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He’s gone from threatening to erase Iranian civilization to promising to make it flourish.

Reports that JD Vance may soon be wheels-up again for another round of talks with Iran are accompanied by a notably different tone from the American vice president. Last time, ahead of the marathon session in Islamabad that produced nothing, the mood music from Washington was martial — threats of civilizational destruction, ultimatums about the Strait of Hormuz. This time, Vance is selling prosperity. “We are going to make Iran thrive, we’re going to make it economically prosperous, and we’re going to invite the Iranian people into the world economy,” he told a Turning Point USA audience in Georgia this week. His boss, Vance said, wants not a small deal but a “Trumpian grand bargain.”

The rhetorical distance traveled is remarkable. What has not moved very much is the Trump administration’s appreciation of what the Islamic Republic actually wants — and what it fears. The American side’s misreading of the regime’s motivations will likely doom the next round of talks as surely as it did the first.

Before we get to that, remember that Vance is still burdened with the Trump administration’s credibility problem. The regime in Tehran has watched his boss shred agreements with America’s allies, withdraw from multilateral commitments, and — most directly relevant — tear up the JCPOA, the nuclear deal that Iran made with six world powers. As the Iranians have repeatedly pointed out, their country has twice been attacked in the middle of negotiations by the US and Israel. From the Iranian perspective, when a counterparty has betrayed you repeatedly, a new promise is not much of incentive.

But even setting aside trust — a substantial thing to set aside — the American position is hamstrung by a profound misunderstanding of what motivates the men in Tehran. Vance speaks of the Iranian people thriving. The regime doesn’t. It speaks of survival, resistance, and the perpetuation of revolutionary ideology. These are not the same thing, and for 46 years the Islamic Republic has demonstrated, with brutal consistency, that it will sacrifice the former to protect the latter.

Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment, one of the sharpest observers of Iran’s internal dynamics, captured the essential paradox after Islamabad: the war had “significantly diminished Iran’s capabilities but hardened its intentions.” He adds: “Although Iranians have been mythologized as expert negotiators, driving a tough bargain is easy when you do not care about the consequences your obstinacy inflicts on your own population.”

Free access to the world market and to long-frozen assets would represent an opportunity for the leaders of the Islamic Republic to shore up their power and enrich themselves, not their people. As Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations, writing with Reuel Marc Gerecht in the Wall Street Journal in March, put it: for Tehran, diplomacy has “overwhelmingly been about deterring the U.S. and Israel — and acquiring sanctions relief and the time required to build long-range ballistic missiles, a well-armed proxy empire, and industrial-scale uranium enrichment.”

Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution, writing with Takeyh in the Boston Globe last June, noted that the regime has “long conceded the revolution’s promise of egalitarian economics and representative politics.” A grand bargain premised on the Iranian people’s economic benefit will not move a leadership that has spent nearly five decades proving the people’s welfare is beside the point.

The Trump administration would do well to remember what happened the last time Iran got a grand bargain. After the JCPOA entered into force in January 2016, Iran received sanctions relief totaling nearly $100 billion. What followed was not an opening to the world economy but a shopping spree to build up regional influence and military power.

The numbers tell the story plainly. Under the multilateral sanctions regime of 2006 to 2015, Iran’s military expenditure fell by roughly 30 percent — one of the steepest reductions globally. The moment sanctions were lifted, the trend reversed sharply: between 2016 and 2018, Iranian defense spending surged by more than 30 percent, reaching one of its highest levels in at least two decades.

The first beneficiaries were not the Iranian people but the regime’s client states and proxy militias. Iran’s Quds Force trained and funded more than a hundred thousand Shiite fighters in Syria, supplied ballistic missiles and drones to Yemen’s Houthis, and helped Iraqi militias build missile capabilities. Hezbollah, at one point, received up to $700 million annually from Iran — roughly 70 percent of its entire budget. Iranian support to Hamas surged to an estimated $350 million a year as oil revenues recovered. The U.S. State Department estimated that between 2012 and 2020 alone, Tehran spent more than $16 billion on support for its clients and proxies — and that figure covers only what American intelligence could document. Much of this funding flows, off the books, directly from oil revenues.

The regime goes to great lengths to hide details of its financial support for proxy groups, not only to guard against condemnation from abroad but also because the Iranian public takes great offense at the prioritization of foreign adventurism over domestic needs. That gap — between what ordinary Iranians want and what the regime delivers — is what the Trump administration claims to want to bridge. But the regime has no interest in bridging it, because a prosperous, globally connected Iranian middle class is not an asset to the Islamic Republic. It is an existential threat.

As Sadjadpour explained on Face the Nation in late March, the regime “actually believes that antipathy towards America is part of their identity, and if you capitulate on that, it actually doesn’t prolong your shelf life, it actually could hasten your death.” This is the iron constraint that no economic incentive can dissolve. You cannot bribe a regime out of an ideology that is, by its own telling, the source of its legitimacy.

This is not to say diplomacy is pointless. Diplomacy is the only way out of a war that is costing the world dearly in treasure, blood, and energy security. But telling Iran’s negotiators that Trump wants their people to prosper is not diplomacy. It is a sales pitch being made to buyers who are not in the market, delivered by a salesman whose company has defaulted on previous contracts.