Diplomacy with Iran can produce signatures. The question is whether the men with the guns are ever forced to honor them.

Today that question sits at the center of a war over the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump has reimposed a naval blockade, threatened strikes on power plants and bridges, and warned Tehran that “you better make a deal” or “you’re not going to have anything left.” The urgency is real. What is less clear is whether his message is reaching the only audience that matters.

For years, Western publics have been offered a familiar comfort: talks are progress, memoranda are progress, and if everyone can just return to the table, the Strait will reopen and the crisis can end with signatures instead of sorties. Serious policymakers know better. Tehran has long used talks to buy time, split adversaries, probe red lines, and turn yesterday’s restraint into tomorrow’s starting point. The misleading element is not the talks; it is the story told about them, in which each broken understanding becomes a setback on the road to peace rather than evidence of how the regime converts process into pressure.

The pattern is no longer beside the point. The pattern is the argument.

Two Irans, one trigger

Twice now, Iran has attached its name to arrangements meant to calm the Strait of Hormuz. Twice, the ink was barely dry before Revolutionary Guard forces were again attacking commercial shipping. This is not the fog of war. It is the business model of a regime that has learned to weaponize a waterway.

Iran’s civilian leadership can speak the language of resolution. Its diplomats can sit in Doha, issue careful statements, and design mechanisms for monitoring violations. But it is the Revolutionary Guards who command the forces in the water and the batteries on shore, and the Guards pursue a different objective entirely. The Strait, they have discovered, is not only a chokepoint. It is a cash register. Their ambition is not simply to close it but to install themselves as the toll collectors of the world’s most important oil artery — dictating routes, protocols, permissions, and prices through waters they do not own. Whatever Iran’s diplomats intend, it is the Guards’ objective that keeps materializing as fired munitions.

Nor is the IRGC limiting itself to the water. While diplomats ask the world to believe in process, Guard-aligned networks manufacture the political climate against compromise — amplifying revenge imagery and turning threats against Trump and Netanyahu into loyalty tests, so that escalation reads as fidelity and compromise as treason. It is the same strategy in another form: diplomats harvest time, Guards harvest leverage, and the public square is trained to applaud the next violation as revolutionary resolve.

Read the sequence plainly. When Washington eased pressure to give diplomacy room, Guard forces attacked shipping. When mediators described talks as productive, Guard forces attacked shipping. There are, in effect, two Irans — one that negotiates and one that........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)