What The Hawks Miss About The Iran Talks
by Portfolio Armor
Monday, Jun 22, 2026 - 19:37
What The Hawks Miss About The Iran Talks
A lot of Trump’s critics are treating the Switzerland talks as a humiliation, a sellout, or a failure waiting to happen.
That misses the point.
The war came first because, in a real sense, it had to come first. For Americans old enough to remember 1979—and Donald Trump is certainly one of them—the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was never just a diplomatic incident. It was an act of war, covered at the time by the regime’s fig leaf that “students” had done it rather than the regime itself.
The United States never imposed a price commensurate with that act. Jimmy Carter’s response lodged in the American memory as weakness. For a country that still thinks in terms of honor, deterrence, and humiliation, that mattered.
Now Iran has paid a price.
American and Israeli strikes killed Ali Khamenei, Ali Larijani, Ali Shamkhani, Mohammad Pakpour, Aziz Nasirzadeh, Abdolrahim Mousavi, Esmail Khatib, Gholamreza Soleimani, Behnam Rezaei, Alireza Tangsiri, Majid Khademi, and other senior regime, military, intelligence, and IRGC figures. They destroyed Khamenei’s compound. They hit Iranian air defenses, command nodes, missile infrastructure, naval assets, and military facilities repeatedly. The regime survived, but America and Israel punished it.
That matters on the American side of the ledger.
It matters on the Iranian side too.
Why Iran Had To Fight Before It Could Deal
Iran couldn’t realistically go from decades of “Death to America” to normalized relations by press release.
Part of the reason is institutional. The previous clerical leadership was unlikely to accept a genuine normalization with Washington, and many of the men most invested in the old posture are now dead. But the deeper reason is cultural and political. A regime that built much of its legitimacy around resistance to America needed to be seen resisting America before it could negotiate with America.
Iran did resist.
It got hit much harder than it hit back, but it didn’t fold. It survived weeks of American and Israeli bombing. It kept launching missiles and drones. It struck American military bases in the Gulf. And, reportedly, it even managed to hit Camp Buehring in Kuwait with an old F-5 fighter jet—a bizarre Top Gun: Maverick inversion in which Iran, not the hero, flies the obsolete aircraft.
That episode, if the reporting is accurate, matters less militarily than symbolically. Iran didn’t just lob missiles from a distance. It sent pilots in museum-piece airframes into harm’s way and scored at least one hit.
The regime can now tell its own hawks: we fought America and Israel, we survived, and we hit back.
That may be the condition that makes diplomacy possible.
Sunday’s Theater
A lot of people jumped on Sunday’s intemperate statements from both sides as proof that the talks had failed.
Trump threatened Iran again. Iran’s negotiators talked tough. Iranian media floated walkout stories. American critics pounced. The usual people declared the whole thing a debacle before the first round had even finished.
That reading is too literal.
Both sides were signaling to their own hawks. Trump had to remind the Republican right, Israel, the Gulf states, and Tehran that America’s military options remained on the table. Iran’s negotiators had to remind their own hardliners that they weren’t crawling to Switzerland to accept dictated terms.
Both sides almost certainly understood what the other was doing.
That’s why the talks kept going through mediators even after the public fireworks. That’s why the technical talks are continuing. That’s why the first round produced a 60-day roadmap, a Lebanon mechanism, a communications line for the Strait of Hormuz, and movement on sanctions waivers, oil exports, frozen assets, and reconstruction.
The rhetoric was ugly. The diplomacy continued.
That’s what hard diplomacy often looks like after a war.
The Attack On Vance
Much of the Republican-side commentary about Switzerland is less about Iran than about 2028.
A faction of the Republican foreign-policy world still hopes Marco Rubio, not JD Vance, becomes Trump’s successor and restores a more conventional neoconservative foreign policy. That faction can’t attack Trump directly, because Trump remains too popular with Republican voters. So it attacks Vance.
The argument wears the costume of concern about American humiliation, but the political target is obvious. Vance is being framed as the weak link, the naive negotiator, the man getting played by Tehran. By extension, the attack also targets Trump’s policy, because Vance isn’t freelancing in Switzerland. He’s carrying out the president’s strategy.
