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President Trump says Iran is, quote, "getting decimated" and desperately wants to hold talks with his administration. Iran experts see a different picture. The country's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is consolidating power, and the one deal that the two sides did negotiate over the Strait of Hormuz is in tatters. NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Suzanne DiMaggio of the Carnegie Endowment is a big believer in and a practitioner of Track II diplomacy. That is informal talks between well-connected Iranians and U.S. experts.
SUZANNE DIMAGGIO: We're not there as negotiators. We're merely experts who are interested in better understanding of the Iranians' point of view, and most importantly, trying to see if there are any viable off-ramps.
KELEMEN: There are some countries playing a more formal mediating role, including Pakistan and Qatar. And there are some direct contacts between Trump's envoys and Iranian officials. But that's been limited, says DiMaggio, who believes Trump needs to beef up his negotiating team.
DIMAGGIO: Unless and until U.S. and Iranian negotiators get to the point where they're meeting for days and weeks at a time, not merely hours every now and then, we are going to be locked in a prolonged cycle of inadequate diplomatic engagements.
KELEMEN: She says both sides are overly confident in their ability to manage the current military escalation. President Trump brushed off a reporter this week who suggested that the Iranians are showing no signs of caving to U.S. military pressure.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Do you know something that I don't know?
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Well, they continue to attack our allies and kill Americans.
TRUMP: You don't know what the dialogue is behind the scenes, that they want to meet desperately to try and end it because they're getting decimated.
KELEMEN: His Secretary of State Marco Rubio, now in the Philippines for a regional summit, says it was the Iranians who broke the memorandum of understanding about traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.
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MARCO RUBIO: We remain open to diplomacy. We remain open to working it out in a negotiated way. But right now, they don't seem to be serious about that. And so we're going to continue to protect shipping.
KELEMEN: Rubio wouldn't give a timeline on how long it will take to, in his words, degrade Iran's ability to target global shipping. That wasn't even an issue before the war, says Carnegie Endowment Iran expert Karim Sadjadpour.
KARIM SADJADPOUR: Iran has learned that the way to win concessions from the United States isn't to take a step back and compromise. It's actually to punch back hard, to attack U.S. bases in the region, to attack U.S. partners in the Persian Gulf.
KELEMEN: Now, the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen are threatening to close a key oil route in the Red Sea.
SADJADPOUR: At the moment, the prospect for escalation looks more likely than the prospect for de-escalation.
KELEMEN: Neither side can really sustain a long war, says Abbas Milani, who runs the Iranian studies program at Stanford University. Still, he's hearing a lot of bombast.
ABBAS MILANI: Clearly, the war has weakened Iran. It has weakened the Iranian economy. But it has also emboldened it because they have found new soft spots that they can hit and virtually take the whole world economy hostage.
KELEMEN: On the U.S. side, Milani doesn't see much of a strategy from President Trump, who one day says he can work with Iran's new leaders, and another day calls them scum.
MILANI: The Iranian regime used to fear the unpredictability of Mr. Trump. I think now they use it to their benefit and put it as part of their calculation.
KELEMEN: He says the Iranians think Trump only cares about oil prices and the upcoming elections.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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