Majid Takht Ravanchi, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, wrote an op-ed a few days ago laying out the obstacles standing in the way of negotiations with the U.S.:

The United States’ proposal on dialogue with Iran faces three major hurdles. First, history shows that genuine talks cannot be productive if they are coupled with intimidation, coercion and sanctions. A dialogue can succeed if both sides accept the principle of mutual respect and then act on equal footing.

Second, the Trump administration does not speak with a united voice on the need for a dialogue with Iran. Those who are eager to provoke a conflict are working to sabotage the possibility of useful and meaningful dialogue.

Finally, Trump’s sudden withdrawal from the JCPOA nuclear deal last year with no good reason — and to the disapproval of almost the entire international community — stirs concerns that any future deal might face the same fate, with no guarantee to the contrary.

As the ambassador explains, the current “maximum pressure” campaign discourages Iran from being willing to talk. The pressure campaign starts from the faulty assumption that other states respond to bullying by seeking to appease the bully, but instead it provokes defiance. It will not force Iran to come to the negotiating table, since it was the Trump administration that unceremoniously walked away from the table in the first place. If our positions were reversed, our government would have the same objections. The beginning of any real understanding starts here.

Suppose that our government were fully complying with the terms of a deal that had already required us to make significant concessions to a group of foreign powers, and then one of those powers flagrantly violated its obligations simply because it could and demanded that we make even more sweeping concessions across the board. How would we respond to being targeted with economic warfare and told that we had to give the deal-breaking government whatever it wanted? We would refuse to give the deal-breaking party an inch, because we would know that they were untrustworthy and were seeking to do us great harm.

Americans regularly fail to understand how other states see the world, and worse many of our policymakers don’t even want to try. Our leaders either project their own aspirations onto other governments, or they don’t accept that other states have legitimate interests and views that need to be taken into account. As a result, the U.S. government frequently expects everyone to want to be just like us, or it refuses to acknowledge the other side’s reasonable concerns and demands and thinks that our government can make them accept anything. Sometimes it does both. Steven Metz warned about this in a recent column:

It has been characterized most of all by a pervasive tendency to assume that other nations and other peoples see politics and security the same way that Americans do. But not surprisingly, that leads to a lot of misperceptions. Today, those misperceptions, propelled by the Trump administration’s eccentric approach to statecraft, are becoming increasingly dangerous as America’s margin for error in its foreign policy decreases. If left unchecked, these chronic misunderstandings may push the United States into an unintended crisis or conflict.

One example of this is the Trump administration’s insistence that its ultimatum to Iran containing unrealistic demands is simply a call for Iran to be a “normal” country. Because Iran is an adversary, the administration doesn’t acknowledge that it has any legitimate security interests in the region and so it sees all Iranian activity as “malign” behavior that has to end in order for Iran to be “normal.” They fail to appreciate how bizarre and abnormal it is for our government to be obsessed with the behavior of a medium-sized regional power on the other side of the planet, but more than that they fail to consider how our behavior over the last several decades appears to the people in the country that our government is aggressively sanctioning and coercing. Iran is responding to the administration’s bullying just as our government would respond if we were in their position, but the administration still mistakenly believes that it can force Iran to capitulate on terms that we would never agree to in their place. Until our government gives up on that bankrupt idea, the current impasse with Iran can’t end.