American and Iranian negotiators are reportedly getting closer to a deal that would end the weeks-long war between the nations, following the collapse of in-person talks in Islamabad last weekend. In his announcement Sunday, Vice President JD Vance initially sounded pretty hopeless about the whole thing, as you might expect of a man whose dreams had just been smashed. But now there are reports of backchannel phone calls, Pakistani delegations, frameworks of frameworks… It’s all very The Diplomat.
Incidentally, my colleagues at the Today, Explained podcast just scored a fascinating interview with an actual diplomat: Wendy Sherman, the former deputy secretary of state and President Barack Obama’s top negotiator for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. So this morning, we’re turning to Sherman to (try to) understand the Trump administration’s screwups in Iran in 2026.
In her new interview with Vox’s Noel King, Sherman cautioned against being too “reductive” in discussing the outcomes of the war or the talks. (Iran has absolutely been weakened, she said.) But she outlined five areas where the Trump administration’s approach has, so far, failed.
Problem No. 1: They sent the B team to negotiate. Nearly 300 Americans descended on Islamabad for the most recent round of US-Iranian negotiations, including national security advisers, regional specialists, and Vice President JD Vance, who led the US delegation. But earlier rounds of negotiations were helmed by guys like Jared Kushner (Donald Trump’s son-in-law) and Steve Witkoff (Trump’s personal friend). Whatever their merits, neither man holds any particular expertise on Iran (or a real government position).
To further complicate matters, the US attacked Iran twice during previous rounds of ceasefire negotiations that Kushner and Witkoff hosted. So they don’t exactly radiate credibility, Sherman said.
Problem No. 2: They pursued a strategy that benefited Russia. Whatever the outcome of these peace talks, no one makes out better than Russian President Vladimir Putin. While the war in Iran is costing the US something like $2 billion a day, it could generate as much as $151 billion in additional revenue this year for the Russian government.
Russia benefits both from rising oil prices and from the relaxation of long-standing US sanctions, which Trump partially lifted in March. That windfall has already eased a domestic economic crisis in Russia and allowed Putin to continue his Ukraine war.
But that’s not the only way that Russia — and other US adversaries, including China — benefit from the war in Iran. The US will also emerge from the conflict weaker than it began, Sherman said: “We have just spent billions of dollars. We have reduced our inventory of weapons that we may need for other theaters. We have undermined our alliances.”
Problem No. 3: They badly damaged the world economy. At this point, I probably don’t need to list the myriad and diverse ways that the war — and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz — has destabilized the global economy. Just this Tuesday, Britain’s finance minister slammed Trump for what she called a costly “mistake” and “folly.”
Whatever you make of that “folly” bit, however, the cost was predictable, Sherman said. In fact, it came up repeatedly during the 2015 nuclear negotiations.
“We constantly said to the United States Congress, ‘if we risk war, it could close the Strait of Hormuz; it could increase the gas prices; it could take down the international economy,’” she added.
Problem No. 4: They did not, in fact, have the Iranians’ “backs.” President Trump initially urged Iranians to rise up against the regime, promising that the US would support them. Now, regime change is no longer a focus of either the US military campaign or negotiations to end it. That’s a major blow to many pro-democracy activists in Iran and throughout the Iranian diaspora, as the writer and advocate Roya Rastegar wrote for Vox last month.
“Iranian citizens who do want freedom … have been completely forgotten in this process,” Sherman said. “The regime in place in Iran now is more hardline than the one before, if you can believe it.”
Problem No. 5: They actually made the nuclear problem worse. As my colleague Joshua Keating has written, Trump’s quest to stop Iran from getting a nuke could actually encourage the regime to seek out a bomb. Why? Because in the present world (dis)order, that actually looks like the best or only way to protect against US intervention.
Meanwhile, if Iran gets a bomb, other countries will want one too — including close US allies, Sherman said. So the world may ultimately become more likely to see a nuclear attack because of Trump’s war.
The bottom line? “The United States, in my view, has been set back.”
Listen to the full interview with Wendy Sherman here.
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