In January 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the assassination of the influential commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Gen. Qassem Soleimani, prompting Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to place a de facto moratorium on any negotiations with the White House. Five years later, a breakthrough in relations may be in the making as the two traditional nemeses meet again. 

In his first presidency, Trump not only eliminated Khamenei’s most loyal confidante, but also walked away from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action just three years after the celebrated nuclear deal was signed in July 2015 between Iran, the P5+1 (China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and the European Union. 

The ayatollah was so enraged by Trump’s actions that he rebuffed the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who came to Tehran in 2019 with a mandate to deliver a conciliatory message from Trump in hopes that it would relieve the escalating tensions. 

The senior cleric, spurning the mediation, told Abe that he wasn’t interested: “I do not see Trump as worthy of any message exchange, and I do not have any reply for him, now or in future.”

Up until a few weeks ago, this was the theocratic leader’s position unchanged: no talks, no war. The supreme leader couldn’t care less about the nuclear deal, even though he has constantly complained about Trump exiting it in May 2018. If he had been truly moved by the suffering endured by Iranians as a result of the multi-layered sanctions that had been in place since the Islamic Republic was founded, he would have greenlighted diplomacy as a remedy long ago. 

Earlier in February, in an address to an elite squad of air force commanders, Khamenei had said talks with America could not be “intelligent, wise or honorable”. He denounced Trump for nixing the JCPOA in 2018, and issued what was unanimously seen as a death knell for peace, a huge disappointment for anti-war voices in Iran and beyond:

“Some people pretend that if we sit at the negotiating table, that certain problem would be resolved. But what we should understand correctly is that talks with the United States don’t have any effects on resolving the nation’s problems,” he said, adding that “experience” was to be the guiding principle in his government’s collective skepticism toward the United States. 

In a thinly-veiled sarcastic broadside against the Iranian diplomats who were engaged in the negotiations leading to the nuclear deal with the Obama administration in 2015, Khamenei bemoaned that they “went, came, sat, stood up, negotiated, talked, laughed, shook hands, befriended each other, [and] did everything,” and eventually, the next US president withdrew from that pact. 

But the third round of Iran-US negotiations in Muscat, expected on April 26, are coming on the heels of a successful first attempt in the Omani capital on April 12, followed by a second high-profile audience in Rome last week on April 19. The policy change that made the rare negotiations possible can be ascribed to a letter that Trump wrote to Khamenei on March 13, proposing a deal coupled with a threat of  “very, very bad” consequences if he were to reject it.

Khamenei is Back to Square One

Khamenei’s earlier disavowal of dialogue with the United States was in effect a public admonition of the pragmatists associated with or loyal to President Masoud Pezeshkian who had been advocating for such a compromise since his election. Pezeshkian had stated in his electoral campaign that he understood running a country paralyzed by sanctions was impossible, and he wanted to revive the JCPOA or a version of it to mitigate a dystopian situation.

In the first presidential debate on July 1, 2024, Pezeshkian asked his rival Saeed Jalili, if after nearly 20 years, the ultra-conservatives had come up with any alternatives to resolve the nuclear stalemate if they believed negotiations with the United States were pointless. “You should tell us what you want to do in this country. We don’t want to talk to them because they bully us? Then tell us what you want to do,” he demanded. 

Jalili rose to prominence under former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He led the inconclusive negotiations with the European trio of Britain, France and Germany between 2007 and 2013 to resolve the nuclear crisis—one that has been dragging on, to varying degrees of severity, ever since. Despite his unvarnished opposition to interacting with American diplomats, he once had a one-on-one conversation with the former undersecretary of state for political affairs William Burns, when they conferred in Geneva on October 1, 2009. The rare get-together was the highest-level contact between the two governments in years. 

Burns later described Jalili as “a true believer in the Iranian revolution” who could be “stupefyingly opaque when he wanted to avoid straight answers”. European diplomats have reportedly complained about his negotiating style, marked by lengthy presentation of abstract ideas and digressions about global justice, equality and poverty as part of the nuclear talks. He remains Khamenei’s trustee, but he is not in charge of the steering wheel anymore. 

