President Donald Trump has said he wants a deal even as Iran’s leadership remains defiant and Israel pushes for military action, with a 60-day deadline looming for an Iran nuclear deal with threats from the U.S. military.
Sound familiar? Deja vu is technically an illusion of the mind, but something like the above has happened to me once before. That is where the Middle East is today, and it is also where it was in April 2025, weeks before Israel’s first attack on Iran and its attack on US nuclear facilities last year. While the past year may seem like a full circle in U.S.-Iranian relations, for the United States and the region as a whole, the trajectory has been a downward spiral.
To summarize, in March 2025, President Trump sent a letter to then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, suggesting that he could use force unless he set a two-month deadline for a nuclear deal.
His special envoy Steve Witkoff flew to Oman in April 2025 to facilitate diplomacy. The whole plan fell apart on June 13, when Israel’s Operation Rising Lion turned to armed action. A 12-day war ensued, during which Israel claimed to have captured much of Iran’s security apparatus and damaged its missile capabilities. The US then claimed to have attacked and “destroyed” Iran’s nuclear program.
With thousands of lives lost in the past three months – more than 3,000 in Iran, according to monitoring groups, about half of them civilians, and more than 3,600 in Lebanon, according to the Health Ministry, many of them also civilians – attempts like last June’s Xerox moment seem like a cruel, if not foolish, repeat.
But Trump literally tried the same thing twice. And in both cases, he was called into military action by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Trump has claimed success in both campaigns and severe damage to Iran, a claim disputed by some in his intelligence community. However, the nature of the recent 60-day deadline (apparently part of the Memorandum of Understanding) suggests the cycle could repeat itself again.
Two important questions remain for this White House. That is, what has been learned from the past year of violence in the Middle East, and whether each cycle of violence has made Iran more or less likely to have a nuclear weapon.
The second one is easier to answer. Iran will undoubtedly want nuclear weapons more than ever after the assassination of its supreme leader and many of its security ministers, and the onslaught against its conventional weapons. But it is likely to be even more unaffordable than it was in April 2025, when Iran’s enrichment was at its peak, its facilities intact and its scientific expertise mostly alive. Now, any bomb would have to be built quickly, using concentrated materials and equipment recovered from beneath the rubble, and under close scrutiny from the United States and Israel. It is important to remember that Iran’s capabilities were underestimated prior to the February 28 US and Israeli attacks. But bomb-making is a whole new level of sophistication, and it would be unlikely, if not impossible, for Iran to pull it off in the current moment of crisis and tension.
The broader first question is more nuanced, but the answer provides little reassurance for this White House.
President Trump is now facing the surviving heirs, or heirs, of his dead enemy, and he must be hoping that the violence and grief will make them more willing to agree to a deal. Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei (whose injuries in the strike that killed his father, wife, and son are often referred to derisively by President Trump) would seem an unlikely candidate for a quick rapprochement. The United States faced the same problem in Afghanistan. Endless night raids against Taliban leaders have left angry, vengeful sons in charge and fewer relatively moderate elders when it comes time to negotiate.
The lessons of the decapitation attacks were not taken into account in the February and March attacks. Israel and the United States either didn’t know who would replace the leaders they killed, didn’t care, or actively preferred to remove relatively moderates. This succession process has arguably led to more hardliners in Iran taking power, or at least allowing them to wield influence amidst the chaos and uncertainty of the security measures that Iran’s leadership relies on to survive. The humiliating start-stop announcement regarding the partial agreement is proof of this. President Trump has been forced to acknowledge that Iran’s chain of command is in disarray, making it the subject of about 40 declarations about how close the dealmakers are to reaching an agreement.
Iran is suffering, don’t get me wrong. The leaders must be grieving, barely sleeping, devastated by sanctions and airstrikes, and on edge. But the United States has also suffered in four major ways.
First, U.S. military deterrence appears to be less effective than it was four months ago. Centcom said more than 13,000 targets were attacked. But still, Iran’s ability to cause chaos with drones, mines, and missiles is what the United States and its allies clearly fear, not so much through material damage as through economic damage from soaring hydrocarbon prices and the global energy recession. The limits of America’s appetite for pain have been exposed. There is no way we can endure another few more months of soaring gasoline prices. Meanwhile, Iranian hardliners are willing to toy with the possibility of new airstrikes and targeting with precision weapons.
Second, the relationship between the United States and Israel, a key regional ally, has been significantly affected. Prime Minister Netanyahu appears to have begun convincing President Trump of the idea of a swift strike in February. Axios reported that Trump received an expletive-filled phone call in June that ended with him saying that without his help, the Israeli leader would be in jail. Widely criticized under President Biden for failing to restrain Israel’s brutal excesses in the Gaza Strip, the United States is now seeking to rein in Israeli actions to address more existential security challenges in the north with Hezbollah. That in itself is a surprising development.
Third, Iran is now extending its security umbrella to the Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, after hitting back at Israel in response to Israel’s June 7 attack on Dahieh, a Hezbollah neighborhood on the southern outskirts of Beirut. Analysts said it was the first time Iran had attacked Israel for attacking another country. The notion of Iran as a protector may seem ludicrous to many Lebanese, given that Lebanon was drawn into the conflict by the indiscretion of proxy militias when it joined Iran’s war against Israel in March. But the June 7 attack on Iran showed that Iran is at a peak in strategic confidence when it really should be at a trough.
The fourth is damage to Trump’s personal reputation. He launched a war of his own choosing, cut into support from MAGA’s political base, dealt a huge blow to America’s pockets ahead of the midterm elections, stripped it of its ability to claim to be a peacemaker aiming for a Nobel Prize, and appeared a bit desperate to get the Iranians to re-agree to diplomacy after being twice thwarted by bombing.
There is no dispute that the United States retains that power. As we move into the same 60-day consultation cycle that precedes military action, the question is whether their wash-and-repeat policy is the right one, or whether it makes the Middle East, Israel, and the United States less secure and requires a fundamental reboot.
