How Donald Trump May Have Sabotaged His Chances for a Deal with Iran

Newyorker-March26th2026

March 25, 2026

Last weekend, President Donald Trump vowed that he would carry out huge strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure, in a threat meant to get Iran’s government to open up the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s closure of the strait was one of the most geopolitically significant developments in a war that began last month with U.S. and Israeli strikes against Iran, and has caused chaos in the region and in the world economy. In recent days, however, Trump has seemingly searched for ways to de-escalate the conflict, promising to postpone the strikes while Iran and the U.S. consider ceasefire negotiations.

I recently spoke by phone with Ali Vaez, the director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what concessions Iran would want in any negotiations to end the war, whether the U.S. and Israel have the same objectives in Iran, and why an off-ramp—let alone a permanent peace—may be so hard to find.

From the perspective of the Iranian regime and its new leadership, what do you think their interests are in any potential deal to end the war with the United States and Israel?

Look, the primary objective in any negotiation would be a deal that would insure the Islamic Republic’s survival. That has several requirements. One is, of course, that the hostilities against Iran would stop and that they would not start again—because Iran doesn’t want to end up being another country, like Lebanon or Gaza or Syria, that Israel or the United States can decide to bomb at will. This concept of the U.S. or Israel scheduling a Google Calendar reminder to bomb Iran every six months is not a situation that the Islamic Republic can tolerate, or believes that it would be able to survive, in the medium to long run. So the primary objective is to basically create the conditions under which Israel and the United States are deterred from committing an act of aggression against Iran ever again.

But, at this point, just that is not enough, because Iran has been living with economic warfare against it for several decades. And, after this war, it would have to reconstruct in order to survive. And this is why it would need economic incentives that are real, not just promised and never delivered. So it also needs some sort of arrangement in which it would be able to secure economic reprieve. And that means that if the hot war ends, but Iran ends up in another cold war, that would be as fatal to the regime as the continuation of the hot war. And this is why Iran will impose difficult conditions for accepting a ceasefire.

I have heard you say in the past that there were some ways in which the heavy sanctions on Iran, the economic warfare that you’re talking about, were beneficial to members of the regime and that the people who thought those sanctions would bring the government down were misguided. But now you seem to be saying that you think it’s important for the economic warfare against Iran to stop, not just for the welfare of the Iranian people, obviously, who’ve been suffering under sanctions, but for the regime itself. Why is that?

So these are different issues. Before the war, when the regime was able to govern, even ineffectively or with a lot of mismanagement and corruption, it could still keep the economy afloat. And, yes, there were regime élites who were benefitting from sanctions and were being enriched, and they were secure in their position because they had enough to sustain their power. But, if you look at what happened to the Assad regime, at a certain point Bashar al-Assad couldn’t even afford to pay his security forces anymore. And this war has basically rendered Iran ungovernable unless it can undergo serious reconstruction. This isn’t just about sanctions relief. The Iranian regime needs money for reconstruction. It’s really as simple as that. There is no agreement in which it would accept American promises because it’s been burned by the U.S. too many times. And, in the absence of sanctions relief, the regime knows it would die on the vine.