CROSSPOST: MICHAEL SELLERS: Trump Thinks Iran Is Ready to Deal. Iran Thinks Trump is. Who's Right?
Michael Sellers reads the standoff as a contest over who can endure pain longer. I think that misses the real problem: with Bibi and Donald, there is no comprehensive settlement to be had — only a series of up-front trades. Thus Trump insists Iran is economically broken and desperate—which it is—and ready to sign on his terms—which it does not see how it can do. Thus Iran denies talks even exist. Moreover, it keeps raising it price for even a temporary Strait-of-Hormuz reopening. Trump keeps announcing that a permanent, comprehensive deal is nearly done. And it isn’t. Not even a temporary reopening is done.
Note this, and note this well: The Iranian government over the past month or so has repackaged things that it once saw as its goals for a comprehensive settlement into mere preconditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
They are not climbing-down. They are escalating. And until something happens to change their thesis here, they are likely to continue to escalate.
Michael Sellers thinks that this is because the Iranian government has concluded, probably correctly, that its government can endure the consequences of continued low-level war and Strait of Hormuz closure more easily and for longer than Donald Trump can. Trump keeps seeing that the United States can inflict more physical damage (albeit at the cost of alarming depreciation of its weapons stocks) and that Iran’s economy is in shambles, and he concludes that Iran must be desperate for a way out and that its we-are-not-negotiating claims are just posturing. So he is puzzled when it keeps not happening.
I think that there is one thing that the Iranian government thinks that Sellers is missing: the Iranian government knows that Trump’s word is not good. Therefore, at least as I see it, they do not believe there is any comprehensive settlement to be had. There is only a situation in which they have to push the United States and others to the table in order to get a month-to-month reopening of the Strait of Hormuz in return for concrete, up-front payments and benefits. And if Trump wants more—if Trump wants a deal-signing too—he will have to pay up-front for that as well:
CROSSPOST: MICHAEL SELLERS: Trump Thinks Iran Is Ready to Deal. Iran Thinks Trump is. Who’s Right?
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Michael Sellers
Aug 10, 2026
If you listen to President Trump, the endgame with Iran sounds almost like a done deal. For more than a week now, Trump has been describing an Iran that is under enormous pressure, knows it is losing, and badly wants a way out. I know, how many times have we heard this. But each time we are compelled to do a reality check.
Last weekend, after threatening a massive new American attack, Trump abruptly called it off. His explanation was that Iran and several Middle Eastern governments had asked him for more time to finish a deal. “Based on this request,” Trump wrote, he had agreed to cancel the attack, provided the parties could “rapidly make a DEAL.”
The following day, Trump went further. He said Iranian officials themselves had begged him not to attack and that the basic outlines of an agreement were already in place. He told reporters aboard Air Force One that Gulf leaders had urged him to choose a deal over another round of bombing because “you don’t know where these attacks lead.”
By Monday, Trump was saying negotiations were actually underway—and that they were taking place at Iran’s request.
“They are going on right now,” he told reporters, describing the negotiations as Iran’s “last chance” to sign a good agreement. Later that day, he wrote that the Iranian leadership had itself asked for a meeting and that additional talks were scheduled for the “immediate future.”
There was just one problem.
Iran said none of that was true.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said there were no negotiations with Washington underway, no meetings scheduled, and no Iranian negotiating team preparing to travel anywhere. The only negotiations Iran acknowledged were its separate discussions with Oman over navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump brushed that contradiction aside. On Tuesday he said the negotiations were “moving along very nicely.”
And then on Sunday, speaking to Axios, Trump offered his explanation for why Iran would ultimately come around.
“We are low-keying it,” he said. “We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.”
Iran, Trump said, is “in very bad shape” economically and does not even have enough money to pay its troops.
“It will work out,” he said. “It always works out. It’s like a chess game.”
Vice President JD Vance has been making much the same argument. Iran is “hurting in a big way,” he said Saturday.
“They want this thing to be over.”
Put all of this together and the administration’s theory of the case is pretty clear.
Iran may issue defiant statements for domestic consumption. It may deny that negotiations are taking place. It may bargain over the details and try to extract concessions. But underneath all of that, Trump believes he is dealing with a badly wounded government whose economic position is deteriorating rapidly and whose leaders increasingly recognize that they need a deal.
But while Trump continues making his claims, Iran’s public behavior over the last several days conveys almost exactly the opposite message.
Tehran is not lowering its price for ending the confrontation.
It is raising it.
