Despite stalled talks with Iran and a fragile ceasefire nearing its end, President Trump expressed optimism this week that a permanent deal is within reach — one that may include Iran relinquishing its enriched uranium. However, experts who spent months negotiating a nuclear agreement during the Obama administration say mutual mistrust, starkly different negotiating styles make a quick truce unlikely.

Referring to Vice President Vance’s whirlwind negotiations in Islamabad last week that appear to have produced little beyond dashed expectations, Wendy Sherman, the lead U.S. negotiator on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal finalized in 2015, says the administration’s approach was all wrong.

“You cannot do a negotiation with Iran in one day,” she told NPR’s Here & Now earlier this week. “You can’t even do it in a week.” To get agreement on the JCPOA, she said, it took “a good 18 months.”

The talks leading to that deal highlighted Iran’s meticulous style of negotiation, says Rob Malley, who was also part of the JCPOA negotiating team and later served as a special envoy to Iran under President Joe Biden.

Summing up the two sides’ differing styles, Malley said: “Trump is impulsive and temperamental; Iran’s leadership [is] stubborn and tenacious.”

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks during a news conference on the Iran nuclear talks deal at the Austria International Centre in Vienna, Austria on July 14, 2015.

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In 2015, patience led to a deal

The talks in 2015, led by Secretary of State John Kerry and Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, culminated with a marathon 19-day session in Vienna to finish the deal, says Jon Finer, a former U.S. deputy national security adviser in the Biden administration. Finer was involved in the negotiations as Kerry’s chief of staff. He said his boss’s patience “was a huge asset” in getting the deal to the finish line, he said.

Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister during the negotiations for the Obama-era nuclear deal, speaks on April 22, 2016 in New York.

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“He would endure lectures … ‘let me tell you about 5,000 years of Iranian civilization’… and just keep plowing ahead,” Finer said, adding that a tactic of Iranian negotiators seemed to be “to say no to everything and see what actually matters” to the U.S.

“They’re just maddeningly difficult,” he said. “You need to go back at the same issue 10 or 12 times over weeks or months to make any progress.”

Even so, Finer called the Iranian negotiators “extremely capable” — noting that, unlike the U.S., they often lacked expert advisers “just outside the room,” yet still mastered the details of nuclear weapons, nuclear materials and U.S. sanctions.

“They were also negotiating not in their first language,” Finer added. “The documents were all negotiated in English, and they were hundreds of pages long with detailed annexes.”

Vance’s trip to Islamabad suggests that the U.S. doesn’t have the patience for a negotiation to end the conflict that could be at least as complex and time-consuming. “The Trump administration came in with maximalist demands and actually just wanted Iran to capitulate,” Sherman, who served as deputy secretary of state during the Biden administration, told Here & Now. “No nation – even one as odious as the Iran regime – is going to capitulate.”

Distrust but verify

Iran was attacked twice in the past year. First in June of last year, as nuclear negotiations were ongoing, Israel and the U.S. struck the country’s nuclear facilities. Months later, at the end of February, Iran was attacked again at the start of the latest conflict. This time around, “the level of trust is probably almost at an all-time low,” Malley said.

“It’s hard for them to take at their word what they’re hearing from U.S. officials,” Malley said. The Iranians, he said, have to be wondering how long any commitment will last and “will be very hesitant to give up something that’s tangible” – such as their enriched uranium – in exchange for anything that isn’t ironclad or subject to suddenly be discarded by Trump or some future president.

“Once they give up their stockpile … they can’t recapture it the next day,” Malley said.

Even during the 2013-2015 nuclear deal talks, the decades of mistrust between Tehran and Washington were impossible to ignore, Finer said. “Our theory was not trust but verify — it was distrust but verify,” he said, adding: “I think that was their theory too.”

Malley cautions about relying on the JCPOA as a guide to how peace talks to end the current war might go. The leadership in Tehran that agreed to the deal is now gone — killed in Israeli airstrikes, he says. The regime’s military capabilities are also greatly diminished and “whatever lessons were learned in the past … have to be viewed with a lot of caution, because so much has changed,” he said.

Negotiations have a leveling effect

Mark Freeman, executive director of the Institute for Integrated Transitions, a peace and security think tank based in Spain that advises on conflict negotiations, says several factors shape the U.S.-Iran relationship. Going into talks, one side always has the upper hand, he says, but negotiations have a leveling effect. “The weaker party gains just by virtue of entering into a negotiation process,” he said.

