One day after a massive U.S.-Israeli military operation killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Trump announced that Iran's newly installed leadership wants to come to the table. And he's ready to let them.

Trump told The Atlantic in a phone call from Mar-a-Lago on Sunday that the path forward is now open.

"They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them."

He didn't specify a timeline. He didn't need to. The leverage speaks for itself.

Tehran waited too long

According to the Daily Caller, Trump faulted Tehran for stalling weeks of diplomatic efforts that preceded the strike, making clear that the regime's destruction of its own negotiating position was a choice, not an accident.

"They should have done it sooner. They should have given what was very practical and easy to do sooner. They waited too long."

He acknowledged that several Iranian officials who had participated in those earlier discussions died in the strikes. His assessment was blunt: "Most of those people are gone." Then, with the kind of understatement that lands harder than shouting: "They played too cute."

This is the core lesson that adversaries of the United States keep refusing to learn. Diplomatic off-ramps exist. They have expiration dates. When you treat negotiation as a stalling tactic while you pursue a nuclear program or fund proxy wars across the Middle East, you are not buying time. You are spending it.

A new power structure takes shape

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian announced that a three-member council had temporarily assumed the supreme leader's responsibilities, according to Reuters. The body consists of Pezeshkian, the judiciary chief, and a Guardians Council representative.

A senior White House official told The Associated Press that this "new potential leadership" had signaled a willingness to engage with Washington. In the same breath, the official confirmed that the military campaign "continues unabated."

That dual posture is deliberate. Talk if you want. The operations don't pause while you decide. It is the kind of negotiating framework that produces results rather than endless rounds of smiling photo ops and back-channel promises that evaporate the moment the cameras leave.

The cost and the mission

Three U.S. service members died, and five others suffered serious wounds during the opening phase of Operation Epic Fury, U.S. Central Command announced Sunday. Those names and families deserve more than a passing mention in a news cycle that will inevitably move on to the diplomatic maneuvering. They are the reason the maneuvering is possible at all.

Trump told CNBC the operation was "ahead of schedule" and "moving along very well." He cast the military action as decades overdue, a sentiment that resonates with anyone who has watched four decades of Iranian aggression met with half-measures and pallets of cash.

"People have wanted to do it for 47 years."

He's not wrong. Since 1979, American policy toward Tehran has oscillated between containment and appeasement, with the Obama-era nuclear deal representing the nadir: billions released, sanctions lifted, and in return, a regime that accelerated its missile program and tightened its grip on proxy networks from Lebanon to Yemen. The JCPOA didn't prevent Iranian aggression. It subsidized it.

A message to the Iranian people

In a video posted Saturday, Trump addressed Iranians directly, bypassing whatever remains of the regime's communication apparatus.

"Now is the time to seize control of your destiny and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach."

Reports from The Atlantic described public celebrations inside Iran and among expatriate communities in Los Angeles and New York. That detail matters. When your own population cheers the death of your supreme leader, the regime is never governing. It was occupied.

For years, Western foreign policy elites treated the Islamic Republic as a permanent feature of the geopolitical landscape, something to be managed, never confronted. The assumption was always that the regime was too entrenched, the Revolutionary Guard too powerful, the risk of destabilization too great. That framing conveniently justified inaction every single time.

What comes next

The transitional council in Tehran now faces a binary choice between two distinct paths forward. The council must decide whether to negotiate seriously, which would involve verifiable denuclearization, ending proxy funding, and pursuing real diplomatic normalization, or attempt to reconsolidate hardline power under active military pressure while contending with a population that recently celebrated in the streets.

There is no third option where the old playbook works. The man who authored that playbook is dead.

Trump has made the opening clear. The door is open, but it won't stay open forever. Tehran already learned what happens when you assume American patience is infinite. The crater where the supreme leader's authority used to be is the lesson plan.