For Tehran, negotiation is war by other means

President Trump has observed that Iran’s rulers have “never won a war, but never lost a negotiation.” The question that should follow: Why is that?

One reason they don’t win wars: They have neither nuclear weapons nor an adequate conventional force – despite what had been a fast-growing arsenal of missiles and drones. 

Last year’s Twelve-Day War – which culminated in Midnight Hammer, President Trump’s deployment of B-2 stealth bombers to destroy subterranean nuclear facilities – was followed by this year’s Operation Epic Fury, a 38-day air campaign. These two brief armed conflicts significantly set back Tehran’s nuclear and conventional weapons programs. Credit where credit is due.

One reason why Iran’s rulers consistently win negotiations: They’re adept at weaponizing hostage-taking.

This skillset traces back to the fall of 1979, just months after the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran when followers of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held more than four dozen Americans hostage – egregious violations of the most fundamental international laws. 

Mr. Khomeini, by then Iran’s “supreme leader,” marveled – or maybe sneered – that “America can’t do a damn thing against us.” 

His analysis was confirmed in April 1980 when Operation Eagle Claw, President Carter’s attempted hostage rescue operation, catastrophically failed. 

Another reason Iran’s rulers have fared so well in negotiations: Most American presidents and their advisors have chosen to see the regime not as it is but as they’d like it to be.

On Jan. 5, 1979 — almost a month before Mr. Khomeini returned from exile in France, and three months before the declaration of an Islamic Republic — the late, great Michael Ledeen, a renowned scholar of fascism, published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing that the ayatollah was as a “clerical fascist.” This was based on Mr. Khomeini’s published works and recorded lectures.

“If you look at fascism as it started in Italy, it’s a war ideology, just as radical Islam is,” Dr. Ledeen later explained. “Whereas the nation was the prime category of European fascism, in the Iranian case, ultimate fealty was pledged to Islam.”

The foreign policy establishment rejected this analysis. Perhaps that was because, in World War II, Roosevelt and Churchill had established, at great cost, that appeasing fascists — as Neville Chamberlain had attempted — was a profoundly stupid strategy. So, to accept Dr. Ledeen’s label was to foreclose the policy the bien-pensants were determined to pursue.

On Feb. 8, 1979, The New York Times reported that Andrew Young, President Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the U.N., had concluded thatAyatollah Khomeini was “a Saint.”

On February 16, Richard Falk, a left-wing professor at Princeton specializing in “global governance,” wrote an article in the Times titled “Trusting Khomeini.” The depiction of the ayatollah as “fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false,” he confidently declared.

Over the years that followed, facts on the ground should have made it undeniable that when Iran’s rulers vowed “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” they meant exactly what they said. 

For example, in 1983, Hezbollah, Iran’s terrorist proxy in Lebanon, bombed the Beirut barracks housing French and American peacekeepers, killing 241 U.S. service members, 58 French paratroopers, and six Lebanese civilians. 

In 1996, Tehran-backed terrorists struck Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia killing 19 U.S. Air Force personnel. 

During the U.S. intervention in Iraq beginning in 2003, Shia militias loyal to Tehran killed hundreds of American troops. 

Washington’s response to such actions, under Republican and Democratic presidents alike, was feckless. In 2009, President Barack Obama told Iran’s rulers: “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” But improving relations with the “Great Satan” was not on their to-do list.

President Trump, in his first term, took a different approach. He withdrew from President Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the product of negotiations in which Tehran’s envoys easily bested Washington’s. Under the JCPOA’s “sunset clauses,” many of the deal’s restrictions would by now have expired, leaving Tehran with an internationally sanctioned pathway to an industrial-scale nuclear program.

Mr. Trump also ordered the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the most skillful of Iran’s terrorist masters, and he put serious economic pressure on the regime.

Starting in late February, Tehran played its one high card: using mines, missiles, and drones to halt the transit of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz – an international waterway and energy chokepoint.

On June 17, President Trump signed a Memorandum of Understanding that gave the regime a ceasefire and financial benefits in exchange for its promise to stop holding the strait hostage.

Yet last Thursday and Saturday, Iranian drones again began striking commercial vessels crossing the strait. The U.S. responded by striking Iranian military infrastructure. Tehran retaliated by targeting U.S. bases in Bahrain and Kuwait. 

On Saturday, President Trump warned on Truth Social: “There may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable, and will be forced to militarily complete the job that we very successfully started. If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist.”

Soon after, both sides agreed to hold their fire and head to Qatar for new talks. But on Tuesday, a spokesman for Tehran said Iranian diplomats would not meet with American envoys – only with mediators. 

And Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi doubled down on his claim that the Strait of Hormuz is Tehran’s private real estate – where rent will be collected and unwanted tenants evicted. 

Iran’s rulers, who have never lost a negotiation, are betting that the current occupant of the White House is as beatable as his predecessors. President Trump knows what’s required to prove them wrong. He already told us.

Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a columnist for the Washington Times, and host of the “Foreign Podicy” podcast.