Trump keeps negotiating while Iran plays the long game America keeps missing
On Nov. 4, 1979, I was serving as duty officer at the headquarters of the 8th Infantry Division in Bad Kreuznach, West Germany. Late that day, a message arrived: Radical Iranian revolutionaries had stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and seized dozens of Americans. My job was to carry that report to the division commander, Maj. Gen. William J. Livsey, and keep him informed as the situation developed.
No special orders came down. No one fully grasped that we were watching the birth of a geopolitical problem that would outlast the Cold War, consume seven American presidencies, and remain unsettled half a century later.
That seizure exposed something beyond a diplomatic humiliation: When the embassy fell, America did not even have a military command responsible for the Persian Gulf. CENTCOM did not yet exist. The hostage crisis, followed weeks later by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, forced the realization. President Carter stood up the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force in March 1980 — the organization that became today’s CENTCOM in January 1983. The 1979 embassy seizure did not merely embarrass a superpower. It restructured how America organizes itself to fight in the Middle East.
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Today, as Washington negotiates a tentative 60-day memorandum of understanding to extend the ceasefire, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and establish a framework for nuclear talks, I keep returning to that November evening in Bad Kreuznach. The particulars have changed. The fundamental dynamic has not.
Washington’s current headlines focus on ceasefires, sanctions relief, Iran’s 440-kilogram stockpile of uranium enriched to 60% — a short technical step from weapons-grade — and competing memorandums of understanding. Those details matter. But they are not the central story.
The central story is one of strategic patience. For 47 years, every American administration has tried some combination of deterrence, diplomacy, sanctions, covert operations, and direct military force to change Iran’s behavior. Seven presidents pursued different approaches and produced different results. The regime has outlasted all of them.
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The clerical government survived the Iran-Iraq War, crippling economic pressure, domestic uprisings, cyberattacks against its nuclear infrastructure, targeted assassinations of senior commanders, Operation Midnight Hammer, and now Operation Epic Fury. Through all of it, the objective in Tehran never shifted.
They mean to survive.
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That may sound unimpressive. It is not. Survival is not a byproduct of Iran’s strategy — it is the strategy. Understanding that distinction is what separates clear-eyed analysis from the wishful thinking that has distorted Washington’s Iran policy for five decades.
The reason Washington keeps misreading Tehran is not a lack of intelligence. It is a failure of imagination. Americans instinctively view Iran as a conventional nation-state pursuing recognizable geopolitical interests. We assume that enough pressure or inducement will eventually persuade Tehran to behave like a normal member of the international community. That assumption has been wrong for 47 years.
Iran’s clerical rulers do not see themselves as managers of a nation-state. They see themselves as guardians of a revolutionary project launched in 1979 and divinely mandated to resist what they regard as permanent Western hostility. Sanctions relief is useful. Diplomatic legitimacy is welcome. But neither objective overrides the imperative to protect the regime itself.
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In my book "Preparing for World War III," I argued that America’s principal adversaries think in terms of decades rather than election cycles. They absorb setbacks and pursue long-term strategic positions. That observation applies to China and Russia. It applies with equal force to Iran. In "Kings of the East," I warned that authoritarian regimes possess a strategic patience that democracies struggle to match because their leaders are not constrained by election calendars or media cycles. Tehran has demonstrated both principles for half a century.
This distinction explains the negotiating pattern we keep witnessing. Each new proposal generates cautious optimism. Then new conditions emerge. Timelines shift. Demands multiply. The head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization has already said Iran will not accept limits on its nuclear enrichment. Foreign Minister Araghchi stated last year that enrichment is a nonnegotiable right. Iranian lawmakers called it "a red line" and "an inalienable right." The memorandum of understanding under discussion would address what happens to existing enriched material — but the right to enrich again remains Iran’s hill to die on.
Consider the pattern across the full timeline. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action capped enrichment at 3.67% and limited stockpiles to 300 kilograms. Iran accepted those terms and used the sanctions relief to rebuild its regional network. Trump withdrew in 2018. Tehran then systematically rolled back every constraint — raising enrichment to 20%, then beyond 60% — until military force disrupted the program again.
ANY NEW IRAN DEAL SHOULD BE JUDGED BY RESULTS, NOT VICTORY-LAP RHETORIC
The deeper lesson is not structural — it is theological. Ayatollah Khomeini did not build the Islamic Republic as a government that could be negotiated into normal statehood. He built it as a revolution with a divine mandate. His successors inherited that mandate. No memorandum of understanding renegotiates a creed. If the talks produce a deal, Iran will parse every provision for leverage. If they collapse, Tehran will absorb the damage, reconstitute where possible, and present itself to the Muslim world as the power that defied America again.
Either way, the regime’s revolutionary identity remains intact — and that is the truth no press release can paper over.
Diplomacy is preferable to another round of major military operations in the Middle East. No serious strategist should welcome an outcome that further destabilizes global energy markets, puts American forces at additional risk, or closes off any possibility of a durable settlement. President Trump deserves credit for pressing negotiations and for sustaining military pressure when Tehran stalled.
But successful diplomacy requires honest analysis, not wishful thinking. The danger is not that America negotiates with Iran. The danger is that America negotiates while assuming Tehran’s fundamental calculation has changed.
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Nothing in the Islamic Republic’s record — across nine American administrations, two Israeli wars, and the most intensive sanctions campaign in modern history — supports that assumption. The regime that seized our embassy in 1979 built its entire identity around surviving American pressure. It has done so consistently ever since.
Forty-seven years after I carried that first message to General Livsey, Washington is still wrestling with the same adversary. The names have changed. The weapons have changed. The uranium enrichment percentages have changed.
The regime’s core objective has not.
Tehran is playing the long game again — and the memorandum of understanding on the table may only buy time for the next round. The question is whether Washington finally negotiates as a realist — or whether we walk in, as we have so often before, as the more eager party at the table.