With Trump’s inauguration on January 20, the two sides began exchanging messages, some of which were transacted in public. In a widely-watched panel with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 22, Javad Zarif, then serving as the vice-president for strategic affairs, said Iran was ready for a new beginning, voicing optimism that “this time around, a Trump two will be more serious, more focused, more realistic”.

His statement meant he would likely be subject to abuse back home. The ayatollah himself wasn’t explicitly opposed to fence-mending, which is why Zarif mustered the courage to make that public overture. It didn’t mean that Khamenei’s allies were prepared to accept the new status quo of renewed diplomacy, espoused by a diplomat who has openly been smeared by the state media as a Western agent.  

As it so happens, shortly after the Davos interview went live, Ruhollah Momen-Nasab, the secretary of Tehran’s powerful Initiative for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, urged in a post on the local social media platform Virasty that “upon Zarif’s return to the country, anti-coup forces should arrest and interrogate him”. It turned out that this time, pressure from the hawks had some impact. Facing Khamenei’s formal declaration against negotiations and mounting personal pressure, Zarif resigned on March 3.

When Trump’s letter came and Iran’s chieftain reluctantly said yes to indirect talks, it was perhaps too late for Zarif to celebrate a process that he would normally either contribute to or spearhead. At that point, it had dawned upon the establishment that rejecting Trump’s outreach would most likely drag not only Iran but the entire region into a devastating war indefinitely. For the time being, that contingency has been put on hold. 

Misleading Preconceptions

Assumptions about Iran being in thrall to a homogenous clique of elites who agree on everything and have unconditional control in deciding the direction of Iranian politics can be rather misleading. The volatility of the country’s politics, including its electoral races, belies the notion that Iran’s events can be described linearly and forecasted easily. 

On several occasions, parliamentary and presidential elections have caught the establishment off-guard when unconventional pro-reform advocates beat the odds to sweep legislative and executive power. These cycles have even disappointed the external opposition streams who wished the rise of reactionary politicians could precipitate enough social crises to bring about the Islamic Republic’s demise. 

Similarly, The 2009 Green Movement, possible only in retrospect, was widely described at its height as a revolution starting from Twitter, now X. Its leaders were two of the trusted insiders of the establishment, and in effect its seminal figures. Many of the participants of the movement are now exiled dissidents who won’t settle for less than punishing Iran with sanctions and military strikes. 

This is a testament to a fluid, rapidly-evolving political landscape. In Iran, a disenfranchised but persistent civil society can always reassert itself, influencing the trajectory of the nation’s democratic evolution.

This was the case last July, when Pezeshkian galvanized a fraction of a disillusioned middle class base to show up at the polls and vote for him. His appeals to the Iranians’ need for ending an extended stretch of isolation due to Western financial sanctions and political isolation resonated with many as sincere. He emphasized the importance of rebuilding Iran’s international relations and learning from the impressive economic progress made by neighboring Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

When he promised to deliver fundamental reform at any cost, the election boycotters were cynical that a president could make any difference as a secondary decision-maker. Still, Pezeshkian’s supporters remained convinced. Determined to thwart the rise of Saeed Jalili, known as the face of the “Iranian Taliban,” pro-reform Iranians showed up at the polls and picked Pezeshkian. A key pledge of his platform was to restart the work with the United States that was left incomplete when former President Hassan Rouhani stepped down as president in August 2021. 

Despite proving ineffective in delivering the domestic reforms he had campaigned on, Rouhani, popularly christened as the “diplomat sheikh,” steered Iran to significant economic progress by pushing for the multilateral diplomacy that brought about the JCPOA. Shortly after the agreement was carved out, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflow reached its peak since 1970, standing at $5.02 billion in 2017. Tourism gained steam and for the first time in a decade, 9.1 million international visitors traveled to the country in 2019. 

