Recent Ceasefire, Old Betrayals: Why Iran Still Does Not Trust the United States

The trust problem between Tehran and Washington is not rhetorical. It is historical, concrete, and cumulative. From the Iranian point of view, the United States does not merely bargain hard: it negotiates while preserving sanctions, threats, deadlines, and, at decisive moments, the option of force. That is why the current two week ceasefire is being treated in Tehran not as a settlement but as a test of whether Washington can do something it has repeatedly failed to do before: keep its word.

The current pause was announced after Pakistani mediation and tied to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s conditions for any lasting peace have been explicit: U.S. attacks must stop, they must not resume, and coercive pressure cannot simply continue under another name. Even at the start, the ceasefire arrived clouded by contradiction. Pakistan said Lebanon was included. Israel said it was not. Tehran was therefore being asked, once again, to trust an arrangement whose scope was disputed before the ink was dry.

To understand why Iran does not trust Washington, one must start with the structure of the relationship, not the latest statement from the White House. The Western habit is to treat each confrontation with Iran as if it begins afresh, as if history can be suspended every time a new American administration offers talks. Tehran does not see it that way, and nor should it. States judge credibility by experience. Iran’s experience is that the United States keeps diplomacy alive publicly while retaining the machinery of coercion in full working order.

The first anchor is 1953. For Iran, the U.S. backed removal of Mohammad Mossadegh is not a museum piece. It is the foundational lesson. When Iranian sovereignty collided with Western strategic interests, Washington helped remove the government that posed the problem. This matters because it established a lasting presumption inside Iranian political culture: American policy toward Iran is not governed by abstract rules, but by shifting strategic convenience. Once that proposition becomes fixed, every later assurance is discounted before it is even tested.

Iranian distrust of the United States did not stop with the coup. It ran through America’s support for the Shah and the security apparatus that kept him in power. SAVAK, established in 1957 with assistance from U.S. and Israeli intelligence services, became notorious for surveillance, detention, torture, and the crushing of dissent. By the last phase of the Shah’s rule, that repression had moved from the prison cell to the street. On Black Friday in September 1978, state forces opened fire on protesters in Tehran. Contemporary and later accounts differ on the exact death toll, but the event became one of the blood-soaked turning points of the revolution. From Tehran’s point of view, the lesson was simple and enduring: when Iranian sovereignty and popular unrest collided with a U.S.-backed order, Washington stood with the machinery of repression, not with those under it.

The second anchor is the nuclear deal. This is the most devastating modern precedent because it involved precisely the sort of arrangement the West now claims to want again: inspections, restraint, staged commitments, and a diplomatic off ramp from war. In March 2018, the IAEA was still publicly saying Iran was implementing its nuclear related JCPOA commitments. Two months later, Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement and restored sanctions. From Tehran’s point of view, that is the decisive modern lesson. Even when Iran signs, complies, and submits to international monitoring, Washington may still tear up the bargain when domestic politics or regional pressure change direction.

This is where many Western arguments still fail. They speak as if trust can be repaired by a new proposal, a new envoy, or a new format. But the damage was not done by impolite rhetoric. It was done by the destruction of the very agreement that was supposed to prevent escalation. Once the United States demonstrated that even a multilateral, heavily verified arrangement could be discarded, every subsequent assurance became weaker. Iran’s negotiators have therefore learned the obvious lesson: do not trade concrete leverage for American paper promises.

Then came January 2020 and the killing of Qassem Soleimani. The point here is not to sanctify Soleimani. It is to identify what the episode told Tehran. The U.S. Department of Defense itself stated that the strike was carried out at the direction of the President. So from the Iranian point of view, Washington was again demonstrating that it retained the right to switch from pressure to open lethal force when it judged conditions favourable. Whatever language of stability or deterrence American officials used afterwards, the operative lesson in Tehran was simpler: force remained central, and negotiation did not neutralise it.

The present war has deepened the same logic. Reuters reported that Pakistani mediated efforts to facilitate U.S.-Iran talks were ongoing even as Trump issued ultimatums tied to Hormuz and threatened severe attacks if Iran did not comply. That is already enough to establish the core point: diplomacy and coercion were not separate tracks. They were running together. Iran was not negotiating in a neutral environment. It was negotiating under overt military threat.

And then came the February 28 strike. Reuters reported that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening U.S.-Israeli attacks. That fact changes the frame completely. If a foreign power killed the monarch or prime minister of a Western state while talks or active mediation were under way, no serious Western commentator would treat it as a technical complication in an otherwise manageable dispute. It would be called what it is: a constitutional shock, an attack on the political head of the state, and an event that transforms the entire diplomatic landscape. Iran is owed the same sovereign seriousness. To deny that is not neutrality. It is a hierarchy of whose statehood counts.

Sanctions complete the picture. They matter because they show that coercion is not suspended while diplomacy is attempted. Iran’s current framework includes sanctions relief precisely because sanctions remain in force and remain central to U.S. leverage. This is the pattern Tehran sees again and again: Washington asks Iran to scale back, open routes, or accept talks, while preserving the instruments that make those talks unequal. Force is threatened. Sanctions remain. Guarantees are demanded from Iran, but credible guarantees are not delivered to Iran.

That is why direct talks have broken down. Reuters reported in late March that there had been no direct negotiations between Iran and the U.S., with messages instead relayed by Egypt, Pakistan, and Gulf states. Other reporting from the same period said Iran cut off direct diplomacy after Trump’s threat to destroy Iranian civilisation while leaving mediated channels open. This is not a cosmetic point. It is the practical expression of distrust. Tehran is not refusing direct talks because it opposes diplomacy in the abstract. It is refusing direct talks because it no longer believes direct American assurances are worth very much on their own.

There is a temptation in the West to treat this Iranian position as obstinacy, ideology, or strategic theatre. That is too convenient. Iran is not required to forget 1953, the destruction of the JCPOA, the Soleimani strike, the sanctions architecture, or the killing of its Supreme Leader simply because Washington now wants a ceasefire to look like peace. A state that has repeatedly experienced negotiation and coercion as simultaneous instruments will not treat new assurances as self proving. It will demand intermediaries, sequencing, leverage, and proof.

That is the real meaning of the current ceasefire. It is not simply a pause in fighting. It is an argument about credibility. The United States says it wants de escalation. Iran asks why it should believe that claim when the record shows agreement followed by withdrawal, diplomacy followed by sanctions, mediation followed by threat, and, in the latest case, a strike that killed the supreme political authority of the Iranian state. From Tehran’s point of view, that is not a misunderstanding. It is a pattern.

That is why the evidence points in one direction. Iranians no longer trust the United States. And that is why they have increasingly refused to negotiate directly with Washington, preferring instead to deal through intermediaries, conditions, and leverage they control themselves.