Can Trump seal a deal with Iran?

Maybe Donald Trump really will be an anti-war president in his second term.

Trump donor and adviser Elon Musk reportedly meeting Iranian officials with the aim of defusing tensions could be a sign that the once and future president may truly buck the neocons and interventionists who have dogged Republican and Democratic efforts to engage Iran and kept the U.S. bogged down in conflicts in the Middle East for a generation. However, the efforts to stop such diplomacy from happening will be fierce.

Despite his hardline reputation and actions in imposing "maximum pressure" sanctions, exchanging strikes and threatening to blow up Iranian cultural sites, and tearing up the 2015 Iran deal — Trump has often been an outlier from the typical Republican hawkish line on Iran.

In 2015, when candidates vying for the GOP nomination were falling over themselves to denounce and pledge to "tear up" the Iran deal negotiated by the Obama administration, Trump said he would not tear up the deal but rather enforce it harshly, claiming his opponents didn't understand how the world actually works. When he finally came around to promising to tear it up, one of his main critiques was that America couldn't benefit financially from it unlike other parties to the deal — which, of course, is due to the U.S.'s own self-imposed "sanctions wall" on Iran.

When Trump made good on this promise and pulled out of the nuclear deal in 2018 — an approach his GOP opponents had endorsed but likely wouldn't have actually implemented — it sowed the seeds of disaster. Trump's surrounding himself with war hawks and neocons didn't help. He allowed the same political influences that limited Obama's ability to lift sanctions so America could benefit from the original nuclear deal; that ensured Biden would never rejoin that agreement and kept America embroiled in conflict after conflict with Tehran.

Key Trump advisers like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Brian Hook, and Elliott Abrams worked assiduously to prevent Trump from pursuing serious diplomatic options on Iran and delivering a "better deal." Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has always worked to prevent anything close to U.S.-Iran rapprochement, bragged that it was he who manipulated Trump to abandon the agreement and shift to “maximum pressure.”

Yet to hear Trump tell it, he would have had an Iran deal with just one more week in office. He even said he told Biden's team to quickly seal an agreement with Iran because he "handed (the Biden administration) a country that was ready for a deal" but that they didn't know how to do it. Now, Trump will get another chance.

While Musk’s talks with Iranian officials are potentially important and could be a sign that major conflict can be avoided, progress will not come easy. Trump's concept of "deal making" heavily relies on the notion that the other side must be softened up in order to get the best deal from a "position of strength." But in his first term, the sanctions on Iran and provocative actions like the Soleimani assassination had the opposite effect and hardened Iran's position by sidelining those in Tehran interested in and capable of striking a bargain with Washington.

In Trump’s first term, French President Emmanuel Macron tried to get Iran’s president to agree to a direct meeting with Trump. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) tried to get then-Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif to come to the White House. But those efforts were ultimately rebuffed, likely by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself, because hardliners did not want to reward Trump with a "photo op" after engaging in a series of escalations, with little assurance of any benefit for them.

Despite the chaos of his first term, Trump says he still wants a deal. In September 2024, Trump was asked if he would seek diplomacy with Iran in light of allegations that Iran wanted to assassinate him. “Yes, I would do that," he said. "We have to make a deal, because the consequences are impossible. We have to make a deal."

Trump also spoke against sanctions and said he wanted to lift them, and bluntly rejected the idea that he should pursue U.S.-led regime change in Iran. "We can't even run ourselves," he said in dismissing the notion.

Trump’s instinct to negotiate is likely to run headlong into his elevation of hawkish advisers who don’t believe in negotiations. When Trump talks about the value of having John Bolton-types in the room to "scare" the other side, and then surrounds himself with hardliners like Secretary of State-designate Marco Rubio and hawks like national security adviser-designate Michael Waltz and Defense Secretary-designate Peter Hesgeth, it signals he may not have learned from his self-acknowledged "biggest mistake" of "picking some people I shouldn't have picked" to serve in his previous administration.

And it takes two to tango. Iran does have a reformist-minded president who campaigned on lifting sanctions and restoring the 2015 agreement, and who brought back pro-engagement diplomats to achieve that outcome. Their initial reactions to Trump appear to be open to negotiation, but guarded, emphasizing that Iran will react harshly to any escalation of pressure.

Also notable is Iran’s reported pledge in writing that it will not retaliate against Trump following threats issued after Soleimani’s assassination in 2020, and public dismissals of allegations that Iran has engaged in such plotting as fictitious.

Ultimately, however, the Supreme Leader — always cautious about engagement and eager to avoid any possible blowback from negotiations — will make the final call over whether and how to negotiate. In Trump’s first term, he was not open to talks. Now, that may change.

If Iran is serious about preventing war and pursuing diplomacy, it must be willing to test if Trump can actually deliver where others could not. Meeting with Trump's apparent emissary Elon Musk within just a week of the election suggests it could be ready to do just that.