President Donald Trump\u2019s angry claim Monday that Iran was being \u201cunbelievably duplicitous\u201d in its dealings with the United States was just the latest sign of his struggle to understand his rivals in Tehran.<\/p>\n
Trump considers himself a master of sizing up and exploiting his adversaries. But Iran\u2019s leaders have baffled him.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll they do is make me angry,\u201d he told reporters last week. \u201cThey just make me angry.\u201d<\/p>\n
More frustration could be in store for the U.S. president. Trump officials say a new deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz may be near, but Iran continues to insist on collecting fees there that Trump has ruled unacceptable.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s inability to strike a favorable deal with Iran has not only cost him politically among war-weary voters, but continued strife around the crucial waterway has made for volatile oil prices at the expense of U.S. consumers and the global economy. <\/p>\n
Trump is hardly the first U.S. president who has struggled to read Iran. Each of his predecessors since the country\u2019s 1979 Islamic Revolution has tried to decode Iran\u2019s murky power structure and the mindset of its political leadership. <\/p>\n
Most have come up short; some have been burned badly. A rare exception is President Barack Obama, whose 2015 nuclear deal with Iran was a 20-month diplomatic effort. Obama considered it a major achievement, despite criticism from Republicans and some Democrats that Iran had lured him into a flawed deal by feigning moderation. <\/p>\n
But Trump may be the president who \u201chas least understood Iran\u2019s leadership,\u201d said Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst and National Security Council official who has studied Iran for decades.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn many ways, Trump represents the epitome of America\u2019s frustrations with Iran,\u201d Pollack said. \u201cHe has been both the most desirous of making a deal with Iran, and the one who used the most force against it. He has found that neither got him what he wanted.\u201d <\/p>\n
Trump often speaks as if massive force will produce a quick deal.<\/p>\n
After the war opened with a Feb. 28 airstrike that killed Iran\u2019s supreme leader of nearly 40 years, Ali Khamenei, Trump called on Iran\u2019s people to rise up and \u201ctake over\u201d their government. He added that he would then \u201cchoose\u201d Iran\u2019s next leader. <\/p>\n
More senior Iranian officials would also be killed in airstrikes. But no popular uprising emerged.<\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s hard-line government instead doubled down. In March, it named a new supreme leader, Khamenei\u2019s son, Mojtaba Khamenei. U.S. officials consider him even more rigid \u2014 and more interested in acquiring a nuclear bomb \u2014 than his father. <\/p>\n
Iran had simply ignored Trump\u2019s public declaration that the younger Khamenei would be an \u201cunacceptable\u201d choice. And Khamenei did not respond to a public offer from Trump for an in-person meeting.<\/p>\n
Even so, Trump retained hope for major change. \u201cIran can get themselves on a very good footing if they make a deal,\u201d he said in late April. Iran, he said could become \u201ca legitimate country, not a country based on death and horror.\u201d<\/p>\n
Iranian officials say they can negotiate with Trump on matters such as the Strait of Hormuz and their nuclear program, even as they rule out many of his core demands.<\/p>\n
But in a political system premised on hatred of the United States, none show interest in a larger reconciliation with the United States.<\/p>\n
There are few signs that Trump\u2019s months of dealing with Iran\u2019s regime have given him a clearer understanding of it. Over the course of the conflict, Trump has constantly revised his assessment of Khamenei and his deputies. He has branded them \u201clunatics,\u201d \u201creasonable,\u201d \u201ccrazy bastards,\u201d \u201cvery smart\u201d and \u201cstone cold crazy.\u201d <\/p>\n
Trump is to some degree experiencing frustrations that have bedeviled several of his predecessors who also hoped for grand bargains with Iran.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor decades, American policymakers have consistently underappreciated the ideological commitment and deeply institutionalized structure of power in the Islamic Republic,\u201d said Suzanne Maloney, vice president and director for foreign policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington. <\/p>\n
One problem, Maloney noted, is how little direct exposure U.S. officials have had to top Iranian leaders. No U.S. official ever met Iran\u2019s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, or the late Khamenei, nor his son.<\/p>\n
Maloney said that war appears to have strengthened the power of Iran\u2019s religious and military leadership, leaving no \u201cviable alternative power center.\u201d<\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s semi-democratic political system, which features a president and parliament under the total religious authority of its supreme leader, has at times included high-level officials open to friendlier relations with the United States. <\/p>\n
