Iran and the United States, a long history of sham peace negotiations

The United States is currently engaged in a diplomatic game with Iran, a series of offers and denials, a dance of shadows where the White House’s peace proposals clash with the supposed rejections of a wounded Tehran. The official objective is to halt the war initiated by Israel and the United States on February 28, but the chessboard is weighed down by nearly half a century of grievances. There is a pathological distrust between the two sides, fueled by decades of broken promises and military interventions that have turned diplomacy into a minefield. The current attacks echo alongside the humiliating U.S. operation, Operation Eagle Claw, in 1980.

To understand the roots of this mutual resentment, one must go back to the origins of the Islamic Revolution that brought the ayatollahs to power in February 1979. The regime accused the United States of supporting the deposed monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The Iranians wanted to prevent the American government from granting asylum to the Shah while he was hospitalized in New York for treatment of lymphoma. Finally, in November 1979, the U.S. Embassy was stormed by 400 Islamist students, an event that would forever mark relations between the two countries. A total of 66 people were taken hostage; some were released as a propaganda gesture, while 52 remained captive for 444 days.

The administration of Democratic President Jimmy Carter attempted to free its diplomats in April 1980 with Operation Eagle Claw. But the mission, involving eight helicopters, turned into a fiery inferno when one of the aircraft collided with a Hercules transport plane during refueling in the Iranian desert. Eight American servicemen died. And that was the final nail in the coffin of Carter’s political career. On January 20, 1981, during Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, Iran released the 52 hostages as a gesture of goodwill toward the new administration.

Asli Aydintasbas, an analyst at the Brookings Institution, explains via email that Iran occupies a particular place in the American imagination, “not only as an adversary, but as the symbol of a hostile regime that has acted against U.S. interests for half a century.” “Trump will personally remember the 1979 hostage crisis. He will not want to experience another similar episode. Therefore, any new peace proposal is evaluated not on its content, but in light of half a century of hostility and humiliation.”

Relations between the two countries were frozen for 34 years, until Ayatollah Hassan Rouhani came to power in 2013. Finally, after a decade of complex negotiations, under the presidency of Barack Obama, an agreement was signed in 2015 in which Iran halted its pursuit of nuclear weapons in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. But when Trump came to power in 2017, he called the pact “the worst deal ever,” withdrew from the agreement in 2018, and reinstated the sanctions.

“In Tehran,” Aydintasbas points out, “the lesson of past diplomacy is that the United States cannot be trusted and can change course even after an agreement has been reached.”

The United States now aims to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program. It seemed an agreement with Tehran was close until June 13, 2025, when Israel launched an attack against the Islamic Republic. Nine days later, the United States formally joined the offensive with Operation Midnight Hammer: 125 aircraft deployed and a total of 75 missiles, including 14 bombs weighing over 13,000 kilograms each. They bombed Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, and Trump called it a “spectacular success.” It became known as the Twelve-Day War. The Pentagon initially stated that the attack had delayed the nuclear program “by a few months.” Later, they extended that estimation to two years.

But it was clear that the nuclear program was far from having been eradicated. So both sides returned to the negotiating table indirectly, with Omani diplomats acting as intermediaries.

Agreement was “within reach”

The latest round of talks took place between February 6 and 26. Just hours before the joint Israeli-U.S. attack, Oman’s Foreign Minister, Badr Al Busaidi, had posted a message on social media saying that an agreement was “within reach.” When the bombing intensified on February 28 with the mission dubbed Epic Fury, Al Busaidi said on the social network X: “I am dismayed. [...] Once again, active and serious negotiations have been undermined.”

Al Busaidi was more explicit in a recent opinion piece published in The Economist: “Twice in nine months,” the minister recalled, “the United States and Iran have been on the brink of a real agreement on the most difficult issue dividing them: Iran’s nuclear energy program and American fears that it could be a weapons program.” The Omani foreign minister added that “the biggest miscalculation by the U.S. administration” was “allowing itself to be drawn” into the war by Israel. Despite everything, Al Busaidi continues to believe that a diplomatic solution is possible.

This week, Trump sent a peace proposal to Iran through mediators with one hand, and with the other, ordered the deployment of nearly 3,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East. He said there were “productive talks” with Iran. But Tehran denied everything. And last Thursday, Trump posted on his Truth Social network: “The Iranian negotiators are very different and ‘strange.’ They are ‘begging’ us to make a deal, which they should be doing since they have been militarily obliterated, with zero chance of a comeback, and yet they publicly state that they are only ‘looking at our proposal.’ WRONG!!! They better get serious soon, before it is too late, because once that happens, there is NO TURNING BACK, and it won’t be pretty!”

Trita Parsi, vice president and co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, notes: “Trump has an interest in calming energy markets; Iran has an interest in increasing the risk premium. So Trump exaggerates the prospects for diplomacy and Iran downplays them, regardless of the facts on the ground.”

For his part, Julien Barnes-Dacey, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), notes via email that Trump continues to condition any new diplomacy on an effective capitulation by Iran, “something unacceptable to Tehran.” He believes, like the other two experts consulted, that Trump is using “the rhetoric of diplomacy to stabilize the markets.” And he believes that Iran will not back down. “Making significant concessions would pose an existential challenge to the legitimacy and survival of the regime itself.”

Room for hope

The recent attacks on Iran, which occurred while negotiations were underway, have made dialogue more difficult. Parsi also believes that Tehran has an interest in diplomacy because it needs it to “consolidate some of the gains it has made through this war.” Aydintasbas also believes there is room for hope. “The mistrust is deep, although I wouldn’t describe it as a point of no return.” He thinks that the country’s leadership still has room to negotiate. “But only if it can present any approach as reciprocal, limited, and compatible with Iranian sovereignty.”

According to the analyst at The Brookings Institution, the real problem between the two countries is that diplomacy is no longer perceived as a path to normalization and has become a mere tactical tool in the midst of war. While this diplomatic dance of deception continues, mediators like Pakistan attempt to create cracks in a seemingly impregnable wall of mistrust.

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