Fast forward to 2025, and Trump is back in the White House, lining up against another moderate president in Tehran, and this time, he doesn’t want confrontation, but a compromise. With Khamenei’s firm rejection of engagement with the United States in February, the dominant mood of helplessness that gripped the nation seemed insurmountable. Even the forex market failed to absorb the shock–the US dollar went up to 1,000,000 rials for the first time.

While Pezeshkian was naturally expected to come up with a crisis management response and be the voice of change that Iranians had hoped for, he instead obediently toed the official line and said his administration won’t be capitulating to a foreign power. Instead, his acquiescence to a powerful clerical ruler at home led many of his reformist supporters to demand his resignation.

It was only when the ayatollah changed his mind, responding to Trump’s proposal,_, that Pezeshkian was assigned to deliver the task. By extension, the president is now functioning as the lightning rod, too, taking the blame from the diplomacy-averse radicals, even though they know he isn’t the key actor anymore.

Optimism: Iran’s Burgeoning Civil Society

So, with an evidently adamant ruling elite, why should anyone expect a long-term positive impact originating from the talks underway between Iran and the U.S.? The answer can be found in Iran’s civil society that continues to surprise observers, making local politics unconventional, if not exciting to follow. Before the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in 2022, media coverage of the battle in Iran for women’s rights and equality was trifling, leading to a global consensus that an organic women’s rights movement was non-existent in that largely untapped part of the world.

In 2006, George Perkovich, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, told a Senate hearing that he believed Iran had “the most vibrant civil society in the region” outside of Israel. This is something that the noted Singapore diplomat Kishore Mahbubani also reiterated in his commentary on the 2009 Green Movement. “The only clear lesson to emerge from Iran’s disputed presidential election is that the country has a vibrant and indeed dynamic civil society”, he wrote in an opinion piece.

Before Mahmoud Ahmadinejad first swept to power in 2005 and secured a second term in 2009 in what many saw as an unmistakable example of electoral fraud, Mohammad Khatami had served as the nation’s first pro-reform president. He dedicated himself to empowering the nation’s civil society, including through, among others, liberalizing the press. Most of the hardcore voices of the exiled opposition today were the rising intellectuals of the late 1990s emboldened by Khatami to express themselves. 

Laura Secor, veteran journalist and author of Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran, once said, “under Khatami, civil society really went through a renaissance”. Khatami’s predecessor, Ahmadinejad, mostly known for his inflammatory, lengthy speeches at the United Nations General Assembly, was not only a virtuoso of erratic foreign policy. He was, in the words of the distinguished philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a Berlusconi in Tehran showing a “mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power politics”. 

When the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising rocked Iran, Žižek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, said in a video message sent to the Netherlands-based Radio Zamaneh, that he believed the protest movement had “obliterated” stereotypes about cultural differences between Iran and the West, including that “you cannot understand us, we cannot understand you”.

“Anti-feminism, political violence, religious violence, are all exploding and we will have to follow you, to organize protests which bring all these different forms of freedom from violence together,” the Slovenian intellectual added. “The moment I learned about your protests, I knew [that] I am part of the same struggle.”

In this climate, and while there is no end in sight in the tug of war between the authoritarians and the disobedient civil society, the weight of the popular will cannot be overstated.

The heterogeneity of forces vying for political power, discursive dominance and control of resources in a country as vast and rich as Iran has left even its formidable leaders desperate–a total shutdown of all discordant voices seems impractical to them. 

Khamenei periodically complains about newspapers and “unbridled” social media acting as the amplifiers of the voice of the “enemy”. Yet, nobody can strip Iranian taxi rides, barber shops, bakery lines, households and WhatsApp groups of heated political conversations in which the clerics and bureaucrats are mercilessly pilloried. The few independent newspapers and websites that are allowed to operate hardly remain silent. 

