Opinion | Is The Iran-US War Talk Ready To Be Retired?

If there is one quality about the contours of Iran-US relations that isn't likely to change in the short run, it is its draining nature. When the inauspicious matchup between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran's president and George W. Bush in the White House escalated hostilities to all-time highs in the 2000s, many observers were convinced that nothing more menacing would be forthcoming. As the drumbeats of war can be heard anew, it is with the hindsight of history that we recognise the bleak status quo isn't unprecedented.

After Bush added Iran to a hypothetical Axis of Evil, speculations about an inevitable war were omnipresent. Iran's leaders, in much less polished ways than today, challenged the US military might, brandishing their supposedly unbeatable resolve. On April 29, 2010, in a public event at Kish Island, Ahmadinejad said, “any hand that is raised from any corner of the world to pull the trigger against the people of Iran will be cut off from the arm”.

Military Adventure Isn't Last Resort

In Washington, the idea of a military adventure against Tehran has not ever been treated as an option of last resort. At least in the Republican Party, advocacy for war on Iran has remained an uncontroversial, if not mainstream position, to the extent that groups like Code Pink that have opposed it on humanitarian grounds have been portrayed as fringe and excessively progressive.

In 2008, Pat Buchanan, the former communications director at the White House under President Ronald Reagan, suggested that Gen. David Petraeus had hinted at a military strike against Iran before the end of Bush's term. Buchanan had interpreted the former Commander of the United States Central Command's testimony before the Congress in April of that year to imply that a war plan was in the making.

Long before that, similar voices could be heard, prophesying a Tehran-Washington showdown, dragging the region into an extended period of chaos. Fortune-telling about the bombing of Iran's nuclear and military sites “by the end of the year” had become tedious in its repetitiveness. But it never ceased to be alarming.

Former British MP and president of the Stop the War Coalition, Tony Benn, wrote in a piece in The Guardian that “the build-up to a new war is taking exactly the same form as it did in 2002”, drawing an analogy with the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. The Iraq war was a massive operation that unseated one of the worst dictators of the region, and it came at a staggering humanitarian cost, unendorsed by the Security Council. 

“First we are being told that Iran poses a military threat, because it may be developing nuclear weapons,” Benn wrote, lamenting that the British people could be persuaded into believing that supporting Bush's effort was the right thing to do. The proposed offensive was gaining momentum as it promised to avert a further crisis instigated by a country racing toward weapons of mass destruction.

The Iraq Lesson

Despite its outcome, the war on Iraq didn't go down in history as a success story. Former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski told me in 2015 that he believed the Iraq war was an example of an “unfinished business” due to its “ill-prepared and ill-executed stabilisation mission”. Iran is almost four times the size of Iraq in terms of area and twice the population.

Even when Barack Obama took over, conversations were underway about military action anchored in real anxieties about Tehran's provocations and lack of restraint on behalf of Washington; till then, Iranians hadn't yet elected Hassan Rouhani as their new president. Citing the Cato Institute's commentator Leon Hadar, Nieman Reports wrote in August 2012, “For journalists to assume that neither the US nor Israel will attack Iran before the November election could constitute another failure of imagination.”

Obscured Perceptions

War talk around Iran has not only featured prominently in the US media reports, but it has also obscured the perceptions of the two peoples of each other. Just as any nation may intuitively hold grudges against an adversary, Americans have often been told that Iran is the band of the resented, bad guys. It's not uncommon for people to lose sympathy with a nation that they believe will be a prospective belligerent on the battleground.

Since 2001, when Iran's nuclear controversy first broke out, 2018 was the only year when 15% of Americans, according to Gallup's annual Perceptions of Foreign Countries survey, said they had “mostly favourable” views of Iran. The rest of the polling period, spanning February 1989 to February 2025, has been characterised by smaller favourability rates, excluding 2004, the final year of reformist Mohammad Khatami's presidency. With his retirement, the “very unfavourable” views of the country, at 31%, began to increase irreversibly annually.

Today, the overarching dynamics resemble the vibe of the Bush-Ahmadinejad era. The two governments refuse to accommodate each other. Iran's nuclear brinkmanship, despite President Masoud Pezeshkian's reassurances of its civilian nature, is in full swing. Meanwhile, as Iranians wrestle with frequent power blackouts, they wonder when the promise of affordable nuclear electricity will be fulfilled if the price has been living under sanctions for decades.