Each side is looking for leverage, he adds.

In Iran’s case, it has used its closure of the Strait of Hormuz to exert such leverage, while the White House has shown an eagerness to resolve the conflict quickly. “If one side perceives the other needs an agreement more … that shapes the entire negotiation,” he said.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was seen for years as a master of tilting the electoral playing field in his favor to remain in power. On Sunday, his carefully-crafted strategy finally failed.

His opponent, Péter Magyar – a former Orbán loyalist – ran a campaign focused on Hungary’s economic problems, government corruption and getting rid of the prime minister himself. The record turnout overwhelmed the measures Orbán had taken over the years to preserve power.

Hungarian American experts here in the U.S. say Orbán’s loss has lessons for President Trump, and about the resilience of democracy.

“You can rewrite the constitution, you can capture public media, you can gerrymander election districts, but as long as people still enjoy the freedom to vote and to vote for whomever they want to, these systems can be reversed under the right circumstances,” said David Koranyi who runs Action for Democracy, a U.S.-based civil society organization.

The case of Hungary is relevant because many political scientists say Trump has adopted a version of Orbán’s competitive authoritarian playbook.

The president has sued news organizations, and the Federal Communications Commission has threatened to pull licenses from broadcasters the president has said are biased against him. 

Trump has also suggested the federal government take over the running of elections in 15 states and has used the Justice Department to target his perceived political enemies.

Orbán’s defeat shows the limits of these sorts of tactics, especially when wielded by an unpopular leader.

“Fundamentally in a democracy, you can’t have the majority of people against you for too long before you lose power,” said Lorinc Redei, who teaches politics at the University of Texas at Austin.

Orbán’s loss also suggests opportunities for Democrats heading into the midterms and Republicans thinking about a presidential run in 2028, experts say. Like Orbán, President Trump is vulnerable on the economy, which he pledged to fix. An NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll earlier this year found nearly 6 in 10 people disapproved of Trump’s handling of the economy – normally a strength for the president.

Magyar, a former member of Orbán’s Fidesz party, led the opposition in Hungary and built a broad coalition. Magyar cut a patriotic profile, traveling the country in a pickup truck with a color scheme that matched the Hungarian flag.

“Everywhere he went, he emphasized that national identity and patriotism do not belong to the right wing,” said Julia Sonnevend, a professor of sociology and communications at the New School in New York.

Sonnevend said Magyar also steered clear of divisive social issues. When Orbán tried to ban last year’s Pride parade in Budapest, Magyar chose not to march and kept his coalition together.

“Magyar really managed to unite the entire opposition to Orbán under his flag and I think that carries lessons for Democrats . . . that you need to create a very, very broad tent,” said Redei, the politics professor.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been a favorite of many MAGA Republicans for his tough stance on immigration and his anti-LGBTQ policies.

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Magyar also benefitted from his profile as an insider and member of Orbán’s right-wing party, who saw the light and quit. Magyar publicly broke with Orbán’s government two years ago. Magyar was furious after his ex-wife, the justice minister, took the fall for a scandal involving the pardon of a child sex abuser.

Koranyi says members of the Trump administration who want to succeed him could try to distance themselves from the president in advance of a 2028 presidential run. But choosing when to break with a powerful leader is tricky.

“It’s hard to know ahead of time when that window of opportunity is going to close,” said Redei. “The higher up you are in a party, the earlier it closes.”

Some conservative political watchers in the U.S., however, said people are reading too much into Orbán’s loss. The United States is a vast, ethnically diverse nation of about 340 million people, while Hungary has a population of less than 10 million and is about the size of Indiana.

Matt Schlapp, who leads the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), pointed out that Orbán, 62, was running for a fifth term, and that no politician can win forever.

“When you’ve been in power 16 years, as Victor Orbán has, longer than FDR . . . it was probably asking a little too much to buck that much history,” said Schlapp, whose organization has held annual conferences in Hungary.

Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, noted that a win for Magyar – who favors strict immigration and conservative social values – is no victory for the left. But Gonzalez added that Orbán’s defeat has lessons for President Trump.

“Keep the promises you’ve made,” said Gonzalez. “Above all, don’t get complacent.”