Rob Malley argues that current talks have ‘very small chance of success’.
When United States President Donald Trump measures success by counting how many Iranian leaders the US and Israel have killed or how many Iranian boats or missile launchers have been destroyed, he’s looking at the “wrong metric”, argues a former US special envoy to Iran, Rob Malley.
Malley told host Steve Clemons that the only way out of this war is “a settlement that respects our core interests, but also theirs”.
To calculate the odds of a deal, Malley said, psychologists may be more useful than experts because “it really depends on the mindset of President Trump.”
Published On 18 May 2026