America’s strategy keeps running into the same old problem: in Washington, ideologized regimes are still too often interpreted through the lens of market logic, costs, and benefits.

For Israel and Ukraine, this is no longer an academic debate. It is a matter of survival.

The West’s problem is not a lack of power, but a false model of the enemy

The United States is once again facing a problem that Washington likes to underestimate, only to spend months trying to catch up once a crisis is already underway. American political culture is too market-driven, too “business-minded” in its internal logic. It assumes that almost any adversary will eventually start calculating the cost of conflict, weighing losses, growing nervous over sanctions, fearing budget distortions, and, in the end, looking for compromise.

For a market democracy, that seems natural.

For an ideologized despotism, not at all.

This is not a random mistake or the failure of a single administration. It is an old American habit: to mirror alien regimes through itself. To look at eastern despotisms through its own experience, its own model of rationality, its own belief that markets, money, elite comfort, and public frustration will sooner or later force power to retreat.

Yet in practice, U.S. political decisions are still too often assembled according to the same old script. First sanctions. Then a signal. Then pressure. Then a window for talks. Then the expectation that the adversary will respond like a rational actor of the Western type.

Iran makes this especially clear right now. Washington repeatedly acts as if, after sharp pressure, Tehran must eventually start thinking in the logic of a deal. But Tehran is under no obligation to think that way.

The most dangerous self-deception here is that in the United States, and in the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)