Iran Has Just Raised the Price
Over the weekend, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, then secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, publicly laid out the conditions under which Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
They are extraordinary. Well, not extraordinary in one sense, as they are basically the same demands that were embedded in the cease fire deal. But they are a list of demands that clearly don’t signal that Iran is on the verge of capitulation.
The United States must lift its naval blockade. Lift sanctions. Release frozen Iranian assets. Withdraw American military forces from the vicinity of Iran. Compensate Iran for damage inflicted during the war. Stop threatening Iran. And cease attacks not merely against Iran but against Iranian allies in Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen and Iraq.
Iranian officials have been even clearer about the sequencing.
The emerging Iran-Oman agreement governing navigation through Hormuz is not, they say, an agreement to reopen the strait.
It merely establishes how shipping could operate once the political conditions for reopening it have been satisfied.
“Whenever the United States accepts Iran’s conditions, the Strait of Hormuz will certainly be reopened,” Revolutionary Guards spokesman Hossein Mohebbi said Saturday.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi reiterated Sunday that Iran and Oman were approaching agreement on the technical arrangements for shipping, but Iran would not actually reopen the waterway until Washington made concessions.
And on Monday Iran repeated the point again.
There are not even direct American-Iranian negotiations underway, Araqchi says. Messages are traveling through intermediaries, but Tehran says it will not return to direct negotiations while Washington remains in violation of the ceasefire arrangement reached in June.
That is a peculiar way for a government supposedly desperate for a deal to behave.
Indeed, there has been a subtle but important escalation in the Iranian position.
Some of the concessions Iran previously sought as part of a comprehensive settlement — sanctions relief, compensation, release of frozen funds and security guarantees — are now being demanded merely as the price for reopening Hormuz.
That represents an escalation in Iran’s demands.
Who escalates their demans when they are on the verge of folding?
So Who Is Bluffing?
There are several possible explanations.
The clearest explanation that makes the most sense to me is that Trump is right about Iran’s underlying weaknesses that have been produced by the US attacks — but wrong about what weakness necessarily produces.
Iran’s economic condition can be genuinely terrible while its leadership simultaneously concludes that surrendering now would be worse.
And Trump just doesn’t get that.
That distinction is crucial.
Yes, Iran is suffering. But the question they seem to be asking is — is continuing to suffer a better option than accepting the terms currently available?
Looks like they think the answer to that one is yes.
And Tehran appears to believe that it still possesses something extremely valuable: the ability to impose continuing costs on Trump, the US, and the world.
Hormuz gives them that power.
Havng that leverage eliminates gives them the ability to impose costs that level the playing field and make them feel they have the upper hand.
Iran Is Watching Another Clock
There is also increasingly strong evidence that Tehran is paying very close attention to American politics, as well they should.
The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour reported last week that Iranian officials are openly studying the approaching November midterm elections and discussing Trump’s political vulnerability. Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi has described a negotiating sequence that could take another two to four months — a timetable that conveniently runs directly into the American elections.
Two Very Different Readings of the Same War
And that brings us back to the apparent contradiction.
Trump says Iran is badly wounded and wants out.
Iran says America must first meet an extraordinary list of demands.
Iran almost certainly does want the war to end. There is little reason to believe its leaders enjoy watching their economy deteriorate and their military infrastructure being destroyed.
But wanting a war to end is not the same thing as being willing to end it on the enemy’s terms.
What Iran appears to be signaling is that it believes it has survived the phase in which overwhelming American airpower was supposed to compel capitulation. It has absorbed tremendous punishment and still retains the capability that matters most for coercing Washington: the capacity to interfere with regional energy flows and impose costs far beyond Iran itself.
Trump believes continued pressure will eventually break that resistance.
Iran appears to believe continued resistance will eventually break Trump’s willingness to maintain the pressure.
That may be the most important thing to understand about where this war stands today.
The battle is no longer primarily over who can inflict more physical destruction. There isn’t much question about that; the United States can.
The battle is over who can endure the consequences longer.
And right now, both Washington and Tehran appear convinced the answer is: we can.
<https://michaeldsellers.substack.com/p/iran-update-trump-thinks-iran-is> <https://michaeldsellers.substack.com/>
Brad DeLong here: What are the important takeaways here?
It is wrong to even think that Iran might be bluffing. That is not a way to characterize it. When you face an untrustworthy adversary, there is no effective way you can negotiate a surrender that ends in a deal. You face a Clown Darth Vader: “This deal is getting worse all the time!” “I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further.” Only real Darth Vader changed the deal for terms you could understand, and foresee, because they made sense.
Let me briefly expand this, and then throw out an idea or two: