With Iran militarily decimated and economically squeezed, Trump holds all the cards. But is a deal possible or worthwhile with a fragmented regime?
Something has changed in the Iran nuclear negotiation that many analysts are not fully accounting for. The military balance between the United States and Iran has shifted more dramatically than at any point since the Islamic Republic acquired its first centrifuges. Iran’s air defense shield, the infrastructure that for years effectively concealed and protected its nuclear program, has been destroyed. Its proxies are severely degraded. Its economy is under sanctions and naval blockade pressure that is genuinely unprecedented. Its nuclear sites have been damaged. Trump built leverage that no American president has come close to matching, and he is bringing it to the table.
The question is not whether Trump will press for his terms. He has made clear he will, and those terms—principally the physical removal of enriched uranium from Iranian soil and a permanent prohibition on nuclear weapons—are the deal the United States and the broader Middle East need. The question is whether Iran will accept them. And beneath that sits a harder one: Will the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which has its own theory of deterrence and its own institutional equities in the nuclear program, allow any agreement to hold?
Both questions matter. Neither has a clean answer.
The strategic landscape today bears almost no resemblance to 2015, when the last deal was struck. When the Obama administration concluded the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Iran’s regional power was intact. Hezbollah was the most formidable non-state military force in the Middle East. The Houthis were an insurgency, not a force capable of threatening Red Sea shipping lanes. Hamas governed Gaza with operational freedom. Iran’s air defenses, built over decades with Russian and Chinese assistance, provided real protection for nuclear infrastructure deep inside Iranian territory. The pressure on Tehran was economic—real, but not existential.
None of that is true today.
Iran’s air defense network has been dismantled. The S-300 batteries and radar infrastructure that once raised the cost of strikes on Iranian territory are gone. Its navy has been largely destroyed. Its air force is severely degraded. Command and control infrastructure, Revolutionary Guard facilities, and intelligence networks have all been struck. What remains of Iran’s conventional military capacity is a fraction of what existed before the conflict began. That is a fundamental change in the military equation.
The proxy network has taken severe damage. Hezbollah suffered shattering losses in the 2024 campaign, its command structure broken, its missile stockpiles depleted, its grip on southern Lebanon fractured. It regrouped and that matters. Hamas still exists and has proven difficult to dislodge, but it no longer governs Gaza or projects power as it did before Oct. 7. The Houthis retain the capacity to do real damage and should not be underestimated. What has changed is that the entire architecture Iran built over decades to extend its deterrence outward, at enormous cost, is under simultaneous pressure. That window will not stay open on its own. It is one more reason why a deal, or a decisive continuation of military pressure, has to happen now rather than later. Yet the Strait of Hormuz remains what it has always been: the choke point through which a third of the world’s oil passes, and a potential Iranian pressure valve that Trump’s blockade is curtailing but has not yet fully neutralized. Any deal must not end with Iranian interdiction capacity in the strait intact.
The economic damage may be the most severe Iran has faced since the revolution. Sanctions, oil export restrictions, and blockade enforcement have driven the rial past 1 million to the dollar. Even by Tehran’s own count, airstrikes hit more than 23,000 factories and firms, costing over 1 million jobs directly, according to Iran’s Deputy Work and Social Security Minister. The Iranian publication Etemad Online has estimated another million pushed out of work by the spillover. Unemployment insurance applications have run at roughly three times last year’s pace. For a population already living with inflation above 40% and a currency that has lost nearly all its value, the consequences reach into every household in the country.
The Obama-era deal accepted Iranian enrichment on Iranian soil, imposed limits on enrichment levels and centrifuge counts, relied on an inspection regime that Iran learned quickly how to limit and evade, and included a sunset provision that would have permitted Iran to pursue a full nuclear weapons capability after roughly 15 years. It left the underlying infrastructure intact. That is why Iran was able to surge toward weapons-grade enrichment so quickly after the agreement collapsed. Trump is seeking something categorically different: physical removal of enriched uranium stockpiles, a genuine rollback of centrifuge capacity, verification with real teeth, and a permanent prohibition on nuclear weapons, no sunsets, no phaseouts. That is the right framework. The leverage to demand it has never been stronger.
The question is whether Iran will accept those terms. Its negotiators will continue to probe, offer tactical concessions, and try to run out the clock, attempting to relieve enough pressure to survive without surrendering the program. That is the playbook from every previous round. Iran’s most recent offer was, by Trump’s own public assessment recently, garbage.
