Would Trump make a deal with Iran?

Republican Party politics would almost definitely intervene

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There’s a good post up recently on the ‘Comment is Freed’ Substack by

Lawrence Freedman

which addresses a topic that I’ve also been thinking about: might Donald Trump try in his second term to seek some sort of major accommodation with Iran, similarly to how he tried with North Korea during his first term?

In a narrow sense, the conditions for this might look right. The Middle East has been consumed by war for over a year, and Trump ran his campaign partly on the idea that he was the candidate of peace and would tamp down global crises. During his first term, he showed a marked willingness to engage with America’s adversaries and play nice with dictators. He had no problem flouting the traditional idea that for the American president to sit down at a table with someone like North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un gives them legitimacy and ought to be avoided at nearly all costs. And he also had no problem charging blindly forward in pursuit of “a deal” even though every informed observer thought that one was impossible. This general ignorance about international politics is part of what makes Trump appear iconoclastic.

On the other hand, I find it extremely hard to imagine that Trump would take this approach to Iran in his second term - or that, if he put out feelers in that direction, it would amount to anything.

To understand why, I think that firstly it’s important to remember how Trump treated Iran during his first term. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was a notable exception to Trump’s general befriend-a-dictator policy. He made very few friendly overtures towards Iran and moving policy towards the country in a more hostile direction was one of his personal missions while in office. He eventually overcame the resistance of his aides in order to withdraw from the Obama-negotiated Iran deal, and then ordered the killing of Qasem Soleimani in early 2020. He also very nearly bombed Iran itself in 2019.

Trump’s retreat from the Iran deal was in part due to his obsession with undoing Obama’s legacy. But it was also based on very real personal animosity towards Iran, and there’s little reason to think that this animosity has lessened in the meantime - especially given that the country has been recently accused of trying to assassinate Trump in retaliation for the Soleimani killing.