“During the chaotic days of Iran’s Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the country’s emerging ‘supreme leader,’ assured Iranians that their supposed oppressor, the United States, would not be able to put the hated shah back on his throne. ‘America can’t do a damn thing against us,’ he inveighed, a winning line that became the uprising’s unofficial slogan. It’s a catchphrase Iran has deployed time and again since, most recently in a taunting billboard along the Iran-Iraq border and in a banner hung in front of a captured American drone (though hilariously, in the latter case, the hapless banner-makers mistranslated the phrase as ‘America Can Do No Wrong’).

Khomeini’s slogan was true enough at the time: There wasn’t much U.S. President Jimmy Carter could do to intervene in one of the most stunning uprisings in history. But today, when it comes to Iran’s endless nuclear impasse with the West, one might turn the phrase back on the Iranians: The problem, in a nutshell, is that Iran can’t agree to a damn thing.

Indeed, the slow pace of nuclear negotiations with Iran are only the beginning of the reasons to be discouraged about resolution of the standoff. More worrying is that political infighting in Tehran is so bad that Iran might not be able to bring itself to accept unilateral U.S. unconditional surrender were it to be offered.

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