THE NEW YORK TIMES: The government in Tehran sees capitulating to Washington’s demands on uranium enrichment and ballistic missiles as riskier to its survival than going to war, analysts say.
Facing high-stakes brinkmanship as American warships and fighter jets mass off its shores, Iran has refused to concede to President Trump’s demands on its nuclear program and weapons — a stance that has bewildered U.S. officials.
The authoritarian clerics who rule Iran see those concessions — which, in their view, could compromise their core ideology and sovereignty — as a greater threat to their survival than the risk of war.
A dangerous mismatch in perceptions between Iran and the United States is why efforts to negotiate a deal over Iran’s nuclear and military capabilities look increasingly fragile, experts say, and a new regional conflict seems almost inevitable.
“Avoiding war is indeed a high priority, but not at any cost,” said Sasan Karimi, a political scientist at the University of Tehran who served as the deputy vice president for strategy in Iran’s previous government. “At times, a political state — especially an ideological one — may weigh its place in history as heavily as, or even more heavily than, its immediate survival.”
U.S. and Iranian negotiators are struggling to break an impasse over their respective red lines.
The Trump administration says it wants Iran to agree to zero nuclear enrichment to ensure it cannot build a nuclear weapon. U.S. officials have also sometimes insisted on limiting the range of Iran’s ballistic missiles and ending the country’s support for allied militias across the region.
For Iran, which says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only, nuclear enrichment is a right that the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, upholds and that his officials cannot abandon. And Iran sees possessing missiles that can reach as far as Israel as critical for self-defense. » | Erika Solomon | Monday, February 23, 2026
