Robert Barnes dug into a decade of University of Maryland polling inside Iran, and the shift in late 2025 is the most overlooked data of this war.
After the assassinations and the strikes, ordinary Iranians reversed themselves: they stopped treating the fatwa against nuclear weapons as binding, said Iran should answer violations of its sovereignty with force rather than diplomacy, and said Trump cannot be trusted in a negotiation.
They had watched what regime change did to Iraq, Syria and Libya next door, and drew the obvious lesson about weakness.
That reframes everything about the diplomacy, because it means the memorandum was signed against the public mood of an entire nation, and any future deal has to swim against a current that's only gotten stronger.
Barnes explains how that happened, and where he thinks it leads, in a conversation with Brandon that pulls no punches.
Paper can be signed with a government.
It can't be signed with a public that wants the bomb.
@Barnes_Law
