Opinion

Trump keeps negotiating while Iran plays the long game America keeps missing

Iran's clerical rulers treat survival as divine mandate, not a negotiating position, and no deal can alter that calculus

By Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis, (ret.) Fox News

Published June 4, 2026 5:00am EDT

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Iran drone strike hits Kuwait airport as Trump says nuclear talks continue

Former Deputy National Security Advisor Victoria Coates joins 'Mornings with Maria' to discuss Iran's attack on Kuwait, President Donald Trump's ongoing nuclear talks and rising tensions across the Middle East.

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On Nov. 4, 1979, I was serving as duty officer at the headquarters of the 8th Infantry Division in Bad Kreuznach, West Germany. Late that day, a message arrived: Radical Iranian revolutionaries had stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and seized dozens of Americans. My job was to carry that report to the division commander, Maj. Gen. William J. Livsey, and keep him informed as the situation developed.

No special orders came down. No one fully grasped that we were watching the birth of a geopolitical problem that would outlast the Cold War, consume seven American presidencies, and remain unsettled half a century later.

That seizure exposed something beyond a diplomatic humiliation: When the embassy fell, America did not even have a military command responsible for the Persian Gulf. CENTCOM did not yet exist. The hostage crisis, followed weeks later by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, forced the realization. President Carter stood up the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force in March 1980 — the organization that became today’s CENTCOM in January 1983. The 1979 embassy seizure did not merely embarrass a superpower. It restructured how America organizes itself to fight in the Middle East.

FROM HOSTAGE CRISIS TO ASSASSINATION PLOTS: IRAN’S NEAR HALF-CENTURY WAR ON AMERICANS

Today, as Washington negotiates a tentative 60-day memorandum of understanding to extend the ceasefire, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and establish a framework for nuclear talks, I keep returning to that November evening in Bad Kreuznach. The particulars have changed. The fundamental dynamic has not.

The regime that refuses to lose

Washington’s current headlines focus on ceasefires, sanctions relief,........

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