But past appeals by Washington to those figures have mostly ended in regret.<\/p>\n
Dennis Ross, a veteran of Middle East diplomacy who served presidents of both parties, said that \u201cthe Iranians seem to understand us better than we understand them.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018Bitter Disappointment\u2019<\/p>\n
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter approved secret talks with Iran\u2019s foreign minister in an effort to free the 52 American hostages seized from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran the year before.<\/p>\n
Carter\u2019s diary entries show him obsessing, much like Trump, on details of Iran\u2019s political machinations \u2014 including feuds among top Iranian officials.<\/p>\n
In early 1980, Carter thought he had struck a deal to free the hostages in return for the release of billions in frozen Iranian assets and a pledge of U.S. noninterference in Iranian affairs, among other things.<\/p>\n
But in what Carter called \u201ca bitter disappointment,\u201d Khomeini shot down the idea, blindsiding U.S. officials and his own subordinates. Carter would eventually order a hostage rescue mission that failed before finalizing a deal that freed the Americans on his last day in office. <\/p>\n
Secret Weapons Deals<\/p>\n
Five years later, President Ronald Reagan directed aides to explore a message from an Iranian arms dealer who claimed that moderate Iranian officials would be open to establishing friendly ties once the aging Khomeini had died.<\/p>\n
In what Reagan later called a search for \u201ca strategic opening,\u201d he approved the secret sale of U.S. weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages held in Lebanon. The arrangement became part of what is known as the Iran-Contra affair because money from the arms sales was covertly diverted, in defiance of Congress, to an anti-communist rebel group in Nicaragua known as the Contras. <\/p>\n
The affair\u2019s exposure engulfed Reagan\u2019s presidency in scandal, as several U.S. officials pleaded guilty or were convicted of felonies; Reagan\u2019s former national security adviser attempted suicide.<\/p>\n
The opening with Iran turned out to be a mirage. No friendly moderates emerged in Tehran, and the CIA believed the arms dealer who began it all was a fraud. Reagan, denying knowledge of key events, apologized in a national address, while defending his original goal of courting Iranian moderates. <\/p>\n
A Hopeful Moment Passes<\/p>\n
A more tangible opportunity emerged for President Bill Clinton in 1997, when Iran elected a reformist candidate, Mohammad Khatami, as its president. Khatami called for good relations with the United States and expressed regret for the embassy hostage crisis. <\/p>\n
This was the real thing.<\/p>\n
Clinton reciprocated with gestures such as the restoration of U.S. imports of Iranian pistachios and carpets, and conciliatory remarks acknowledging some of Iran\u2019s historical grievances.<\/p>\n
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright even issued a public apology for the CIA\u2019s backing of a 1953 coup that overthrew Iran\u2019s prime minister after he nationalized the country\u2019s Western-dominated oil industry.<\/p>\n
But powerful hard-liners opposed Khatami\u2019s moderate vision, in part because reconciliation with the United States threatened the foundations of their anti-Western ideology.<\/p>\n
Days after Albright\u2019s speech, the elder Khamenei, who became supreme leader after Khomeini\u2019s death in 1989, dismissed her words \u2014 and any possibility of dialogue with Washington.<\/p>\n
Khatami later said privately that Khamenei believed that Iran could never make peace with the United States, according to Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.<\/p>\n
Outmaneuvering Washington<\/p>\n
Only Obama has pulled off a major diplomatic agreement with Iran, in the form of the 2015 nuclear deal that placed limits on Iran\u2019s atomic program lasting up to 15 years in exchange for relief from economic sanctions.<\/p>\n
Many officials in the Obama administration hoped that agreement, negotiated with another moderate Iranian leader, Hassan Rouhani, might be a first step toward better relations. But that was not to be. Khamenei approved the deal but showed no desire for taking things further; critics said that confirmed their warnings that Rouhani would amount to a replay of Khatami. <\/p>\n
Iranian suspicions that the U.S. could not be trusted were soon affirmed. In 2018, Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal and imposed even harsher economic sanctions than had been in place before the agreement.<\/p>\n
Iran responded by accelerating its nuclear program, putting it on course for a violent collision with the United States and the war Trump initiated in February.<\/p>\n
Since then, Ross said, Iran has continued to outmaneuver Washington, which Trump\u2019s obvious impatience to conclude the war has made easier.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey tend to read our sense of urgency as a form of leverage,\u201d Ross said. \u201cWe always seem in a hurry to get things done. They operate under the premise that time serves their interests more than ours.\u201d<\/p>\n