Iran rejects US pressure in nuclear talks

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has said Tehran will not “bow down” to US pressure in nuclear talks, a line aimed as much at domestic audiences as at Washington. Al Jazeera reports the remarks as negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme grind on under the familiar mix of sanctions leverage, threat signalling and political theatre.

The interesting question is not whether Iran will resist pressure—every Iranian administration must say it will—but what each side is trying to make credible. In bargaining terms, both governments benefit from tying their hands. By publicly narrowing his room for concessions, Pezeshkian reduces Tehran’s temptation to accept a deal that looks like capitulation and increases the cost of compromise for any rival faction waiting to accuse him of weakness. The same logic holds in Washington: maximalist rhetoric allows the US to claim that any eventual rollback of pressure is “earned”, while keeping domestic hawks invested in escalation.

That dynamic tends to produce a predictable pattern: each side escalates in ways that are reversible for itself but costly for others. For Iran, that may mean calibrated nuclear steps, regional proxy activity, or maritime harassment that can be dialled up or down. For the US, it is often sanctions design, secondary sanctions and military posturing—tools that can be deployed quickly and, crucially, externalise a large share of the economic blowback.

Europe sits in the blast radius of this incentive structure. When Washington tightens the screws, energy risk premia and shipping insurance costs do not stay neatly on the US balance sheet. They show up in European import prices, industrial competitiveness and fiscal pressure—especially for states already subsidising households and firms against energy volatility. In game-theory terms, Europe is the “ally” whose costs are easiest to socialise: it is politically committed to the alliance, geographically exposed to Middle East supply disruptions, and institutionally slow to change course.

Pezeshkian’s refusal to yield also signals an internal constraint: Iran’s leadership has learned from past rounds that any deal perceived as temporary or dependent on the next US election is economically weak. If sanctions relief can be reversed by executive action, then the private sector will discount it—investment will not materialise, and the political payoff inside Iran collapses. That pushes Tehran to demand more durable guarantees, which US institutions are structurally reluctant to provide.

The result is a negotiation in which both parties prefer appearing tough to being flexible, even if a narrow technical compromise would be mutually beneficial. The longer that persists, the more the talks become less about centrifuges and verification than about domestic coalition management—while Europe is asked to treat the spillover as a moral duty rather than a bill.

Al Jazeera did not report any concrete new technical proposal alongside Pezeshkian’s comments, suggesting the immediate development is rhetorical positioning rather than a breakthrough. That, too, is information: when diplomacy is going nowhere, speeches become the product.