Israel’s Role in the Iran-U.S. Dynamics

The question, then, is how this dynamic but ailing civil society will benefit from de-escalation, and the extent to which Trump’s renewed interest in the Middle East will impact or slow down Iran’s spiraling tensions with Israel. Perhaps it is the urgency of the situation in that battle of wills that has encouraged Iran and the United States to sit at the same table. The sights of Iranian and U.S. diplomats rushing to different venues in different cities to engage in dialogue were unthinkable a few months ago–now, everyone acknowledges that it’s not the right time for grandstanding. 

Iranians understand the basics of Trump’s transactional politics. First and foremost, he is a businessperson, and pretty much like the Iranian Shia clerics, doesn’t consider himself bound to principles. This means that if there’s a good offer on the table, he will take it. And the Iranian government makes good offers when it hits rock bottom.

Precedent has proven that Trump doesn’t care if he is seen as undemocratic or un-presidential. Whatever enriches the U.S. economy, creates jobs and boosts his ego appeals to him. This mindset explains his outreach to undemocratic leaders in Russia, Hungary, Argentina, Arab kingdoms, and North Korea—so why not the Islamic Republic? 

Moreover, as much as Trump is reluctant to spend U.S. taxpayer money in Ukraine to save a NATO neighbor, his administration’s commitment to defending Israel is unwavering. His Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, has made frequent statements in support of Israel in different capacities, both before and after joining the Trump cabinet. 

His Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he represents what is “perhaps the most pro-Israel administration in American history”. During his 2016 presidential campaign, Rubio had said, “my support for Israel flows from my faith in God.”. The unprecedented wave of visa revocations affecting college campuses, which has now mutated into the rare practice of Green Card nullifications and deportations, stems from the same mindset. 

The new climate would be one in which criticism of Israel will expectedly be treated with much less tolerance, if not totally outlawed. Universities are already losing federal funding and other entitlements over allowing debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In multiple cases, they are being told to redesign their Middle East curricula. 

The nightmare the Palestinian people have endured over the past 18 months can at best be referred to as “the situation in Gaza” in the mainstream narrative, even if there are no explicit instructions. It is only unwise for any government, including the widely unpopular Islamic Republic, to assume they can square up to Israel and secure a deal with the United States or remain unscathed in forthcoming geopolitical storms.

Roles Reversed

Here, the unintended dividend for Iran is that its authorities are being compelled to understand that they must put their own people first before joining an extraterritorial war without invitation. Tehran’s withdrawal from the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma will be equally welcomed by Palestinians, the Arab world, the international community and embattled Iranians. Everyone will rejoice at Tehran reversing its intrusive role in a crisis it has only exacerbated since the first day it got involved. 

The Iranian leadership should understand that U.S. advocacy for Israel is resolute enough to cross party lines. The Democrats’ inability to adequately address Palestinian rights while preserving their support for Israel in the war cost them key voting blocs. Clearly the Trump administration doesn’t have much to lose by continuing its ironclad backing of Tel Aviv. Iran is in need of circumspection to objectively analyze the costs and benefits of rejecting a deal. 

That discretion has often been missing. A member state of the United Nations, Iran, invited the politburo chief of the militant group Hamas to Pezeshkian’s inauguration last July. When Ismail Haniyeh was killed in Tehran, the nation was pushed to the precipice of a war, which it marginally averted. Then again, on February 8, another delegation of Hamas representatives met Khamenei and Pezeshkian in the Iranian capital. 

Washington’s policy, as long as the Islamic Republic fans the flames of anti-U.S. hostility, will remain unchanged, and it’s only natural for not only the White House but the American public to be skeptical of a country where chanting “Death to America” in state-sanctioned rallies is standard protocol. If there’s one realm of governance the rulers in Tehran have perfected, it’s filling the streets with anti-U.S. demonstrators and embellishing those rallies with Uncle Sam effigies. 

