Donald Trump's hope was to turn Iran from an adversary into a partner, the way he believes he did with Venezuela. But the Islamic Republic is fundamentally different: for its remaining leadership, hostility to America is not a bargaining chip but the foundation of the regime's identity and sense of its own legitimacy.
Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has laid out this argument in The Atlantic, "Hvylya" reports. As a former real-estate developer who appointed fellow developers as his envoys, Trump has no mental framework for dealing with an adversary where neither side wants a transaction, Sadjadpour writes.
Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff repeatedly suggested that Iran could rejoin "the league of nations." That offer fundamentally misread the regime. Political scientists call the dynamic "ontological security" - any deal that requires Tehran to abandon its revolutionary identity poses a greater existential threat than war itself. "You cannot negotiate away the thing that justifies your existence," Sadjadpour writes.
Trump speaks about the systematic assassinations of Iran's leadership with the nonchalance of a mob boss. "Most of the people we had in mind are dead," he said of political succession in Iran. "Pretty soon, we're not going to know anybody." But Iran's leadership is steeped in a Shiite political culture premised on the seventh-century martyrdom of Imam Hussein. So long as this regime remains in power, it will mourn and seek to avenge the killing of the 86-year-old Khamenei.
Trump has reportedly pinned his hopes on Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf emerging as a pragmatist willing to break with the past. But Ghalibaf is a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander whose public statements on X combine grandiose threats, anti-Semitism, and calculated appeals to the anti-imperialist left. Sadjadpour describes him as a man aspiring to lead the regime, not change it.
The Islamic Republic, Sadjadpour concludes, is a path-dependent aircraft with neither a captain willing to turn the wheel nor a crew willing to let him. The assassination of Iran's top leadership has left no figure with both the power and the will to deliver a major compromise with Washington. Also read how Gulf states have begun reassessing U.S. military bases as the Iran war shakes trust in Washington.