We Bombed Our Way Back to Obama's Deal

Eight years, one war, and a great deal of rubble later, the framework on the table looks familiar

The Clock Has Been Ticking Since 2018

Nobody knows what the United States is offering Iran. Nobody knows what Iran is prepared to accept. What we do know is that an unnamed source speaking to an IRGC-linked news agency moved global oil markets on Monday, dropping Brent crude by a dollar in an afternoon. That’s not chaos as a side effect. That’s chaos as the operating condition.

Here is what was reported on Monday alone: the US has agreed to waive oil sanctions during negotiations. The US has refused to release even 25% of Iran’s frozen assets. The US has shown flexibility on civilian nuclear activity. The US is demanding Iran reduce to one operational nuclear site and transfer its highly enriched uranium stockpile to American custody. Iran submitted a new 14-point proposal through Pakistan. Trump called a previous Iranian proposal “a piece of garbage” he didn’t finish reading. His envoys were apparently still negotiating it at the time.

All of this happened on the same day. Some of it cannot simultaneously be true.

The pundits watching this from the outside have reached for words like seesawing, chaos, flip-flopping. They’re not wrong, but those words let the administration off too easily, because they imply a kind of innocent disorder, the natural turbulence of high-stakes diplomacy. What Rob Malley, who actually negotiated with Iran during the JCPOA talks, described this week is something more structurally damaging than chaos. He drew a distinction that should be printed and handed to every journalist covering this story: unpredictability can be a negotiating asset. Unreliability is a different animal entirely. One keeps your adversary off balance. The other makes them ask why they should concede anything to a counterparty whose position may reverse before the ink dries, or before the president’s next television segment.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Araghchi, speaking in New Delhi on Friday, put it more simply. The main obstacle to a deal, he said, is “mistrust” and “contradictory messages” from the American side. “We are in doubt about their seriousness.” This is the foreign minister of a country that has been bombed twice, mid-negotiation, expressing doubt about American seriousness. The bar for credibility is not high, yet the US is still failing to clear it.

In 2018, Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear agreement negotiated over eighteen months by the Obama administration and five other world powers. He called it “a giant fiction” built on the lie that Iran sought only peaceful nuclear energy. The worst deal ever made he claimed and then he inaugurated what his administration branded “maximum pressure” sanctions severe enough to strangle the Iranian economy into submission, combined with the implicit promise that a better deal was available if Iran would simply come to its senses. Instead of coming to its senses, Iran accelerated its enrichment program instead.

Six years of maximum pressure later, the ledger is grim: one war, thousands of casualties, the assassination of a Supreme Leader, the largest oil supply crisis in recorded history according to the International Energy Agency, Brent crude at $108 a barrel after a dip, 20,000 European flights cancelled, and a drone strike on the perimeter of a functioning nuclear power plant in the UAE.

After all that, here is the framework now on the table: civilian nuclear enrichment under IAEA supervision. Sanctions relief. Phased release of frozen Iranian assets. The question of highly enriched uranium transfer mutually deferred to “later stages” by both sides because, as Araghchi confirmed, they have reached a deadlock and agreed to move on.

Students of the JCPOA will recognize this framework. They should. It is, with some modifications around the edges and a great deal more rubble, roughly what Barack Obama left his successor in January 2017. What the last eight years were for is left as an exercise for you, dear readers, to define.

There is a particular kind of official optimism that should be recognized on sight and treated accordingly. It speaks in phrases like “difficult but constructive.” It counts bridges bombed and missile launchers destroyed and presents the tally as evidence of progress. It mistakes the metrics it can measure for the metrics that matter.

Malley, who has sat across the table from Iranian negotiators, reached for a historical comparison that is not flattering to anyone in the current administration. The McNamara problem. Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of Defense, was famously rigorous about quantification, body counts, sortie rates, infrastructure destroyed, and famously wrong about what any of it meant for the outcome of the war in Vietnam. The numbers said America was winning. The numbers were not lying exactly. They were just measuring the wrong thing.

Trump’s briefings, Malley suggested, are telling him the same story. How many boats sunk. How many leaders killed. How many missile launchers taken out. Winning, by those metrics, at something like a hundred to zero. Meanwhile Iran is still standing, still controlling the Strait of Hormuz, still not capitulating, and has now formalized its grip on the waterway through a newly created body called the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, which this week began issuing instructions to international shipping and demanding coordination protocols from vessels wishing to pass. That is not the behavior of a country that believes it is losing.

The metric Iran is using is simpler and more durable than anything on Trump’s briefing charts. We are still here. We have not surrendered. The Strait remains ours. Every day that remains true is, by their accounting, a victory, regardless of what the rubble looks like.

This asymmetry is the negotiation. The US entered this war assuming economic pain would force Iranian capitulation faster than it would force American concession. It was a reasonable hypothesis if you had not been paying attention to Iran for the last forty years. The Iranian regime has demonstrated, repeatedly and at enormous cost to its own population, that it will absorb extraordinary economic punishment rather than be seen to yield to external pressure. Malley’s explanation for why is worth sitting with: if Iran concedes under pressure, it establishes the principle that pressure works, which is an invitation for endless future pressure. From Tehran’s perspective, the choice is not between hardship and relief. It is between hardship now and permanent vulnerability.

Trump, facing midterm elections with inflation at 3.8% and gas prices climbing, is operating on a shorter timeline than a regime for whom, as Malley put it, this is literally an existential question.

Quietly, the concessions have begun moving in one direction.

On Monday, Iran’s semi-official Tasnim News Agency reported that the United States has agreed to temporarily waive sanctions on Iranian oil during the negotiation period, waivers to be issued by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control until a final agreement is reached. The US has not confirmed this. It has not denied it either. Markets chose to believe it and oil dropped accordingly, which tells you something about how desperate traders are for an off-ramp and something about the information environment in which this negotiation is occurring, where an unnamed source in a Guards-linked outlet carries enough weight to move a billion dollars of capital in an afternoon.

What the Tasnim report did not mention, and what the Guardian filled in, is that this is not the first time. In March, facing surging oil prices and the political arithmetic of approaching midterms, the Trump administration quietly waived sanctions on Iranian oil purchases for thirty days. The Guardian described it at the time as “a stunning reversal of longstanding American policy.” It was also, in the context of a maximum pressure campaign premised on economic strangulation, a concession. It passed with surprisingly little comment. The second one is now being reported as breaking news.

The highly enriched uranium question, Trump’s stated red line, the demand that Iran transfer its stockpile to American custody, has been mutually deferred by both sides to later stages of negotiation because, as Araghchi confirmed, they are at a deadlock and have agreed to move on. The demand for zero enrichment, which Trump announced as non-negotiable and which Khamenei called “excessive and outrageous” as recently as last week, has softened into flexibility on “limited peaceful nuclear activities under IAEA supervision,” according to a senior Iranian source speaking to Reuters. The sequencing Iran insisted on from the beginning, end the war first, nuclear questions second, appears to be the sequencing now being followed.

None of this has been announced, and certainly none of it has been framed as a concession. The Truth Social account continues to promise devastation.

At 7:40 this morning, before the markets opened and shortly after Araghchi took questions in New Delhi, Trump posted his terms for victory on Truth Social. They are worth quoting in full, not for the grammar, but for the strategic picture they paint. He would consider the war won, he wrote, if Iran “surrenders, admits their Navy is gone and resting at the bottom of the sea,” if “their entire Military walks out of Tehran, weapons dropped and hands held high, each shouting ‘I surrender, I surrender’ while wildly waving the representative White Flag,” and if “their entire remaining Leadership signs all necessary Documents of Surrender.”

This is the negotiating posture of the man whose envoys are currently offering Tehran temporary oil sanctions waivers through Pakistani intermediaries.

Malley said you’d need a psychologist, not an Iran expert, to assess the odds of a deal. The post suggests the psychologist might want to clear their schedule.

What makes this moment genuinely dangerous, beyond the diplomatic dysfunction, is everything happening at the edges of the negotiation that the negotiation cannot control. Israel killed seven people in Lebanon on Monday including an Islamic Jihad commander and his seventeen-year-old daughter, despite a ceasefire. Iran has made a lasting Lebanese ceasefire a precondition for any broader deal, which means Netanyahu’s military decisions are effectively a gate on American diplomacy, a fact the Trump administration has chosen not to address publicly. A drone struck the perimeter of the UAE’s Barakah nuclear power plant on Sunday. The UAE blamed Iran or its proxies and called it a dangerous escalation. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards announced they had struck groups linked to the US and Israel in Kurdistan. Alcatel, the world’s largest undersea cable company, has suspended repair operations in the Persian Gulf after Iran demanded permits and protection fees for seabed infrastructure critical to the Gulf’s AI buildout.

The war is still expanding at the edges while the diplomacy tries to contain the center.

In a negotiation where credibility is the entire currency, the United States is represented not by a seasoned nonproliferation team but by political loyalists whose qualifications appear to begin and end with proximity to Trump. Into this walks Steve Witkoff, real estate lawyer, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, leading the American negotiating team. Malley, who spent years in this particular room, graded the current American negotiating operation and arrived at an F. He considered whether it should be an F-plus. The generosity is noted.

The bottom line, which Araghchi and Malley and the oil markets and the cancelled European flights are all saying in their different registers, is this: the United States went to war with Iran to prevent a nuclear-armed Iranian regime and to demonstrate that American pressure is irresistible. Eight years after tearing up the last deal and two and a half months after the bombs started falling, it is offering sanctions waivers to keep Iran at the table, deferring the nuclear questions it went to war over, and waiting for a response through Pakistani mediators while the president posts ALL CAPS warnings on a platform he owns.

Iran does not trust America. America cannot explain why it should. And somewhere in the gap between those two facts, Witkoff and Kushner are trying to negotiate a deal that will outlast the news cycle, survive Israeli sabotage, clear the US Senate, and hold through the next American presidential administration.

No wonder everyone is confused.