As the United States and Iran embark on complicated negotiations toward a peace deal, U.S. officials have described a fundamentally transformed relationship between the two longstanding adversaries.
Iran has an opportunity to secure prosperity at home and finally free itself of the vice grip of sanctions, Vice President JD Vance has said, provided it agrees to long-term nuclear limits and rethinks its most critical foreign and military policies.
Mr. Vance, who was tasked by President Trump with leading the negotiations, has also said that Iranian pragmatists and hard-liners were warming to the idea that it was time to turn over a new leaf in Iran-U.S. relations.
The United States has been down a similar path before. In 2015, President Obama reached a deal with Iran, offering sanctions relief in exchange for restrictions on the Iranian nuclear program.
That deal offers a cautionary tale, as the current administration now engages in talks with even more ambitious aims.
Proponents of the deal believed it would lead to Iran becoming more focused on domestic development than ideology, but it soon faced resistance from Iran’s clerical-military establishment. Those elements of the regime blocked a true opening-up of Iran’s economy and launched a crackdown against those who had brought foreign investment into the country.
Of course, Iran has undergone seismic events in the last decade, including several rounds of protest sparked by economic discontent. Its current leaders, elevated after the killing of their predecessors during the recent war, may well decide to prioritize economic growth going forward, if only to preserve their own rule.
At the time the 2015 deal was being negotiated, pragmatists in Iran were already working to maximize its economic potential.
In 2014, the country’s then-president, Hassan Rouhani, who had been elected on a promise to lift the sanctions through diplomacy, met in a Manhattan hotel with some of the most successful Iranian Americans from tech, finance, law, and business.
On its face, Mr. Rouhani’s pitch was enticing: Return to Iran, bringing your connections and investment capital, according to two people who attended the meeting and requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. Iran wanted its economy to reach its full potential, and its talented diaspora was essential to that effort, Mr. Rouhani told them.
Sorena Sattari, Iran’s vice president for science and technology during Mr. Rouhani’s tenure, said in an email that he was at a 2014 New York meeting with Mr. Rouhani and Iranian American business leaders. Mr. Sattari said he held dozens of other meetings with scientists and entrepreneurs of Iranian origin during his visits to the city.
Mr. Rouhani did not respond to requests for comment sent via email and his social media account. Ultimately, his bid to transform the country’s economy through foreign connections fell flat.
Instead of receiving a universal welcome, many Iranian dual nationals and foreigners who tried to work in or visit Iran in the years after the 2015 deal faced harassment and arrest by the country’s powerful security forces. Iran’s leaders proved suspicious of foreign capital flowing into their economy, believing it would be a vector for outside infiltration.
In public comments in 2023, Mr. Rouhani said that one Iranian dual national who had attended one of his talks in New York in 2014 had decided to return to Iran, only to be detained at the airport upon arrival.
Javad Zarif, who served as foreign minister during Mr. Rouhani’s tenure, said in an email that it was always Iran’s policy to encourage Iranian scientists and experts to return to the country, but he did not address the crackdown against some of those who did.
Iran remained isolated, and Iranians soon soured on their president. Mr. Trump’s decision to pull out of the nuclear deal and reimpose sanctions on Iran during his first term in 2018 further ensured that Iran would not join the world economy.
Now, a decade later, the Trump administration is gambling that Iran’s security forces can be enticed into moderating their confrontational policies with the prospect of global integration.
Or as Mr. Vance, in an interview with The New York Times Opinion section last month, put it, Iranian leaders from across its political divides are coming around to the view “that 47 years of Iran policy toward the United States has been a mistake.”
The interim memorandum of understanding that Iran and the United States signed in June envisions $300 billion in reconstruction funds and the lifting of all sanctions, in return for Iran restricting its nuclear program.
Since the signing, Mr. Vance has said that Iran will not receive the most significant financial incentives unless it also turns its back on nearly five decades of ideological opposition to the United States, and its support for militant groups in the Middle East.
“If they don’t transform, they don’t get any of the economic benefits of the bargain,” he said in his interview with the Times’s Opinion section.
Such a fundamental transformation would not be in keeping with the Iranian government’s habits and instincts, forged over decades. The ideology that swept its Islamic government to power in 1979 remains rooted in opposition to the United States. And Iran’s most powerful economic players today are the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a military force, and semipublic companies that are controlled by the clerical leadership.
Their business interests would be threatened if the economy were to truly open up, economists and experts say, as it would likely bring in outside, independent funds that might dilute their control of key sectors.
“I don’t buy it for a second,” said Richard Nephew, a former Obama and Biden administration official who was the lead expert on sanctions on the U.S. negotiating team that secured the 2015 deal. “I can see these guys wanting to expand the ability to do international trade and whatnot, but that’s not because they want to change the system.”
Just weeks after his diplomats finalized the deal in July 2015, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, then Iran’s supreme leader and who held ultimate power in Iran’s theocratic system, gave a set of speeches that warned of enemy “infiltration” of Iran.
“We will not allow the Americans’ economic infiltration in our country, nor their political infiltration, nor their political presence, nor their cultural infiltration,” he said in one of the speeches.
The message was that Iran could take some benefits from the deal, but it would not become the basis for normalization with the United States or Western economic reach into Iran. Mr. Khamenei publicly struck down further efforts by Mr. Rouhani to build on the nuclear deal and further connect Iran to the outside world.
In the years after the 2015 nuclear deal, Iranian security forces launched a wave of arrests targeting Iranians with connections to the West as well as foreign nationals. Some went to explore business opportunities, others to visit family, carry out research, or for other personal reasons.
Each arrest, which often included unfounded allegations of espionage, served to dampen outsiders’ enthusiasm for going to Iran, for fear that they too would be targeted.
“There’s nothing even remotely going to happen that’s going to be a positive for people to go back and invest” in the next several years, said Morad Tahbaz, an Iranian-American conservationist who was arrested by authorities in 2018 and held in Tehran’s Evin prison, before being released in 2023 as part of a deal with the United States. “It’s almost hard for me to imagine that things could change that radically.”
Mr. Khamenei is no longer in power, having been killed at the outset of the U.S.-Israeli war in February along with other political leaders and several layers of military commanders. Mr. Trump has said there has been “regime change” in Iran, and complimented Iran’s new leaders as “not radicalized” and “very rational.”
Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council, an advocacy group that favors the removal of sanctions on Iran, said that while Mr. Vance’s comments about a new era in relations may be oversimplified, “there are grounds for some optimism that this could be the turning point for the U.S.- Iran relationship and their roles in the region.”
He acknowledged that there are still major hurdles. The war has reinforced Iran’s notion that its support for militant groups in the region is essential to its security, and there is deep mistrust toward U.S. officials given that past negotiations have been interrupted by attacks.
And yet, Mr. Abdi added, “there is some evidence that a new generation has emerged in Iran’s leadership and security forces that is less committed to the ideological projects of the state and more focused on the practicalities of governance, a sort of pragmatic nationalism.”
Mr. Khamenei’s successor as supreme leader, his son Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, is only months into his rule. How he will approach Iran’s many deep problems is still largely untested, but he was a key player in running affairs in his father’s office, and so far, he has shown little inclination toward a radically different view of the United States.
Mohammad-Hossein Khoshvaght, a political analyst and a relative of the Khamenei family by marriage, said in a recent interview with a reformist news outlet in Iran that Mojtaba Khamenei would continue his father’s path, but in light of the “new conditions” after the war, it was possible that his “management style” would be different.
“Conditions have changed and, naturally, wisdom demands that the current leader operate commensurate with conditions,” Mr. Khoshvaght said.
