Wendy Sherman speaks during a meeting in Wellington, New Zealand in August 2022. | Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images American and Iranian negotiators are reportedly getting closer to a deal that would end the weeks-long war between the nations, following the collapse of in-person talks in Islamabad last weekend. In his announcement Sunday, Vice President JD Vance initially sounded pretty hopeless about the whole thing, as you might expect of a man whose dreams had just been smashed. But now there are reports of backchannel phone calls, Pakistani delegations, frameworks of frameworks…it’s all very The Diplomat. Incidentally, my colleagues at the Today, Explained podcast just scored a fascinating interview with an actual diplomat: Wendy Sherman, the former deputy secretary of state and President Barack Obama’s top negotiator for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. So this morning, we’re turning to Sherman to (try to) understand the Trump administration’s screwups in Iran in 2026. In her new interview with Vox’s Noel King, Sherman cautioned against being too “reductive” in discussing the outcomes of the war or the talks. (Iran has absolutely been weakened, she said.) But she outlined five areas where the Trump administration’s approach has, so far, failed. Problem No. 1: They sent the B team to negotiate Nearly 300 Americans descended…
Trump’s bungled Iran negotiations didn’t have to go this way
