Throughout the history of Middle Eastern wars, one strategic mistake has been repeated time and again: great powers achieve victory on the battlefield, only to give their defeated adversaries an opportunity at the negotiating table to transform military defeat into political triumph.President Donald Trump faces precisely this danger.
After eight months of war, the Islamic Republic of Iran, despite suffering devastating military and economic losses, continues to seek political survival through nuclear blackmail, threats to global energy security and the deliberate prolongation of negotiations.Washington must not allow a regime that has paid a heavy price for its reckless adventurism to regain, through a hastily negotiated agreement, the very position it occupied before the war.The developments of Oct.
20 demonstrate that Tehran has abandoned none of its familiar tactics of confrontation, intimidation, bluffing and extortion.On the one hand, Islamic Republic officials speak of negotiations and ending the war; on the other, they impose imaginary conditions on Washington that, if accepted without credible guarantees, could dismantle much of America's leverage.Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of the Islamic Republic's Supreme National Security Council — a former terrorist affiliated with the Islamic terrorist group Mansouroun, who even sought to visit the United States in the 2000s but was opposed by the CIA — emphasized during his meeting with Pakistan's army chief that not a single gram of Iran's enriched uranium would leave the country.IRAN RULES OUT TRANSFERRING URANIUM TO A THIRD COUNTRYMeanwhile, Abbas Araghchi — a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps member acting as foreign minister — has made reopening the Strait of Hormuz conditional upon acceptance of Tehran's proposed plan.
Far from demonstrating a genuine willingness to compromise, these positions reveal the regime's determination to preserve its instruments of coercion on the eve of a potential agree...