Some of the attacks aren’t subtle.
We see the coordinated op and it's not going to work.
That comparison doesn’t survive contact with history.
Ronald Reagan hit Iran in Operation Praying Mantis in 1988, and that was a serious naval action. But Trump hit Iran far harder with Operation Epic Fury. Reagan also sold weapons to Iran as part of Iran-Contra. And when 241 American servicemen were killed in the Beirut Marine barracks bombing in 1983, Reagan didn’t double down on the Lebanon peacekeeping mission. He pulled the Marines out.
That doesn’t make Reagan a coward. It makes him a president who understood limits.
Trump understands limits too.
Prudence After Force
The hawks calling for regime change, invasion, or a return to full-scale war are being imprudent.
Trump has cared about nuclear proliferation for at least forty years. He knows Iran can’t be allowed to become a nuclear weapons state. But he also knows military force can only achieve so much at an acceptable cost.
America can bomb Iran. America can kill senior Iranian leaders. America can destroy military targets. America can blockade Iranian ports. America can rescue downed pilots from Iranian territory and demonstrate that it won’t leave Americans behind.
America can’t occupy Iran cheaply. It can’t turn a proud, ancient, mountainous country of more than 90 million people into a stable client state by invasion. It can’t keep the Strait of Hormuz throttled indefinitely without imposing serious costs on the global economy. It can’t ask voters who elected Trump to avoid stupid wars to support an open-ended occupation of Persia.
Trump seemed to acknowledge that reality in France when he talked about the economic catastrophe that could follow if the war and the Hormuz crisis continued. Energy workarounds and strategic stockpiles can’t permanently substitute for normal shipping through one of the world’s most important chokepoints.
The choice was between converting battlefield gains into a durable settlement and letting maximalists push America into a war whose political support would evaporate the moment body bags started coming home in large numbers.
Trump chose to bank the gains.
That’s prudence after force.
The Dollar Angle
One underappreciated aspect of the sanctions debate is what sanctions relief would actually do to Iran.
Critics describe the mooted $300 billion reconstruction and development plan as though the United States would simply write Tehran a check. That’s almost certainly not how it would work. The more likely structure would involve some mixture of private-sector financing, regional government loans, strategic investments, joint ventures, oil revenue normalization, and access to previously frozen assets.
To get that, Iran would have to come back through the dollar system.
That’s not a small thing.
For years, the BRICS fantasy has held that Russia, China, Iran, and the rest of the “Global South” would build a parallel financial order outside American reach. The fantasy was always overstated. The yuan can’t replace the dollar so long as Beijing reserves the right to devalue it whenever necessary to maintain its trade surplus and domestic employment model. A currency controlled that way can support bilateral trade and political signaling, but it can’t function as a true global reserve substitute.
If Iran gets pulled back into dollar-denominated trade, dollar-cleared investment, Western-linked financing, and U.S.-licensed reconstruction, the BRICS alternative becomes even less plausible.
The same goes for the International North-South Transport Corridor, the Russia-Iran-India route designed in part to move trade outside the reach of U.S. sanctions and naval pressure. If Washington reestablishes diplomatic and economic relations with Tehran, it gains leverage over that corridor instead of watching Iran function as the sanctioned hinge between Moscow and New Delhi.
That’s a strategic gain, not a giveaway.
The Russia Spillover
There’s also a Russia angle here.
If Washington normalizes relations with Iran, lifts sanctions, permits reconstruction financing, and pulls Tehran back into the dollar system, it’ll become harder to explain why sanction-free relations with Iran are possible but sanction-free relations with Russia aren’t.
The two cases aren’t identical. Russia is fighting a major land war in Europe. Iran’s war was shorter, more contained, and more directly tied to nuclear and regional-security arrangements. But the diplomatic contrast will still be obvious. If a postwar Iran can come back into the American-led economic order, then Washington can’t simply treat a postwar Russia as permanently untouchable without making sanctions look less like a tool of policy and more like a theological category.
That may be one of the larger consequences of an Iran settlement.
