Trump fears political cost of Iran deal weaker than Obama's accord, analyst warns

Donald Trump finds himself trapped between two political imperatives that may be impossible to satisfy at once. His approval ratings on military action against Iran have collapsed—only 36 percent of Americans support the strikes, and just a quarter believe they've made the country safer. A Reuters/Ipsos poll published this week showed 62 percent disapprove of his handling of the crisis. The political math is brutal: he needs to end this conflict quickly to stanch the bleeding. But he also fears something worse than continued war—the humiliation of accepting a deal that looks weaker than the one Barack Obama negotiated in 2015, the very agreement Trump spent years denouncing as a catastrophe and vowed to surpass.

This contradiction may be unsolvable, according to international relations analyst Uriã Fancelli. The realistic outcome, he argues, is not a grand new accord but something far more modest: a preliminary understanding designed only to reduce the immediate risk of renewed fighting. A comprehensive nuclear agreement of the kind the world saw in 2015 is simply not achievable in the current moment, when even the existing ceasefire appears fragile. The 2015 deal—formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—ran to nearly 160 pages with detailed technical annexes and represented two years of intensive negotiation. It addressed extraordinarily complex issues: the fate of hundreds of kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent, international inspections with intrusive verification mechanisms, the sequencing of sanctions relief, and reciprocal guarantees from all parties.

Fancelli points to a structural weakness in the American negotiating team that makes even a limited agreement difficult. The talks are being led by Vice President J.D. Vance, special envoy Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law. None of them possesses the technical depth required to manage a nuclear dossier of this complexity. In 2015, roughly 200 diplomats, financial experts, and nuclear specialists were involved. Any real progress now depends far less on grand announcements than on parallel technical conversations and the painstaking reconstruction of trust—a task made harder by the fact that Trump himself withdrew the United States from the previous agreement in 2018 and has since alternated between negotiation and military threats.

Trump's own communication style has become a liability. His erratic public statements create permanent uncertainty about what constitutes genuine negotiation and what amounts to psychological pressure or political theater. Last Friday alone, he told Bloomberg that Iran had accepted an unlimited suspension of its nuclear program, assured CBS that the Iranians agreed to work with the United States on uranium removal, and promised Axios that a deal would materialize within one or two days. Hours later, he reverted to threats of total destruction, oscillating between the promise of quick agreement and military escalation. On the Iranian side, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament, accused Trump of trying to turn negotiations into a surrender ceremony and declared that Iran will not negotiate under duress.

Fancelli expects Trump will attempt to market whatever arrangement emerges as a major victory, though credibility is wearing thin. The conflict itself has shifted the strategic balance in ways that work against American interests. By degrading Iranian military capacity without eliminating the regime and by weakening parts of Iran's regional alliance network, the war has actually strengthened Tehran's incentive to weaponize its control of the Strait of Hormuz—one of the world's most critical chokepoints for global oil shipments. What Trump may have inadvertently accomplished is to make that narrow waterway one of Iran's few remaining instruments of leverage and deterrence. The longer negotiations drag on, the more entrenched that position becomes.