Dont buy Irans charade this regime cant afford peace at ANY price

For the last two months, President Donald Trump’s rhetoric on Iran has seesawed between expressing optimism on negotiations and making explicit threats to remove the mullahs from power.This week, Trump has returned to pugilistic mode, boasting of the strikes that quickly followed a regime drone attack on a US Apache helicopter — and warning, “We’re going to hit them hard again.”Yet as long as Trump sees negotiations as an option, there’s a danger that he’ll try to treat the Islamic Republic in much the same way as he’s approached the leftist regime in Venezuela after the capture of President Nicolás Maduro by US forces.That is, that he expects extraordinary military and political pressure will force a pivot to incentive-based negotiations through which Tehran, like Caracas, can be bargained into behaving like a normal state. Sign the right agreement and ease the right sanctions, the thinking goes, and the mullahs will trade their revolution for a seat at the table.The trouble is that Iran’s regime — with its record of wars, inflation, capital flight, water shortages and a currency in free fall — cannot afford the bargain.It can’t win legitimacy from success, so it has to manufacture it from confrontation.That’s exactly why, for at least two decades, the regime has built its deterrence upon its neighbors’ borders, not its own.Yemen provides the clearest example of Tehran’s strategy.While Western nuclear negotiators spent a decade developing the flawed 2015 nuclear deal, the IRCG’s Quds Force was quietly turning the Houthi militia into a strategic weapon, boosted by a military allocation that rose by 90% in the year after the nuclear deal’s implementation.After the United States and Israel struck Iran directly in February, the regime closed the Strait of Hormuz and turned the Houthis loose on the Bab al-Mandab, another chokepoint to the world economy.This same method of using proxies in the Middle East has crossed into the Wes...