On February 28, the United States and Israel struck Iran. Khamenei killed and soon replaced. Oil markets in crisis, Iranian missiles targeting NATO facilities, and yet European leaders are saying “this is not our war.” We are watching this and asking, how does this end? To me, a better question is: how did we get here in the first place?

The Western liberal worldview holds that diplomacy is transformative and that the use of force is a failure of imagination. This is not a policy position; it is a comforting delusion that has hardened into an identity. When Iran contradicts that identity, the Western liberal mind does not admit it was wrong. It rewrites Iran, even as the Iranian people scream for help and rise against their own regime. “They don’t mean it. The moderates are rising. This time will be different.” That is not analysis. It’s a self-deceptive wish dressed up as nuance.

From the day the Ayatollahs took power in 1979, they swore to destroy the United States and Israel. Iran’s parliament passed legislation mandating Israel’s destruction. Iranian military commanders called this “an achievable goal” and painted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” on their ballistic missiles. In 2023, Khamenei invoked taqiyya, the theological permission to deceive an adversary to achieve religious goals, to explain why they signed the nuclear deal. He said it was a tactic, and that Iran never intended to honor the agreement. He told the world he had been lying.

Yet the world scheduled another meeting.

In the decades I have spent studying human behavior, negotiation and communication, and working in sales, and marketing,  I’ve learned to read the gap between what people say and what they do. And yet, with sirens overhead and missiles falling, I find myself as shaken by the war as by the realization that the people in charge still refuse to open their eyes. This is not one missed signal, but a fifty-year parade of evidence ignored. 

It might be time to look at things through a behavioral perspective instead of a diplomatic and geopolitical one.

In sales, people don’t buy based on evidence. We buy to feed our identity and our emotions. In relationships, in bad business deals, in any scenario where we find ourselves trapped, we will twist reality to avoid admitting we are wrong. Social psychologist Leon Festinger called this cognitive dissonance.

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, whose work on decision-making changed how we understand the human mind, called the broader pattern theory-induced blindness: the inability to see what contradicts your own framework. His research demonstrated that people do not think their way to conclusions. They feel their way to decisions and then construct rational explanations afterward, and this applies to nations just as much as it applies to individuals.

In gaming design, the most powerful mechanism for keeping someone engaged is not consistent reward but unpredictable reward: one small win dropped into a long losing streak, the engine behind every slot machine and every algorithm keeping us scrolling. Behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner identified this as a variable reinforcement schedule, and it is the most addictive pattern in behavioral science.

Iran has been running this loop since 1979: hostility, threats, and then a softer face, a pause. Just enough hope to keep us hooked. It is the same pattern that keeps someone in an abusive relationship, making excuses for a partner who has shown them again and again exactly who they are.

Most Western leaders have been falling for this stunt, and the cost of their delusional stand can be measured in lost lives. Let’s not fool ourselves. In Israel, we fell for the same thing, and we paid for it, on October 7.

What should the international community do? A few Western leaders have seen through the pattern. But I am left wondering whether others, or their successors, will ever wake up. And whether they will ever acknowledge the lives lost due to their delusion — Iranian, Israeli, and every victim of terrorism financed by this regime.

The world keeps asking for restraint. Here is where I disagree. I want the blood of this regime to wash away the suffering it has inflicted on its own people, on Israelis, on our children.

Now let me close the way I would with a friend who has fallen into this trap, whether in a relationship, a negotiation, or any other context where the hard truth has been staring them in the face and they still refuse to see it.

Trust the pattern. Not the wish.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)