Obama Administration needed more than two years to negotiate the terms of the 2015 nuclear accord—and it was jointly orchestrated by the world’s six major powers. The proposal made during Pezeshkian’s quick trip represented an attempt to inject new momentum to end the war. But genuine movement on the nuclear program is almost certain to drag out over the complex science of preventing the Islamic Republic from converting a peaceful energy program into the world’s deadliest weapon. ♦