JNS
Leaders of the Islamic Republic do not think or talk like Western nations; to believe that they do is a recipe for disasters, as history recounts.
According to U.S. special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, U.S. President Donald Trump is curious as to why the Iranians have not “capitulated,” given the amount of naval and other power Washington has amassed in the Middle East.
Maybe we could help provide an answer.
To answer the question, we must ask ourselves how Iranians, as well as other Middle Eastern powers, understand negotiations and war. Unlike us, they ask themselves two questions. Do their enemies/adversaries have both the capability and the will to use their weapons against their enemies? If they conclude that the answer to both questions is yes, they usually determine that they must accede to their enemies’ demands, in order survive.
In the present case, the Iranians seem to realize they we certainly have the military strength to them out, should we desire to do so. But they seem also to have concluded that we don’t have the will to do use our force to do so.
Therefore from the Iranian perspective, that means that we are weak. And when Iranians smell weakness, they strike. That is why the more we delay action in Iran, the more they raise the ante in the so-called “negotiations” between Washington and Tehran. That is why we have more and more invective coming out of the mouths of Iran’s most senior leaders.
What then is the purpose of negotiations?
From the perspective of the Iranians and others throughout the Muslim world, the time to talk is only after one side wins. At these talks, the winner dictates to the loser the terms of how they will deal with each other. This, in short, means that the loser must surrender. If the loser isn’t prepared to do so, the battle continues until the loser has been destroyed.
Examples of how we know this to be true are how the Iranians reacted to the 12-day war last June. When that war began, Iranians came out into the streets shouting vicious slogans against their leaders and for the only leader outside the country that most people knew—Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah before the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
The people seemed to have believed that America and Israel were going to finish the job. They felt that we were behind them and would relieve their misery by destroying the regime.
When they realize that we weren’t prepared to do so, the demonstrations stopped.
I personally witnessed a similar situation during when I was attending university in Mashhad, Iran, during the early and mid-stages of the Islamic Revolution.
When I first arrived, I asked naively asked fellow Iranian students what they thought about the Shah. I didn’t realize yet that if they opposed him, they would never tell others out of fear that the secret police would arrest them. Those few who did talk were effusive about their support for the government. As unrest grew stronger, these same students went out into the streets and were yelling “Death to the Shah! Long live Khomeini!”
I found this puzzling because the most pro-Shah students shouted the loudest against the Shah.
Why were they shouting pro-Khomeini slogans? I knew, from previous conversations about the various Shi’ite Grand Ayatollahs, that they have no idea who he was. So why were they then apparently so pro-Khomeini? The Shah’s regime was either unable or unwilling to do what was necessary to keep itself in power. And Khomeini looked like he would eventually take over.
The Iranian people had clearly a fine sense of knowing when power is shifting, a skill that I, having grown in America, never developed because I never needed to do so. Iranians, on the other hand, knew that under a new leadership, everything would change and that they needed to support the winning side, lest they be arrested or killed.
Iranian history is replete with other instances like these as well.
So where does this leave us? From appearances, it looks like Trump and his foreign-policy team seem to believe that their Iranians counterparts are “negotiating” the way we Westerners do, which is a recipe for disaster.
If the goal is to create a new world order where Iran, among others, is no longer a threat to its neighbors, then the Europeans and the United States must take this regime down.
From an Iranian perspective therefore, any negotiations before achieving this goal just prolongs the agony the Iranian people, and all others threatened by this regime must endure.
Our job, therefore, is only to remove this regime from power and let the Iranian peoples determine their own future. After all, they are the ones who have endured since the revolution. And now, there is good reason to believe that most of the Iranians want nothing more than to rejoin the international community of nations as the respected member Iran once was.
