The 2015 Iran nuclear deal took months. A peace deal could be just as tough : NPR
A Pakistani Ranger walks past a billboard advertising peace talks between the United States and Iran in Islamabad, April 12, 2026. The talks, led by Vice President JD Vance, have not resulted in any concrete movement toward a peace deal.
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Despite stalled negotiations with Iran and a fragile ceasefire nearing its end, President Trump this week expressed optimism that a permanent deal could be reached — one that could include Iran giving up its enriched uranium. However, experts who spent months negotiating a nuclear deal under the Obama administration say mutual distrust and very different negotiating styles make a quick truce unlikely.
Referring to Vice President Vance’s whirlwind negotiations in Islamabad last week, which appear to have yielded little beyond dashed expectations, Wendy Sherman, the lead US negotiator on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal finalized in 2015, says the administration’s approach was completely wrong.
“You can’t negotiate with Iran in one day,” she told NPR. Here and now earlier this week. “You can’t even do it in a week.” To reach an agreement on the JCPOA, she said, it took “a good 18 months.”
The talks that resulted in that deal highlighted Iran’s meticulous negotiating style, said Rob Malley, who was also part of the JCPOA negotiating team and later served as special envoy to Iran under President Joe Biden.
Summarizing the different styles of the two camps, Malley said: “Trump is impulsive and capricious; [is] stubborn and tenacious. »
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks during a news conference on the Iran nuclear deal at the Austrian International Center in Vienna, Austria, July 14, 2015.
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In 2015, patience led to an agreement
The 2015 negotiations, led by Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, culminated with a marathon 19-day session in Vienna to seal the deal, said Jon Finer, a former U.S. deputy national security adviser in the Biden administration. Finer participated in the negotiations as Kerry’s chief of staff. He said his boss’s patience “was a huge asset” in bringing the deal to fruition, he said.
Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iranian Foreign Minister during the Obama-era nuclear deal negotiations, speaks April 22, 2016 in New York.
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“He would endure lectures…’let me tell you about 5,000 years of Iranian civilization’…and keep moving forward,” Finer said, adding that the tactic of Iranian negotiators seemed to be to “say no to everything and see what really matters” to the United States.
“They are incredibly difficult,” he said. “You have to come back to the same problem 10 or 12 times over weeks or months to make progress.”
Even so, Finer called Iran’s negotiators “extremely capable” — noting that, unlike the United States, it often lacked expert advisers “right outside the room” while mastering the details of nuclear weapons, nuclear materials and U.S. sanctions.
“They weren’t negotiating in their native language either,” Finer added. “The documents were all negotiated in English and ran to hundreds of pages with detailed annexes.”
Vance’s trip to Islamabad suggests that the United States does not have the patience to engage in negotiations aimed at ending the conflict, which could be at least as complex and lengthy. “The Trump administration came in with maximalist demands and really just wanted Iran to capitulate,” said Sherman, who served as deputy secretary of state under the Biden administration. Here and now. “No nation, even as odious as the Iranian regime, will capitulate.”
Beware but check
Iran was attacked twice last year. In June last year, while nuclear negotiations were underway, Israel and the United States struck the country’s nuclear facilities. A few months later, at the end of February, Iran was attacked again, at the start of the latest conflict. This time around, “the confidence level is probably almost at an all-time low,” Malley said.
“It’s hard for them to take what they hear from U.S. officials at their word,” Malley said. The Iranians, he said, must ask themselves how long any commitment will last and “will be very hesitant to give up something tangible” — like their enriched uranium — in exchange for something that is not foolproof or likely to be suddenly abandoned by Trump or a future president.
“Once they abandon their stock… they can’t get it back the next day,” Malley said.
Even during nuclear deal negotiations from 2013 to 2015, the decades of mistrust between Tehran and Washington were impossible to ignore, Finer said. “Our theory was not trust but verification, it was distrust but verification,” he said, adding: “I think that was their theory too.”
Malley cautions against relying on the JCPOA as a guide for how peace talks aimed at ending the current war might proceed. The Tehran leaders who agreed to the deal are now gone – killed in Israeli airstrikes, he says. The regime’s military capabilities are also significantly reduced and “whatever lessons learned in the past… must be viewed with great caution, because so much has changed”, he said.
Negotiations have a leveling effect
Mark Freeman, executive director of the Institute for Integrated Transitions, a Spain-based peace and security think tank that advises on conflict negotiations, says several factors shape the relationship between the United States and Iran. At the start of negotiations, one side always has the upper hand, he says, but negotiations have an equalizing effect. “The weaker party wins simply by starting a negotiation process,” he said.
Each party is looking for leverage, he adds.
In Iran’s case, it used the closure of the Strait of Hormuz to exert such leverage, while the White House showed willingness to quickly resolve the conflict. “If one side feels the other needs a deal more… that shapes the whole negotiation,” he said.
