Iran and the US: this is geopolitical poker at its most dangerous

Over the past few days, an extraordinary amount of American military hardware has been moved to within striking distance of Iran. Advanced aircraft, including F-35 stealth fighters, C-17 transport planes and aerial refuelling tankers, have been repositioned. Assets have been deployed to Diego Garcia, the remote Indian Ocean base long associated with US power projection in the Middle East. The scale and speed of this movement are unmistakable: it is meant to be seen.

As President Trump himself put it in a series of posts last week, “a massive armada is heading to Iran. It is moving quickly, with great power, enthusiasm, and purpose.” The force that has gathered, he added, is “ready, willing, and able to rapidly fulfill its mission, with speed and violence, if necessary”.

The president has also emphasised that there is an alternative. “Hopefully Iran will quickly ‘Come to the Table’ and negotiate a fair and equitable deal — NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS — one that is good for all parties.”

On Saturday, he told reporters on Air Force One that Tehran was “seriously” negotiating with Washington, having told Fox News earlier in the day: “We’ll see if we can do something [in talks with Iran], otherwise we’ll see what happens … We have a big fleet heading out there.”

He added that regional allies were not being told of plans for potential strikes for security reasons. “If I told them the plan, it would be almost as bad as telling you the plan — it could be worse, actually,” he said.

In another move apparently designed to increase pressure on the Iranian regime, Trump said a “concept” of a deal had been agreed under which India would buy oil from Venezuela rather than Iran.

The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, was in Istanbul on Friday for talks with his Turkish counterpart about negotiating with the US. Ali Larijani, a senior Iranian security official, said on Saturday that a framework for negotiations with the US was progressing.

To most commentators, Tehran has a hard decision to make: negotiate or capitulate. But Trump, too, faces the same dilemma. The US has the ability to launch a major attack, but what is less clear is whether it wants to, what it hopes to achieve by doing so — and what terms it might settle for if it did not.

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Iran is arguably weaker than it has been at any point since the Islamic regime came to power in 1979, with protests brutally suppressed in recent weeks, leaving many dead, an economy ravaged by decades of mismanagement and sanctions, and a military still reeling from the 12-day war of June 2025, when Israel, along with the US, dismantled a major part of the country’s defence infrastructure.

In such circumstances, Trump might be minded to aim for a wider set of goals in any negotiation with the Iranian leadership. Top of the agenda, of course, is Iran’s nuclear programme. At the most extreme end, the US might demand Iran commit to no enrichment of any kind, a position that would certainly be a red line for the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who sees this as his country’s sovereign right.

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Trump would be unlikely to settle for a lesser commitment from Iran to allow regular extensive inspections — partly because it is easy enough to stay away from prying eyes, and partly because he mistrusts people who play for time to buy breathing space that allows them to recover. Trump himself pulled out of the previous (imperfect) agreement — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — during his first presidency. So presumably the terms he would accept this time would need to be significantly more onerous, with guarantees that could not be unwound by delay, ambiguity or a future change of political mood in Tehran.

The fact that it is not clear how this circle might be squared suggests that Trump might need other significant concessions — perhaps around missile programmes, already enfeebled proxies and restrictions on regional behaviour — demands that would cut to the core of Iran’s strategic doctrine and almost certainly be seen in Tehran not as negotiation, but as capitulation.

Such are the stakes, then, that Iran’s foreign minister has indicated a willingness to engage.

“The United States”, Araghchi said on Friday, “has repeatedly requested negotiations with us through various intermediaries and continues to renew these requests. We have no problem with engaging in negotiations; however, negotiations cannot begin with threats. They must set aside their threats.”

Many Iran observers question whether Araghchi’s aim is to put Iranian emollience on the record in advance of US military action, in order to be able to claim that any use of force is premature and unprovoked. Trump, as is clear, cares little about the court of public opinion, and in any event, because of the protests in Iran, will probably take the view that many in the region would welcome seeing a regime that can treat civilians so badly given a dose of its own medicine.

Military build-up creates leverage for Trump, but it also narrows his room for manoeuvre. The immediate problem, therefore, is whether there exists any solution that allows Iran to save face and avoid the appearance that its sovereignty has been compromised. That concern has been voiced repeatedly at the very top of the Iranian system, including by the supreme leader himself. For Tehran, the optics matter almost as much as the substance.

At the same time, Trump will certainly need a significant win to justify de-escalation. He has framed this confrontation in absolute terms: no nuclear weapons, no excuses. Backing down without a visible achievement would cut against the image of decisiveness he is trying to project domestically and internationally. The demands likely to satisfy Washington may be politically or ideologically impossible for Tehran to accept.

This makes the prospect of military action more, not less, likely. Iran has made clear that it does not wish to meet America’s demands, often via posts on social media, which serves as a proxy for contact between two countries that do not have diplomatic relations.

While Araghchi has said on X that “Iran has always welcomed a mutually beneficial, fair and equitable NUCLEAR DEAL — on equal footing, and free from coercion, threats, and intimidation — which ensures Iran’s rights to PEACEFUL nuclear technology, and guarantees NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS”, the fact that he also stated that Iran’s armed forces have their “fingers on the trigger” will not have gone down well in Washington.

This White House administration is more steely-eyed than some in the recent past, and recognises that much can go wrong. It is no surprise that the Venezuela model has been invoked several times by Trump and by Marco Rubio, who told the Senate last week that effecting a change of leadership in Iran “would be even far more complex” than had been the case in the South American country at the start of January.

Lessons too have been learned from Iraq, not only of the mass deployment of US forces and the human and financial costs that this involved, but also of the decapitation of the state with the removal of hundreds of thousands of members of the Ba’ath party, leaving a country not only on its knees and broken but incapable of basic tasks such as tax collection, primary school education or traffic management.

Trump’s key strategic aim may not be wholesale regime change, but political restructuring carried out in Iran itself. This has been on the table since last summer, when Israeli attacks, conducted with US blessing, targeted nuclear scientists and senior military figures — but politicians and senior clerics were left untouched. That was partly due to the hierarchy of targets; but it was also an opening for future discussion around regime survival in a modified form. Trump himself even hinted at this logic at the time: “We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding,” he wrote. “He is an easy target, but is safe there — We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.”

It is impossible to conceive of change from within in the current circumstances — as is clear from the (surprisingly large) number of defiant statements being made by senior officials in public in recent days, professing their loyalty and devotion to the cause. So the most likely scenario is a spiral of events in the coming days, one that sees a series of limited strikes against symbolic but painful targets that is designed to concentrate minds and lead to a different set of conversations to those that are taking place at the moment.

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There is no question that Iran, too, has cards to play, both regionally and elsewhere. It is no coincidence, for example, that dark warnings have been issued to European states, with Araghchi claiming that none are working to prevent “the eruption of all-out war in our region” and are instead “busy fanning the flames”, while Rear Admiral Ali Shamkhani, who has been appointed head of a new body that oversees military operations, has threatened “immediate, all out, and unprecedented” action targeting Tel Aviv and “all those supporting the aggressor” — presumably all those Nato countries that a week ago were worrying about whether the US had turned from friend to enemy.

This is geopolitical poker at its most raw and dangerous. Two sides, staring each other down while waiting for the other to blink. There are ways out of this; but they involve climb-downs that look too steep and precarious for either to countenance. What happens next, then, may be decided not by strategy or statesmanship, but by miscalculation — the moment when a bluff is called, a line is crossed and escalation takes on a momentum of its own that spins out of control.

Peter Frankopan is professor of global history at Oxford University