Are The Iranian Demands Really Unreasonable as Trump Says?

US Bases in Middle East Uninhabitable Source

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired
HEO/GED
5-12-26

I don't visit CNN often, but a recent report titled Clash of Perception attempts to explain the deadlock in US-Iran negotiations. Reading it after following independent journalists and reputable international outlets is a jarring experience.

Trump described the latest Iranian response as "a piece of garbage" and rejected it outright. 

So let's examine what Iran is actually demanding.

Iran wants formal recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz — a waterway that sits alongside its own coastline in the Persian Gulf, the body of water named after Persia, what Iran was called until around 1959. Iran wants full relief from the US sanctions that have devastated its economy and contributed to years of social unrest. Americans should understand what sanctions mean in practice: they cut individuals and states off from the global economy and from the necessities of life. Trump sanctioning UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese for her criticism of Israel's conduct in Gaza, means she cannot even open a bank account. US /EU sanctions have cost 38 million lives according to a recent report from the Lancet.

Iran wants an end to hostilities on all fronts — that includes sanctions. It wants an end to the US naval blockade of its ports. It wants the right to civilian nuclear power but says it is willing to negotiate the specifics, with the primary condition being an end to the war that the US and Israel initiated.

Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House, puts it this way: "We're in a standoff because President Trump doesn't understand why these guys are not making a deal to save themselves." The Iranians, Vakil adds, don't trust Trump and have been "personally burnt by him." That is, to put it mildly, an understatement.

The US and Israel assassinated Iran's Supreme Leader Khamenei in the opening strikes of February 28th, along with key government figures including Ali Larijani, who had been central to the negotiations. Mojtaba Khamenei has since taken his father's place. Calling this being "personally burnt" by Trump is generous in the extreme.

On the first day of the war, a US Tomahawk missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, southern Iran, killing at least 156 people — over 110 of them schoolchildren. The US claims it as an accident, the result of outdated targeting data. One wonders how many people were killed in Afghanistan by US drone operators based on “outdated targeting data.”. 

Gen. Dan Caine stated the US military has struck over 13,000 targets in Iran, claiming severe damage to its air defences, navy, and weapons manufacturing capacity.

To oppose this is not to validate the Iranian government or its record. Washington embraces and has installed, many despotic regimes. Trump himself memorably joined the Saudi ruling elite around the glowing orb — the same elite responsible for the murder and dismemberment of journalist and US citizen, Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2019. The US overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953 and installed the murderous Shah that banned all opposition and imprisoned and tortured opponents.

Iranian Foreign Minister Esmaeil Baghaei has framed the disagreement as being "between a party that is solely seeking its fundamental rights and a party that insists on violating the rights of the other side." I personally think this is a valid argument. 

What is unreasonable about demanding an aggressor cease its aggression? The distrust is such that Iran is also demanding any agreement be guaranteed by major powers and ratified at the UN Security Council — an institution whose legitimacy the US has itself shattered through its support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the continued violence in the occupied territories where illegal settlers murder Palestinians at will and destroy their homes and farms. 

Trump, meanwhile, demands Iran dismantle its nuclear program entirely and hand over its enriched uranium stockpile. He called for "unconditional surrender" as recently as March 6th. What the US and Israel wants is an Iran completely subservient to US and Israeli power. 

According to Justin Wolfers, professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, when all costs are factored in — energy, environmental, inflationary, equipment replacement, and veteran healthcare — the war will cost far more than the $25 billion figure cited by the lunatic Hegseth, amounting to roughly $4,000 per US household. (New York Times, May 8, 2026.)

This war was unprovoked and illegal. It is being waged at enormous cost to the American taxpayer and at devastating cost to the Iranian people and their communities. The Iranian negotiating position — stop the war, lift the sanctions, provide guarantees against future attack — is a just one. The refusal to acknowledge this in the US corporate media tells you everything you need to know about the state of that media and the so-called claims of press freedom.

Alan Browne commented on this blog last week on the social crisis in the US and the savage assault on workers’ living standards and the difficulties workers face keeping their heads above water. This trend is continuing and the social crisis of this war is deepening at home and will continue as US imperial power declines until a mass movement, and, arising out of that, an independent political party based on the working class, our organizations, and communities, emerges as a real alternative to the Democrats. 

Capitalism cannot resolve a global crisis of its own making. I think it was Rosa Luxemburg who once wrote that the only alternative to the madness of the so-called free market and capitalist production was “Socialism or Barbarism”. Given the existence of nuclear weapons and the looming, market driven climate catastrophe, that threatens human life on this planet we are we are now facing socialism or annihilation.