But Rezaei, like other senior Iranian officials, once entertained the possibility of compromise with Washington. Indeed, he openly promoted it. Nearly two decades ago, during a 2007 reporting trip to Iran, I received a surprise invitation from Rezaei to meet him at his summer villa on the Caspian Sea, about 150 miles north of Tehran.

He didn’t smile much then, either. But it was clear that Rezaei and the regime were looking for a face-saving way out of the nuclear standoff with Washington, which was almost as tense then, under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as it is now. After offering me tea and fruit in his garden, Rezaei indicated that the Islamic Republic was eager for some kind of deal and told me: “If America pursues a different approach than confronting Iran, our dealings will change fundamentally.”

Those days are, of course, gone, probably never to return. Now, Rezaei and his colleagues appear to be indicating that Iran is prepared for sustained open conflict with the United States. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has been inconsistent in saying what kind of agreement it might accept, and on May 11, the president said the month-old cease-fire that he announced in early April is now on “massive life support.”

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This state of play became ever clearer over the weekend when, after days of touting a forthcoming deal with Iran, Trump found himself humiliated as Tehran slow-walked its response. The regime then delivered an offer that the president called “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE.” According to the state-run Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, Tehran is insisting that the United States lift its blockade of Iranian shipping, immediately lift sanctions, pay reparations, unfreeze assets, and accept Iranian sovereignty over the critical Strait of Hormuz.

The Iranian position, which appears to offer only limited concessions on the all-important issue of Tehran’s nuclear weapons program, reflects the uncompromising stance that Rezaei and other senior officials have staked out in recent days.

Many Iranian experts believe that after more than two months of devastating U.S.-Israeli attacks, the regime is more entrenched and harder-line than ever. And it’s almost certain to stay that way, especially after having discovered a never-before-deployed but powerful tool of leverage—Tehran’s shutdown of the strait—that is spiking world energy prices, causing a political backlash for Trump at home, and chilling the global economy. While the Iranian economy is suffering something close to hyperinflation and sinking faster than ever under a U.S. blockade, there’s a general sense that the Islamic Republic can outlast Trump’s patience, even if he resumes hostilities.

“Iran seems to hold most of the cards at the moment,” said John Ghazvinian, the author of the magisterial 2021 bookAmerica and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present. “After several years of setbacks, both militarily and domestically, Trump has in many ways thrown the regime a lifeline.”

Indeed, it may be that the war started by Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has actually strengthened the regime’s position both internationally and domestically, at least for the moment. At home, the IRGC has bloodily crushed any opposition. What’s more, even many Iranian dissidents are believed to be angered by the U.S.-Israeli attacks on a school in Minab as well as Iranian infrastructure and population centers. And by seizing the Strait of Hormuz, the Islamic Republic has suddenly put itself at the center of global geopolitics.

“Iran was worse off before, domestically and internationally, under the terms of the stalemate it pursued from [U.S. Presidents Ronald] Reagan to [Barack] Obama. Trump has tipped the balance of advantage toward Iran in the current stalemate,” said Hussein Banai of Indiana University, the co-author of a 2022 report on relations between Iran and the West, Republics of Myth: National Narratives and the US-Iran Conflict.

“Since nearly everyone around the world sees this war as a bad choice based on little preparation, the regime in Tehran is betting the economic costs won’t hurt them any more than what they’re already enduring,” Banai said.

Nor is there anything like the fracturing of leadership inside Tehran that Trump and his team have talked about, despite the deaths of Khamenei and many senior officials. Trump referred to the surviving regime as “Iran’s so-called ‘Representatives’” in the response that he posted on Truth Social on May 10.

“As far as I can tell, the current leadership is coherent and shares a common IRGC background,” said Ryan Crocker. A former U.S. ambassador in the region, Crocker oversaw several negotiations with Iran after 9/11 and knows most of the current players. “They are extremely tough guys—also all veterans of the Iran-Iraq War. It is laughable to think they can be bombed into submission.”

Ghazvinian said that the biggest fear for Washington and the international community now should be “overconfidence” on the part of the Iranian regime.

“This is a tendency that Iran’s hard-line elements, who believe deeply in the revolutionary ideology of the Islamic Republic, are particularly susceptible to. And they seem to be the ones in the ascendant,” he said. “Historically, the most hard-line leaders of the Islamic Republic have a tendency to overplay their hand” and make “maximalist demands.”

