U.S. – Iran: ‘Immediate results’ vs. ‘The long game’

Pic.: publics

President Trump said on Tuesday that he was extending a cease-fire with Iran that had been about to expire, even as Vice President JD Vance’s trip to Pakistan for a second round of negotiations with Iran was put on hold after Tehran failed to respond to American positions.

Mr. Trump said on social media that, at the request of Pakistan’s leadership, the cease-fire would stay in effect until Iran’s “proposal is submitted, and discussions are concluded, one way or the other.” The president, however, said that the U.S. military would continue to blockade Iranian ports.

That stance appeared to be a major sticking point for Iran. The country’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said on social media earlier on Tuesday that the blockade was “an act of war and thus a violation of the cease-fire.”

Although the two-week truce, which had been set to end on Wednesday in Iran, was extended, it was unclear what steps Iran or the United States would take next.

President Trump views himself as the master of coercive diplomacy

As the United States and Iran make a second attempt at a deal, their negotiating styles are on a collision course, ‘The New York Times’ writes.

President Trump views himself as the master of coercive diplomacy, forcing his opponents to capitulate quickly to American demands or face the threat of attack.

But in dealing with Iran over the past six weeks, Mr. Trump has discovered that he is up against a nation that prides itself on resilience and delay. And never has that been more obvious than in recent days, when Mr. Trump has tried jawboning the Iranians by contending that they already surrendered — they “agreed to everything” he insisted on Friday, including turning over their “nuclear dust” — only to discover that patter doesn’t work with Iranian officials, who took to social media to declare he had made it all up.

So over the next few days, assuming that Vice President JD Vance leaves for Islamabad for a second shot at agreeing to a “framework” for a deal, the two approaches are about to come into direct collision. If the stakes were not sky-high — the prospect of renewed combat in the Middle East, global energy shortages and the very real possibility that the surviving Iranian leaders emerge convinced they need a nuclear weapon more than ever — it would be a classic case study in negotiation styles.

Trump insists on a flashy, headline-grabbing outcome; Iran’s leadership sweats every detail

“Trump is impulsive and temperamental; Iran’s leadership is stubborn and tenacious,” said Robert Malley, who negotiated with the Iranians in the lead-up to the 2015 nuclear deal and again in a failed effort by the Biden administration.

“Trump demands immediate results; Iran’s leadership plays the long game,” Mr. Malley continued. “Trump insists on a flashy, headline-grabbing outcome; Iran’s leadership sweats every detail. Trump believes brute force can compel obedience; Iran’s leadership is prepared to endure enormous pain rather than concede on core interests.”

There is a reason the last big negotiation, completed 11 years ago, took the better part of two years, moving from secret talks with a then-new Iranian president with a pragmatic bent to a full-scale negotiation involving scores of meetings.

The final agreement ran more than 160 pages long, including five technical annexes that defined the limits on Iran’s nuclear activities, the pacing of sanctions relief and, most importantly, Iran’s obligations to comply with inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The accord that was ultimately reached — not signed, because it was not a formal treaty — in 2015 was overturned by Mr. Trump in 2018. Ever since, the Iranians have made the point that it is pointless to negotiate with one president if the next one is going to scrap the resulting agreement.

“Mr. Trump is not a reliable interlocutor”

More recently, Iranian officials have noted that twice in a row, in June 2025 and again this February, Mr. Trump has ordered attacks on Iran in the midst of diplomatic negotiations. The Iranians cast this as perfidy, evidence that Mr. Trump is not a reliable interlocutor.

And the distrust turned into gunfire over the weekend, near the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian boats opened fire on two freighters that they said were breaking out of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’s strict control of who can, and cannot, sail through the Strait. On Sunday, the U.S. Navy shot out the engine room of a huge Iranian-flagged container ship, which the Navy has now seized. Mr. Trump noted that the ship had been sanctioned by the Treasury in 2020, at the end of his first term, for a “prior history of illegal activity.”

One way to interpret these moves is that they are efforts to shape the negotiating sessions, just as generals try to shape the battlefield. The Iranians are demonstrating that no matter what happens or what they give up, they will be able to control commerce across the strait and charge millions of dollars for passage. The Trump administration is demonstrating that it is willing to reopen hostilities if negotiations fail.

Trump’s negotiating team travels light

11 years ago, in the gilded halls of the 160-year-old Beau-Rivage Palace Hotel in Lausanne, Switzerland, Secretary of State John Kerry and his counterparts from five other countries struggled to close a preliminary agreement with Iran. It was, perhaps, the closest analogue to what is unfolding now in Islamabad.

Wendy Sherman, the chief U.S. negotiator at the time, who went on to become deputy secretary of state in the Biden administration, would go into these negotiations with a large posse. She often had the C.I.A.’s top Iran expert in the room, or nearby. So was the energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, an expert in nuclear weapons design. Proposals floated by the Iranians would be sent back to the U.S. national laboratories, where weapons are designed and tested, for expert analysis of whether the agreements being discussed would keep Iran at least a year away from a bomb.

But Mr. Trump’s negotiating team travels light, with no entourage of experts and few briefings. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, the president’s son-in-law and the special envoy, learned their negotiating skills in New York real estate and say a deal is a deal. They say they have immersed themselves in the details of the Iran program, and know it well.

Moreover, even if the issues they are facing are very much the same ones that the Obama-era negotiators faced, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff see little value in spending hours poring over the diplomatic history, especially given what Mr. Trump had to say about the resulting agreement.

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