Emma Wendt graduated from DePaul University in June 2026 with a degree in International Relations and Diplomacy. She has been researching the US relationship with Iran during her internship with CAPA, as well as assisting with organizational tasks and learning about the peace advocacy field. In her free time, she enjoys reading and trying new restaurants.
The United States has spent decades trying to bring down the Iranian government with sanctions and bombs, but by almost every measure, it has kept it in power. Now, President Donald Trump recently threatened to “annihilate” Iran during his speech in front of the UN General Assembly if a deal is not made to end the eight-month long war being waged by the US and Israel. This threat came three months after the two sides signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for a sixty-day ceasefire, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, and the release of Iran’s frozen assets. While this MoU was not a final peace agreement, it was a step forward that set the stage for talks to address unresolved issues, including Iran’s nuclear program. However, this agreement failed after fighting continued and it ultimately expired in August 2026. The obstacle to a lasting US-Iran diplomatic relationship is not a lack of negotiators, nor disagreements over nuclear physics. It is the structural issue of Washington trying to negotiate peace while maintaining a stance of total economic and military coercion. Every time the US escalates pressure on Iran, it triggers a rally-around-the-flag effect in Tehran, hardening the government’s power and destroying the domestic political space that lasting peace requires.
That effect is the heart of the problem. American coercion hands the Iranian government the ability to frame domestic suffering as foreign aggression, consolidating its power and crushing domestic dissent. The stakes are clear: American policy is devastating ordinary Iranians, who suffer the brunt of economic and military devastation, while the government remains intact.
To understand how we arrived at this current moment, we must consider what was on the table in June. The Memorandum of Understanding emerged after five weeks of intense military confrontation, offering a 60-day window to freeze new sanctions, a framework for reopening the Strait of Hormuz to commercial vessels toll-free, and the promise of $25 billion in unfrozen Iranian assets. It was a deal weighted heavily in Iran’s favor: sanctions relief up front, security guarantees to follow, and no requirement that Tehran concede anything before receiving tangible benefits. For the first time in over a decade, the two countries had agreed to steps linking immediate economic relief to long-term security guarantees. If coercion were the key to diplomatic leverage, this was the moment it should have worked.
However, Washington never stopped crushing Iran. Even in the days after the MoU was signed, the Trump administration escalated their “Operation Economic Outcast” campaign, targeting Iran’s petrochemical traders and threatening to shut down the country’s entire aviation sector internationally, all while maintaining a high-intensity naval blockade. The US treated the ceasefire as a pause in coercion, rather than a shift in strategy, signaling to Tehran that the goal of the negotiations was capitulation and not stability.
This created a perfect scenario for a rally around the flag response in Iran. A government long weakened by social repression and economic mismanagement suddenly had a lifeline: an external enemy to blame for the suffering its own rule caused. U.S. actions gave the Iranian leadership the narrative they needed to justify rejecting further concessions to their own public. For Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, continuing to negotiate on Washington’s terms would have meant appearing as collaborators with the power strangling their economy. The MoU failed because the two states were operating on completely different premises: the United States saw a path to end the fighting, while Iran saw a path to complete surrender. No Iranian leader could choose the latter without risking their own survival and legitimacy.
This is a structural flaw in American diplomacy, not a one-off failure. Washington has historically operated under the assumption that maximum pressure will force weaker states to accept the terms they are given. The Vietnam War proved otherwise. In the late 1960s, Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were escalating America’s years-long effort to keep communist North Vietnam from absorbing the US-backed South. They believed that bombing campaigns and troop surges would force North Vietnam’s capitulation; instead, the bombing handed Ho Chi Minh’s government the ultimate rallying cry, uniting North and South Vietnam against American aggression. On the diplomatic front, the trust between the two states totally collapsed. Every negotiation began from a position of American “strength” while the bombing continued, and Hanoi soon learned that every concession invited another demand, followed by more escalation. You cannot build a treaty on sand when one party is actively trying to destroy the other.
The US-Iran relationship carries decades of this baggage, and its deficit of trust runs deeper than any single failed agreement. Tehran watched Washington sign the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, also called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, abide by it, and then abandon it in 2018. The first Trump administration reimposed sanctions on Iran that were so punishing that even the European powers who brokered the deal could not save Iran’s economy. Iranians also remember 1953, when a democratically elected government was overturned in an American-backed coup and the monarchy remained in place, sustained and armed by the US. Iranian negotiators today are not starting from a blank slate; they are starting from a documented pattern in which American commitments expire with American administrations, and in which concessions made are answered with continued escalation.
Whatever one thinks about the Islamic Republic, the government did not simply invent their suspicion of Washington; it was inherited and repackaged as a founding narrative and has now spent four decades turning every American act of hostility into proof of that narrative. This is the compounding tragedy of maximum pressure. Each round of coercion replenishes the government’s reservoir of grievances, exactly when that reservoir is running dry. Each collapsed agreement makes the next one harder to sell to a public that has watched countless previous ones fail.
If the goal is a settlement that survives longer than a mere news cycle, then the measure of American strategy cannot be how much pain and force it inflicts. It must be whether coercion leaves Tehran’s negotiators more room, or less, to say yes without being destroyed politically. For seven decades, US pressure has done the opposite: every new sanction and new strike makes compromise easier to classify as treason, making any Iranian official who offers it look like an enemy of the state. That is the dynamic on display recently at the United Nations, where envoys hold quiet talks in the hallways while Trump promises annihilation on the main stage and each government performs power for its own audience as the war continues. Trust between the United States and Iran will not be built on another ultimatum. It will be built, if at all, by an American administration willing to treat its signature on an agreement as a commitment rather than a pause between wars.