February 21, 2025
by Warren L. Nelson
Three days after President Trump offered to negotiate a new nuclear agreement with Iran, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi stomped on the idea of talking with the United States about anything, saying flatly: “One should not negotiate with it.”
Khamenehi has made many statements in recent months that were interpreted by most listeners as opening the doors to talks in the future. But on February 7, he slammed the door tight with a speech filled with anti-American diatribes and including even factually inaccurate comments asserting that President Obama never abided by the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that he negotiated with Iran.
Many major American news outlets stated that Khamenehi did not flatly ban any talks, including The New York Times, which said Khamenehi “stopped short of ordering Iran’s government … not to engage with Washington,” and The Associated Press, which said he “stopped short of issuing a direct order not to engage with Washington”—oddly similar wording. The Washington Post carried no story the day after Khamenehi’s speech, and The Wall Street Journal carried only a few paragraphs in its briefs section. While it is quite common for Khamenehi to leave considerable wiggle room in his speeches, that was not true in his speech on talks with the United States.
Khamenehi, for example, lauded the Foreign Ministry for traveling the globe and signing agreements with “all” the countries of the world, then added: “The only exception in this regard is the United States.” Elsewhere in the speech, he said, “One should not negotiate with it.” And at another juncture in the speech, he said, “Negotiations with the United States have no effect on resolving the country’s problems.” (All the Khamenehi quotes in this article are taken from the official regime translations of the Supreme Leader’s speech posted on the Supreme Leader’s English language website.)
Referring to the hard work of the Foreign Ministry in negotiating, traveling, and concluding agreements with “all” countries in the world, he emphasized: “The only exception in this regard is the United States. Of course, we do not mention the Zionist regime as an exception, because this regime is not a government, but rather a criminal gang that usurps land.”
Explaining the reason for excluding the United States from negotiations with Iran, Khamenehi said: “Some pretend that if we sit at the negotiating table, a certain problem will be solved, but the reality that we must understand correctly is that negotiations with the United States have no effect on resolving the country’s problems.”
He cited the experience of two years of negotiations before the JCPOA was agreed to in 2015 as proof of the futility of negotiations with the United States, saying: “Our government of the day met with them, went back and forth, negotiated, laughed, shook hands, and acted as a friend, and a treaty was formed in which the Iranian side generously gave many concessions to the other side, but the Americans did not comply with that treaty.”
Khamenehi said that before Trump, “The previous US government [of President Barack Obama], which had accepted the treaty, did not comply with it, and the US sanctions that were supposed to be lifted were not lifted.” But that is false. The sanctions were lifted. From 2015 until Trump publicly repudiated the JCPOA in 2018, both countries abided by the agreement. Neither accused the other of violations
. Why Khamenehi decided now to rewrite history and attack Obama was not clear. But it raises questions as to whether his memory is playing tricks with him now that Khamenehi is 85 years old—almost as old as former President Joe Biden who has often had memory lapses.
Khamenehi made no political point with his attack on Obama, so there was no obvious political gain from his rewriting of history. Khamenehi said it was necessary to use the experience of “two years of negotiations, con cessions and concessions, but no results” leading up to the JCPOA. He said: “America violated the same treaty despite its shortcomings and withdrew from it. Therefore, negotiating with such a government is unwise, unintelligent and dishonorable, and one should not negotiate with it.”
Finally, he pulled out all the rhetorical stops and declared: “If they threaten us, we will threaten them; if they carry out their threat, we will carry out our threat; and if they attack the security of our nation, we will attack their security without hesitation.”
That stunning rhetoric appeared to go beyond anything Khamenehi has ever said before about the United States in terms of harshness. The day after the speech, Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi conceded that talks with Washington were now off the table. He said, “Lifting sanctions requires negotiation, but not under a policy of ‘maximum pressure.’ Negotiation cannot take place from a position of weakness because it is no longer called negotiation and is a form of surrender.
We will never come to the negotiating table like this.” This was a remarkable statement since it admitted the Islamic Republic was now in a “position of weakness.” Araqchi and many others focused on the fact that the Trump Administration had just issued some new sanctions when they said they could not negotiate under coercion from Washington.
But the new sanctions just hit six people, eight small firms and three tankers. They were like sanctions issued every few days for the last two decades. They didn’t stop previous negotiations from being held. What’s more, the serious negotiations that resulted in the JCPOA only started after Obama convinced Europe in 2012 to join in issuing really punishing sanctions. So, the excuse of new sanctions making talks impossible was clearly just a lame excuse.
President Pezeshkian also joined in the no-talks-becauseof-sanctions pitch: “Iran will not submit to any threat and will not back down in the face of pressure. Whoever wants to negotiate with us must stop anti-Iranian policies. Trump cannot dictate orders to us and impose sanctions on us and then talk about negotiations.” He said, “We’re not saying that we don’t negotiate. But Trump can’t impose all kinds of sanctions on us and then speak of negotiating. Why would he block food and water and medicine from us? [He’s not] They are not after negotiations.
They want us to be submissive to them. But we won’t be made submissive.” These comments made clear after months of public debate within the regime that negotiations are a dead letter for now. But they fail to explain why Khamenehi, after months of open-mindedness about negotiations, has now decided to slam the door shut.
Khamenehi’s speech was broadcast nationally on state television. He was speaking at the annual ceremony in which Air Force personnel repeat what was done February 7, 1979, when Air Force warrant officers appeared en masse before Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, saluting him to show their loyalty to him. Many view that as the culmination of the revolution because it showed a huge body of military personnel abandoning the monarchy and shifting their allegiance to Khomeini.
Even though Khamenehi was quite firm in barring any negotiations with Washington, some analysts thought the Supreme Leader might not mean what he said. Ali Vaez, the Iran director of the International Crisis Group, recalled that in 2011 Khamenehi publicly opposed negotiations with the Obama Administration even while he allowed Iranian officials to meet secretly with US officials in Oman to organize what later became publicly acknowledged negotiations leading to the JCPOA. But back then Khamenehi was simply continuing a longstanding public line opposed to talks until there was a breakthrough.
This time, Khamenehi was reversing weeks of statements in which he had repeatedly left the door to talks ajar. Just a week before slamming the door shut on talks, Khamenehi made one of many vague comments that many saw as holding the door ajar for possible talks. He then said, “We must be careful about whom we are dealing with and whom we are negotiating with.”