The Islamic Republic’s misconduct has not only made it economical, but rather imperative for U.S. politicians and the media to refer to Iran in ways that would otherwise only sound surreal and inflammatory: “parasitoid wasp,” “a dangerous nation,” “a barbaric country,” and “a violent menace”. These portrayals don’t generate backlash—they have become institutionalized.

The 14th century Persian poet and mystic Hafez wrote in his collection of sonnets that if the chamberlain, responsible for protecting the sanctuary, starts striking everyone with a sword, there would be nobody left to inhabit that otherwise sacred space. 

Applied to contemporary politics, the Islamic Republic has consciously decided to isolate itself, rendering global integration a remote possibility and as implied by its leadership, a luxury. It no longer finds being treated as a pariah something to frown upon, nor does it seem troubled by the degradation of Iranians due to its excesses. 

If the international stakeholders of public awareness, whose words and ideas constantly shape and reshape the mainstream discourse, are to come up with bulletproof evidence of their pro-freedom credentials, a disparagement of Iran as a nation and an idea, is key. This is perhaps why without constant reminders, the Iranian people’s bravery in resisting their autocracy, evidenced by, among others, one of them winning the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize while in jail, can be easily neglected. 

In the same vein, no matter how Iran’s archfoe Israel is viewed these days, the Trump administration won’t blink to stick up for a traditional ally. This nexus is so unshakable that even an arrest warrant for the head of the Israeli government by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes won’t affect it. The United States has already started the process of imposing sanctions on the court in The Hague so that it’s clear how international law is enforced. 

Israel is already primed to take military action against Iran if the Tehran-Washington diplomacy craters. 

Avoiding Confrontation

Unpredictability and aversion to forever wars are features of Trump’s brand. He has fired Brian Hook, his erstwhile most likely Iran envoy, from the Wilson Center—Hook had served in the first Trump administration and was credited with engineering some of his most stringent Iran strategies. The president has also distanced himself from two vocal advocates of military intervention in Iran, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, revoking the Secret Service protection that shielded them from an alleged Iranian threat. 

These were supposed to be persuasive gestures by the US president to Iran so that it could be reassured the worst-case scenarios won’t materialize immediately. Authorities in Tehran decipher such clues sluggishly. The fact that diplomacy has been given a chance means reason is dominating in a climate of sentimentalism, at least for the time being.

On Iran’s part, the resolve to engage in a new conciliatory process is a long-overdue understanding. In 2018, Khamenei had theatrically intoned, “there will be no war, nor will we negotiate with the United States”. The statement was adulated by his most besotted supporters as his display of valiance. 

Since 2018, Iranians’ purchasing power parity (PPP) declined incrementally, standing at $4,471 per citizen in 2024, recording a 28% decrease in just one year. Khamenei did allow his presumptive heir-apparent, the late President Ebrahim Raisi, to negotiate with the United States. When Raisi’s helicopter went missing after crashing on May 19, 2024, Iran reached out to the Biden administration to request reconnaissance assistance. 

A regional flareup along the lines of a war broke out when Raisi’s successor was inaugurated—Iran and Israel exchanged direct fire for the first time. But even then, Tehran and Washington were talking to contain the perilous escalation. A limited experiment with war tested Iran’s military might. Despite all this, the Tehran-Washington conversations had still taken place. Things that Iran’s most senior cleric had said, much like his other predictions, remained just that—predictions. 

Today, all the ideologues who orchestrated an extended show of bravado after Trump’s JCPOA walkout and his subsequent assassination of Soleimani, including the ranking IRGC commanders who promised “harsh revenge” then, are seven years older–although with no guarantee that they have matured. 

The supreme leader himself appears more impatient and restless as he ages. What is happening in the corridors of power in Tehran is not easy to unpack amid a cacophony of voices who negate, question, doubt and threaten each other daily. At present, everyone has embraced the possibility of peace, which is promising. But what can ultimately keep the flames of hope alive for a better Iran is its civil society and its young people as they fight on two fronts: autocracy at home and economic suffocation from abroad.