When the world doubts Israeli warning and decodes Iranian threat

Tehran has long understood something about the West that the West is slow to admit about itself: a threat, if delivered with sufficient repetition and surrounded by enough diplomatic smoke, can cease to be treated as a threat, becoming instead a signal, a posture, and a bargaining device.

This is one of the more peculiar shapes of modern diplomacy, in which the Islamic Republic says what it says, and then a huge industry assembles to explain why it may not mean it. The chant is treated as local politics; the ambition for nuclear weapons and the missile parades are seen as deterrence; the proxy attack is called complicated; and, simply put, Iranian behaviour is perceived as a desire to acquire political leverage, while........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)