Iran As Just A 'Launch Pad'

Beyond that, Iran's regional activities no longer come across as political maneuvering to expand its sphere of influence as a regional power. The clerical establishment, fuelled by the apocalyptic ambitions of the Revolutionary Guards, is seeking to sow chaos in the region to perpetuate its hegemony at any cost.

As evidenced by its disregard for what millions of Iranians cherish as their ancestral heritage, including the Nowruz festivities, or its lackadaisical approach to resolving the deepening economic crisis of a nation beset by a hyperinflation of 75%, the Islamic Republic leadership doesn't have a vision for Iran as a country. It uses Iran as a launching pad to “export the revolution” and establish its fancied theocratic civilisation.

For its part, the US administration today subscribes to a foreign policy mantra that is neither revisionist nor revolutionary, but unconventional and eccentric. If the idea of annexing Canada as the 51st state can be floated as official policy, a diplomatic or military shakeup of the Middle East implicating Iran won't be inconceivable. “It has been a long time since an American president spoke so aggressively about wanting to annex new territory, from Gaza to Greenland, the Panama Canal, and even Canada,” wrote Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia and Stanford University professor, in a recent piece.

Trump's Letter

The Iran dilemma is one that the US president is determined to resolve as quickly as possible. Donald Trump has gone out of his way to write a personal letter to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, asking for a deal. His letter was delivered to Tehran by an Emirati diplomat on March 12. Answering Trump's letter, Khamenei green-lighted indirect talks, now scheduled for Saturday, April 12, in Oman. And shortly after giving a nod to renewed diplomacy, in his Eid prayer sermon, he threatened a “firm retaliatory blow” in response to any outside aggression.

Now, it depends on the calculations of the senior cleric to prevent a further spiral of chaos in an already boiling region. Trump has reportedly set a two-month deadline for the two sides to achieve an understanding before “bad, bad things” happen to Iran. As likely as it is that the crisis can be averted, there is a chance that the “bad things” may follow a failed stab at diplomacy. If the US president is taken for his word, that he remains opposed to forever wars, then the responsibility to initiate the “bombing the likes of which they have never seen before” would have to be delegated to Israel.

The reality of the Iran-Israel proxy conflict today is much different from what it looked like before April 13, 2024, when Iran launched direct attacks on Israeli territory for the first time in retaliation for the latter's bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus 12 days earlier. Iran and Israel fired at each other again, and the mutual restraint that had created a theoretical buffer zone between the two nemeses was dislodged.

The Witkoff-Araghchi Exchange

The US Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, an established real estate entrepreneur, has a track record of brokering agreements that have at least partly worked. His messaging has also been one that the Islamic Republic hasn't found objectionable per se. On April 1, Witkoff publicly reacted to an extended X post by Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, reviewing the key provisions of the 2015 nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Araghchi had written that the US president may not like the deal, “but it contains one vital commitment by Iran which remains in place, and which even the US - being out of the deal, has benefited from”. He then cited one passage from the 159-page agreement that obligated Iran to never “seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons”. Witkoff commented "great" in response to Araghchi's post, a signal from the White House that could hardly be misunderstood. Under increasing criticism, however, he deleted his note.

Predicting what happens next would be a fool's errand. Iranians reeling from foreign meddling and domestic authoritarianism are not a fan of their government's senseless rejections of overtures by successive US administrations. At this point, indirect talks may lead to a limited agreement, even though it's unlikely Trump would find a temporary agreement savoury enough to underwrite.

Let There Be A Fix

No deal at all is no better than a limited deal, which anyway won't be an alternative to a lasting agreement. The Legatum Prosperity Index shows Iran is ranked 126th out of 167 nations in different measures of governance. The Chandler Good Government Index 2024 has assigned Iran a ranking of 107 out of 113 nations surveyed. The Islamic Republic's governance problem is not merely about its inability to address its foreign policy challenges through dialogue. It's more chronic.

Any form of Tehran-Washington contact at this fraught time will be in the interest of global stability. It promises betterment for the drained Iranians and preempts the elusive prospect of improved relations between Iran and the United States as former allies with deep cultural ties. It is not wishful thinking but constructive optimism to expect the two capitals to demonstrate the prudence that can spare the world the spectre of another conflict while the flames of those already raging haven't been extinguished.

(Kourosh Ziabari is a journalist and researcher of media studies. His writings have appeared in Foreign Policy, New Lines Magazine, and The American Conservative, among others. A non-resident journalist at the National Press Club, he has earned a master's in political journalism from Columbia Journalism School and has covered the United Nations on a Dag Hammarskjold Fund for Journalists fellowship. He is an alumnus of the Chevening Scholarships.) 

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author