But coercive leverage is useful only if there is someone on the other side capable of accepting its terms and making them stick.
On the Iranian side, the question of who can deliver on a commitment is emphatically open.
When was the last time you actually saw Mojtaba Khamenei? Not a statement attributed to him. Not a still photograph. Not him moving or speaking on camera. No video of him has been seen since his appointment. That question opens onto a larger one about who is running Iran.
Start with how he got there.
Ali Khamenei was killed on Feb. 28. Within a week, the Assembly of Experts formally named his son Mojtaba as successor, under what Iran International reported as direct IRGC pressure on individual clerics, including in-person visits and phone calls that sources described as psychological and political. At least eight Assembly members boycotted the final session in protest. The objections were not only about hereditary rule, which Ali Khamenei himself had condemned in 2017 as monarchical restoration. They were also about Mojtaba’s clerical rank: He is a mid-level cleric, three ranks short of the grand ayatollah status the Iranian constitution requires of a supreme leader. Ali Khamenei had reportedly opposed his son’s elevation during his lifetime. Within days of his father’s death, the IRGC pushed it through anyway.
Since then: no public appearances. Reuters, citing three sources close to his circle, has reported severe facial and leg injuries from the strike that killed his father. Iranian state media has used the word Janbaaz, the honorific for an injured war veteran, in references to him. Statements appear in his name. Surrogates speak on his behalf.
The honest counterargument deserves its weight. A wartime leader staying hidden after his father was killed in a strike may be practicing disciplined survival rather than signaling incapacity. Israeli and American intelligence are presumably hunting for targeting opportunities. Staying out of view during an active conflict is what a competent regime would do. Iranian officials say his injuries are limited. The Iranian president reportedly claims to have met him. That reading is available, and it should not be dismissed. But survival and authority are different things. A leader in hiding is not a leader in command.
What exists now in Tehran is a set of overlapping factions: Mojtaba at the apex on paper, the IRGC running operations, the Supreme National Security Council coordinating, the Foreign Ministry providing the diplomatic interface. The wartime succession has made the fragmentation deeper and not legible from the outside, or from within Iran itself. There is also a possibility worth naming directly: Mojtaba was elevated precisely because he could preserve continuity while remaining beholden to, possibly controlled by, possibly entirely subservient to, the security establishment that installed him. There is a harder possibility still that cannot be ruled out: Whether he is alive and functioning at all remains genuinely uncertain.
When Iran’s foreign minister signs an agreement, the question is not only whether he intends or has the power to honor it. It is also whether that signature binds the IRGC commander who controls the nuclear facilities. Whether it binds the Quds Force officer managing proxy networks. Whether it binds the engineers at the enrichment sites who may answer to a chain of command that runs through the Guards, not through the Foreign Ministry. The JCPOA, negotiated when Iran had a functioning and consolidated supreme leader, was still contested inside the IRGC from day one. The hard-liners who opposed it moved to dismantle its constraints the moment political cover appeared. That was the counterparty problem with a strong leader in place. The counterparty problem now is structurally more severe.
Trump did not inherit this negotiating position. He built it through sustained military and economic pressure that degraded Iranian capabilities to a degree no previous administration achieved. Israel’s military operations were indispensable to that result. He arrives at the table with more leverage than any American president has held on this issue since the revolution.
The problem is that leverage is only as durable as the pressure sustaining it, and a deal is only as durable as the authority of the party committing to it. Whether Iran currently has a supreme leader who can make the system honor a commitment, or whether what exists is a set of competing factions that could fracture the moment pressure lifts or internal power dynamics shift, is genuinely unclear.
That is not a reason to walk away from negotiations. It is a reason to build any agreement on the assumption that the counterparty may not hold. Verification cannot depend on good faith. Enforcement cannot require a trip to the U.N. Security Council, where some have historically shielded Tehran from consequences. Europe cannot be a decision-maker here. Its track record on Iran enforcement is a history of deference dressed as diplomacy, and it has spent two decades prioritizing engagement over accountability. Consequences for breach need to be automatic, pre-agreed, and executable by the United States. If Iran breaks a deal, the response cannot hinge on whether those with a Security Council vote are having a cooperative month.
The best hand in a generation is worth playing. But you need a table and cards and players across from you who can cover their bets. Right now, at least one of those conditions remains genuinely in doubt.
Jason D. Greenblatt was the White House Middle East envoy in the first Trump administration.
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