The earlier Russia track was real enough to alarm the Ukraine-war establishment. Axios reported last year that the Trump administration had been quietly working with Russia on a Ukraine peace plan, and Reuters reported that the proposal grew out of discreet discussions involving Steve Witkoff and Kirill Dmitriev. Park MacDougald put the internal fight more sharply on X: “Rubio burned a lot of political capital to strangle the Witkoff-Dmitriev plan.”
Rubio burned a lot of political capital to strangle the Witkoff-Dmitriev plan.
The flip side of that is that he’s going to have to say things like this in public.
On one side is the Trump-Witkoff-Vance instinct: use American leverage to get settlements. On the other side is the old Republican foreign-policy apparatus, which is more comfortable treating Ukraine as an open-ended proxy war and Russia as a permanently sanctioned enemy. Rubio has often sounded closer to the latter camp, which is why his role in both the Russia and Iran tracks matters.
A successful Iran deal would strengthen the case for reviving the Russia track.
It would show that Trump’s method is force followed by bargaining. Hit hard where necessary. Establish the limits of what force can achieve. Then convert leverage into a settlement before the war party moves the goalposts from victory to maximalism.
There’s a warning here too.
If Russia concludes that Iran got Washington to the table by surviving punishment, imposing costs, threatening energy flows, and proving that escalation could damage the global economy, Moscow may draw its own conclusions. Great powers notice what gets results. If diplomacy with Russia remains blocked while diplomacy with Iran succeeds, the lesson Moscow takes may not be the one Washington wants it to take.
That’s another reason to treat an Iran settlement as part of a larger strategic reset, not as a one-off exception.
A president who can make peace with Tehran after war should be able to make peace with Moscow after Ukraine. The alternative is a foreign policy in which America reconciles with the former “Death to America” regime while continuing an open-ended proxy war against the world’s largest nuclear power.
That would be a strange definition of realism.
Israel And Iran
The Israel-Iran side of the conflict will be harder to settle.
There’s no near-term path to normal Israeli-Iranian relations. Too much blood has been spilled. Too many constituencies on both sides define themselves against the other. Israel needed to learn the limits of what it could accomplish by airpower alone. Iran needed to learn the price of continuing to arm and encourage proxies at Israel’s borders.
That learning process was brutal, but it was probably necessary too.
The realistic near-term objective isn’t Israeli-Iranian normalization. It’s Lebanon. If Trump can get Iran to rein in Hezbollah, and if Washington can get Israel to withdraw, then the most dangerous live fuse in the postwar settlement can be dampened.
That won’t end the ideological hostility between Israel and Iran. It may not even end covert conflict between them. But it could move the region away from open war and toward a colder, more manageable rivalry.
That’s how a lot of wars end. Not with hugs. Not with trust. With limits.
The Possible Shape Of Peace
The Switzerland talks should be judged against the reality of what came before them.
America and Israel demonstrated they could decapitate much of Iran’s leadership and batter its military infrastructure. Iran demonstrated it could survive, impose costs, disrupt global energy flows, and keep fighting. The United States demonstrated it was willing to use overwhelming force, but not willing to invade and occupy Iran. Iran demonstrated it could still retaliate, but not defeat America or Israel conventionally.
Those are the facts the diplomats are now negotiating over.
The hawks wanted the war to end with regime change. The third-worldists wanted it to end with America humiliated. Neither got what they wanted.
What may be emerging instead is more realistic: no Iranian nuclear weapon, sanctions relief conditioned on compliance, Iran pulled back into the dollar system, Hormuz reopened, Hezbollah restrained, Israel out of Lebanon, and the United States positioned as the indispensable power in the settlement rather than the exhausted occupier of another Middle Eastern country.
Iran may cheat. Israel may keep striking Lebanon. Republican hawks may try to sabotage the deal from Washington. Iranian hardliners may try to sabotage it from Tehran. The 60-day deadline is ambitious, and the old JCPOA took far longer than that.
But the fact that the talks are happening at this level, after this war, is historic.
The war clarified what force could do. Switzerland may clarify what diplomacy can do after force has done its work.
That’s the opportunity Trump and Vance are trying to seize.
