Vice President JD Vance led a whirlwind round of talks in Islamabad this month that produced little movement toward a peace agreement with Iran. President Trump, however, voiced optimism that a permanent deal could be reached — possibly one that would require Iran to relinquish its enriched uranium. Veteran negotiators who helped forge the 2015 nuclear accord warn that such a result is far from certain and unlikely to come quickly.
Those who worked the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action say talks with Tehran demand time, patience and painstaking attention to technical detail. Wendy Sherman, the lead U.S. negotiator on the JCPOA, says the idea of resolving issues in a day or a week is unrealistic; the Obama-era effort required roughly 18 months to reach agreement. Rob Malley, another member of that team, emphasizes that negotiating cultures differ sharply: one side can act impulsively while the other is deliberative and tenacious, and those styles collide when pace is rushed.
The 2015 process offers concrete lessons. John Kerry and Iran’s foreign minister closed the deal after marathon sessions in Vienna, including a 19-day push to finalize language and annexes. Jon Finer, who worked as Kerry’s chief of staff, credits patience as an essential asset. Iranian negotiators often used delay and repeated refusals as tactics to test U.S. priorities, forcing American diplomats to revisit the same issues many times over weeks and months to find workable compromises.
Those Iranian teams proved highly capable on technical matters despite frequently operating without the volume of outside expert advisers the U.S. side enjoyed. They negotiated long, complex documents in English and mastered issues ranging from nuclear materials to sanctions enforcement. That attention to detail made slow, iterative bargaining almost unavoidable.
The current U.S. approach, critics say, appears to lack that tolerance for prolonged back-and-forth. Sherman and others argue that maximalist demands and an expectation that Tehran should simply capitulate work against the possibility of a negotiated settlement. No government, the former diplomat notes, will abandon tangible leverage unless it has ironclad assurances in return.
Mistrust is another major obstacle. Iran has been struck militarily multiple times in the past year, including attacks on nuclear facilities, and a fragile ceasefire now risks collapse. Those events have driven trust to very low levels. Iranian leaders, having seen commitments reversed or undermined in the past, are understandably wary of trading away hard-to-recover assets like enriched uranium for promises that could be discarded by a later administration.
That distrust shaped the JCPOA too: U.S. negotiators operated on a principle of ‘distrust but verify,’ and they believed Iranian counterparts accepted similar rules of the game. Still, conditions have changed since 2015. Malley warns that the Iranian leadership that agreed to the original deal has been decimated by targeted strikes, and the regime’s military capacities have been weakened. Those shifts mean lessons from the earlier deal must be applied cautiously; personnel, power balances and incentives on both sides are not the same.
Experts on conflict negotiation also stress the leveling effect of bargaining. Mark Freeman of the Institute for Integrated Transitions points out that entering talks often benefits the weaker party by giving it leverage it lacked before. Iran has used measures such as partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz to underscore its bargaining power, while the White House has signaled eagerness for a rapid resolution. When one side appears to need an agreement more, that perception reshapes the entire negotiation.
Taken together, these factors help explain why experienced diplomats view a quick, sweeping settlement as improbable. Technical complexity, divergent negotiating styles, deep mutual suspicion and shifting power dynamics mean any meaningful deal will likely require lengthy, patient diplomacy rather than a single sprint of meetings.