Iran’s Negotiating Strategy Is Built on Distrust

Tehran will engage tactically, resist irreversible concessions, and assume diplomacy can be used to justify further military pressure

If you have followed the past several days of reporting on the Iran conflict, it is difficult to separate signal from spin. The White House has suggested negotiations are underway, circulating a 15-point framework through intermediaries, even as President Donald Trump alternates between claims of progress and threats of renewed strikes. Iranian officials publicly rejected those claims, calling them fabrication and warning that “the era of your promises has come to an end.” Tehran has gone so far as to ban the “backstabbing” Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner from any prospective negotiation. Meanwhile, regional actors — including Pakistan, Egypt, and Turkey — are reportedly passing messages between the two sides.

That ambiguity is not peripheral. It is the condition under which any negotiation will occur. Iran will not enter talks expecting clarity or consistency. It will enter expecting continued pressure — military, economic, and rhetorical — and will shape its position accordingly.

The USS Thomas Hudner fires a Tomahawk land attack missile on March 21 in the war on Iran. (Department of Defense)

The question is not what Iran might concede in a stable diplomatic setting. It is how it negotiates when it assumes instability is built into the process.

The collapse of trust is not a backdrop; it is the operating condition. The first Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action established that U.S. commitments have little meaning and could be reversed irrespective of compliance.

Subsequent episodes reinforced the pattern. On June 12, after multiple Oman-mediated rounds aimed at constraining Iran’s nuclear program and just two days before a sixth round was scheduled, Israel launched large-scale strikes that triggered a multi-day conflict, followed days later by U.S. strikes on nuclear facilities including Fordow.

The current conflict itself followed a similar sequence: signals of diplomatic progress alongside preparations for expanded military action. For Tehran, the lesson is not simply that agreements can be reversed. It is that negotiations for the Trump administration are a tool of exploitation — suggesting good faith, shaping expectations, and then striking when Iran lowers its guard.

Iran will not approach negotiations assuming a single interlocutor whose commitments can be trusted. It will factor in two actors — Washington and Jerusalem — each with independent decision-making and each, in Tehran’s view, willing to act irrespective of diplomatic signaling.

That concern is reinforced by Israel’s operational pattern. While Israeli leaders have framed the Gaza war in terms of eliminating Hamas rather than managing the conflict, their statements and actions continue to signal a willingness to apply repeated military pressure over time rather than move toward a durable settlement. For Tehran, the distinction is secondary. The expectation will not be that this conflict resolves underlying tensions but that any pause reflects a temporary lull before further strikes.

Compounding that assessment is the perception that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not fully constrained by Washington. Israeli strikes have expanded beyond military targets to include energy infrastructure, most notably the attack on Iran’s South Pars gas field. Reporting around the strike suggested uneven coordination, with Trump demonstrating limited awareness while Israeli leadership engaged in broader, longer-term framing. Analysts have noted divergence in U.S. and Israeli objectives, with Washington intermittently signaling interest in negotiations as Israel sustains pressure on Iranian capabilities.

For Tehran, the implication is clear: Even if the United States offers terms, Israel may continue to act on its own timeline, reducing the credibility of any U.S. assurance.

Under those conditions, deterrence becomes the currency of negotiation. Iran’s leverage comes from its ability to impose costs that cannot be ignored: ballistic missile forces, proxy networks, and maritime disruption in the Strait of Hormuz. Deterrence is not a background factor.

That logic is reinforced by Tehran’s assessment of its internal position. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others have repeatedly emphasized the degradation of Iran’s conventional capabilities — declaring a defeated enemy yet demanding additional resources and deploying more military assets to the region. But regime stability in Iran does not depend on conventional parity. It rests on internal control.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and associated security institutions are structured to suppress dissent and maintain cohesion under pressure. Recent personnel shifts and consolidation of authority point not to fragmentation but to potential greater militarization. Iran does not see itself as negotiating from collapse. It sees itself as negotiating from endurance.

That perception shapes the options available to Tehran. The most likely path is tactical engagement without strategic concession: entering negotiations to slow escalation while preserving core capabilities. Iran’s stated conditions — ending hostilities, securing guarantees against future attacks, compensation for damage, and recognition of control over key waterways — function less as opening bids than as boundary markers. They define the limits of what Tehran will consider, not the starting point for compromise.

A second option is managed escalation designed to improve leverage. Iran retains the capacity to raise costs incrementally without crossing into full-scale war. It is part of the negotiating strategy, intended to alter the cost-benefit calculation in Washington and Jerusalem.

A third option is refusal paired with endurance. Iranian officials have indicated a willingness to continue conflict rather than return to a pre-war status quo that leaves the regime exposed. In an environment in which communications are constrained by fears of targeting and negotiations are viewed as unsafe, disengagement is not irrational. It is a way to avoid entering a process perceived as structurally biased and strategically risky.

Across all three paths, one constraint dominates: Iran cannot assume that any agreement will be durable and therefore cannot afford to make concessions that are reversible. This is where the asymmetry between the parties becomes decisive.

The United States and Israel seek to eliminate or permanently degrade Iran’s strategic capabilities. Iran seeks to preserve regime survival and maintain deterrence. Those objectives do not align. They intersect only in temporary arrangements that manage risk rather than resolve it.

That reality is reinforced by how negotiations themselves are likely to be conducted. Iran will enter expecting that accusations of noncompliance — delay, obstruction, failure to meet timelines — can be used to justify renewed military action. The precedent of negotiations occurring alongside strikes supports that view. Thus, Iran has strong incentives to resist phased or sequential agreements that expose it to subjective judgments about compliance. It will favor positions that are immediate, reciprocal, and difficult to reinterpret.

Assertions that the United States will negotiate “from a position of strength” or dictate terms are unlikely to alter that calculation. Such language may serve a domestic political purpose, but it does not function as leverage in Tehran. Iranian decision-makers are not calibrating their approach based on rhetorical posture. They are assessing patterns of action: the coupling of negotiations with force, the expansion of demands, and the absence of enforceable guarantees. In that context, maximalist framing is not intimidating. It is expected — and discounted.

What emerges is not a negotiation aimed at resolution but one structured around constraint. Iran will treat talks as a means of managing pressure while preserving deterrence, not as a pathway to resolution. The United States and Israel, for their part, are unlikely to suspend coercive tools while diplomacy proceeds. That convergence creates a narrow margin for error. Negotiations may continue but under conditions where escalation remains active and where the line between diplomacy and conflict becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.

Brian O’Neill, a retired senior executive from the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center, is an instructor on strategic intelligence at Georgia Tech. His Safehouse Briefing Substack looks at what’s ahead in global security, geopolitics, and national strategy.

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