Nine lessons the West still hasn’t learned about the table in Tehran

When an adversary can make you angry, it can make you hurry. And when it can make you hurry, it has already won something before the first offer is on the table.

That may be the clearest lesson from President Trump’s latest frustration with Iran. As Michael Crowley reported in The New York Times, Trump has called Iran’s leaders lunatics, reasonable, crazy bastards, very smart, and stone cold crazy — sometimes within the same month. “All they do is make me angry,” he told reporters last week. “They just make me angry.”

He has applied overwhelming force. He has publicly demanded capitulation. He has kept reaching for a deal. Tehran has remained defiant.

Trump is not the first Western leader to discover that Iran refuses to follow Washington’s script. Jimmy Carter believed Khomeini’s subordinates could deliver the hostages, and Khomeini killed the deal himself. Ronald Reagan chased an opening to Iranian moderates and ended up in Iran-Contra. Bill Clinton answered Mohammad Khatami’s genuine overtures, and Khatami could not overcome the system above him. Barack Obama got the most consequential agreement of all, and the hopes attached to it went nowhere.

Dennis Ross, who negotiated for presidents of both parties, put it plainly: “The Iranians seem to understand us better than we understand them.”

This history does not prove diplomacy with Iran is useless. It proves that diplomacy untethered from a realistic understanding of the Islamic Republic is dangerous.

The distinction matters. Iran is an ancient civilization with a large, diverse, and often courageous population. The Islamic Republic is an authoritarian revolutionary system that has spent nearly half a century organizing power around clerical rule, internal repression, and hostility toward the United States and Israel. What follows is not a theory about how Iranians negotiate. It is a set of lessons about negotiating with the regime that rules them.

1. Know who can actually say yes

Iran has a president, a parliament, diplomats, and competing factions. They matter. They do not hold final authority.

Under Iran’s own constitution, the supreme leader sets general policy and commands the armed forces. The elected president is explicitly subordinate on matters connected to the leadership. A polished foreign minister may sincerely want an agreement and still be unable to deliver it.

This problem has gotten worse, not better. Killing Ali Khamenei in February did not create an opening. Authority scattered further — into the Revolutionary Guard, the parliament speaker, the security council, the Office of the Leader. There used to be one address for a final decision. Now there are several, and we cannot reliably name them.

Three questions belong at the front of every negotiation: Who authorized this offer? Who must approve it? Who can reverse it?

A channel is not authority. Access is not power.

2. Treat ideology as an interest, not decoration

Western governments assume ideology is rhetoric draped over ordinary interests — sanctions relief, growth, survival. In Iran, ideology is itself an interest.

Opposition to American power and rejection of Israel are not foreign policy positions the regime holds. They are part of the story it tells about why it exists and why its rulers deserve to rule. Suzanne Maloney of the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)