The writer is a professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of ‘Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History’
The US appears poised to launch a major military attack on Iran. The last round of talks between the two countries was an opportunity for Iran to avert war but Tehran offered little to Washington. That is not because Iran’s rulers are too obdurate and caught up in their old ways of thinking. Rather they are putting little stock in diplomacy and increasingly see war as inevitable. They see talks more as a trap than a solution and seem to view an unavoidable war as more cathartic than a weak deal. They are focused on how to manage it — and even use it to their advantage.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei deeply distrusts the US president. It was Donald Trump who abandoned the 2015 nuclear deal and imposed punitive sanctions, causing the currency crisis which Tehran blames for domestic unrest; then, last summer, he gave a green light to Israel to attack Iran amid ongoing nuclear talks, and then bombed Iran’s nuclear programme.