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It wasn’t always so. For decades, Washington has swatted aside several offers of accommodation by moderates inside Iran. The most successful of those efforts, President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, was canceled by Trump in his first term. Starting with an offer of rapprochement shortly after 9/11, reformers inside the Islamic Republic have repeatedly felt undercut by Washington. At that time, the regime actively cooperated with the U.S. campaign against the Taliban, only to have President George W. Bush label it as part of the “axis of evil.”

The outcome of this dynamic has been to marginalize the moderates and vindicate the endemic suspiciousness of hard-liners, starting with the supreme leader himself.

“That missed opportunity was an even bigger calamity in the long term, because it pushed away Khamenei from the normalization path,” Banai said.

Every time the reformers have tried to reach out, Ghazvinian writes, “the American response has been to pocket the concession, increase the hostility, and shift the goalposts. Iranian leaders are now deeply convinced, if they were not before, that the nuclear issue was merely a pretext and that America’s true goal is to weaken, isolate—and if possible—to eliminate the Islamic Republic.”

At the time I met Rezaei, in June 2007, the Iranian uranium-enrichment program was far less developed. Mohamed ElBaradei, then the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), had proposed a “timeout” or a pause in both Iranian nuclear development and simultaneous economic pressure by Washington.

Rezaei cautiously endorsed the plan. “The Iranian nuclear issue has to be resolved through a new kind of solution like this,” he said.

It was an early sign of accommodation that in some ways foreshadowed what would later become Obama’s 2015 deal, under which Iran agreed to significantly constrain enrichment for 15 years, transport most of its highly enriched uranium abroad, dismantle most of its centrifuges, and subject itself to unprecedented IAEA inspection.

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So what does this mean for the prospect of Trump’s negotiations today?

A deal of some sort may still be possible, but it would require Trump to show greater flexibility and accept something very similar to the terms achieved by Obama. In fact, the administration has been unclear about what it might settle for—with Trump’s negotiating team reportedly proposing a 20-year moratorium on enrichment, while the president himself has insisted that Tehran needs to surrender its nuclear program entirely.

Moreover, for the past two and a half months, both Trump and Netanyahu have called for an overthrow of the regime. This, combined with the war itself, appears to have dashed any remaining hopes inside Iran that Washington, at least under Trump, will settle for much less than the president’s earlier demand for “unconditional surrender.”

Several Iran experts interviewed for this article indicated that even the current leadership in Tehran “can be pragmatic and nonideological” on some issues, as Crocker put it. “It is only a matter of time before European and other governments begin to lose patience with Iran amid the negative effects on oil markets. Having said all that, Iran probably still believes it can wait out Trump, and it probably can,” Ghazvinian said.

My earlier conversations with both hard-liners and reformers inside Iran indicated that, even under the hard-line Ahmadinejad, Tehran might have been willing to stop short of building a bomb and instead become a nuclear “threshold state” like Japan.

“Iran would like to have the technology, and that is enough for deterrence,” Mohammad Hossein Adeli, a former Iranian ambassador to Britain, told me.

But Rezaei gave voice to the suspicions of many Iranian hard-liners then—and now—that the main problem is that Washington can’t bring itself to negotiate an accommodation with Iran.

It is a “tension” that “has run through U.S. foreign policy for almost half a century,” as Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria wrote last week. “On the one hand, the U.S. has had certain issues it wanted resolved — from the return of the hostages to nuclear limits. On the other hand, it wants to topple the regime, not just negotiate with it.”

Even former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell expressed frustration, after leaving office, with his former hardline colleagues in the George W. Bush administration who refused to entertain anything but Tehran’s unconditional surrender of its nuclear program and strategic position.

“You can’t negotiate when you tell the other side, ‘Give us what a negotiation would produce before the negotiations start,’” Powell told me in an interview before he died in 2021.

Rezaei has always been a hard-liner, of course. In the 1980s, he was one of the strongest holdouts against a truce with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. But it’s clear that he and other regime militants were, at one point, looking for a way out of war with the United States. As Rezaei put it to me in 2007, Washington was “stuck at a crossroads” between confrontation and engagement, “and it can’t make a decision.”

He added: “We have a saying in Farsi: When a child walks in darkness, he starts singing or making loud noises because he’s afraid of the dark. The Americans are afraid to negotiate with Iran, and that’s why they’re making a lot of loud noises.”

The United States, it is fair to say, is walking in darkness through the Middle East once again. Between Iran’s hard-line stance and Trump’s wildly fluctuating attitude toward negotiations, sustained conflict now seems more likely than a workable deal.