Iran cannot afford peace at ANY value
For the final two months, President Donald Trump’s rhetoric on Iran has seesawed between expressing optimism on negotiations and making express threats to take away the mullahs from energy.
This week, Trump has returned to pugilistic mode, boasting of the strikes that shortly adopted a regime drone assault on a US Apache helicopter — and warning, “We’re going to hit them laborious once more.”
But so long as Trump sees negotiations as an choice, there’s a hazard that he’ll attempt to deal with the Islamic Republic in a lot the identical means as he’s approached the leftist regime in Venezuela after the seize of President Nicolás Maduro by US forces.
That’s, that he expects extraordinary navy and political stress will pressure a pivot to incentive-based negotiations via which Tehran, like Caracas, may be bargained into behaving like a traditional state.
Signal the proper settlement and ease the proper sanctions, the pondering goes, and the mullahs will commerce their revolution for a seat on the desk.
The difficulty is that Iran’s regime — with its file of wars, inflation, capital flight, water shortages and a foreign money in free fall — can’t afford the discount.
It could’t win legitimacy from success, so it has to fabricate it from confrontation.
That’s precisely why, for not less than twenty years, the regime has constructed its deterrence upon its neighbors’ borders, not its personal.
Yemen gives the clearest instance of Tehran’s technique.
Whereas Western nuclear negotiators spent a decade growing the flawed 2015 nuclear deal, the IRCG’s Quds Drive was quietly turning the Houthi militia right into a strategic weapon, boosted by a navy allocation that rose by 90% within the yr after the nuclear deal’s implementation.
After the US and Israel struck Iran immediately in February, the regime closed the Strait of Hormuz and turned the Houthis free on the Bab al-Mandab, one other chokepoint to the world economic system.
This identical technique of utilizing proxies within the Center East has crossed into the Western Hemisphere through Iran’s shut ally, Venezuela.
In December 2025, the US Treasury sanctioned a Venezuelan agency that was assembling Iran’s Mohajer fight drones for Maduro’s regime, warning that the commerce “constitutes a risk to US pursuits within the Western Hemisphere, together with the Homeland.”
One month later, the US forcibly eliminated Maduro, changing him along with his former comrade Delcy Rodriguez.
And whereas Rodriguez has skillfully managed her relationship with Trump, pulling US funding into Venezuela’s oil sector, supposedly giving Washington a say in the place its oil goes and firming down her regime’s anti-American rhetoric, her overseas coverage stays carefully aligned with Iran, Russia, China and different US adversaries.
That’s the peril of adjusting the dictator however not the underlying regime, as Washington will doubtless uncover within the coming months and years.
All of the extra essential, then, to keep away from that very same mistake with Iran — particularly as Tehran has, with Venezuelan consent, been doing within the Caribbean what it did in Yemen: pre-positioning a functionality towards a goal it can’t attain by typical means.
That is why a continued cease-fire or a recent settlement with the Iranian regime would settle nothing.
The Houthis emerged from a yr of warfare stronger and extra technically proficient than once they began.
In the event that they and Iran’s different proxies now watch the US attain for the acquainted off-ramp — sanctions aid and a deal that lets its terror community survive intact — they’ll learn it as affirmation that ache pays, simply as Tehran taught them.
And a presidential administration that has proven its readiness to behave could be squandering its personal leverage if it trades stress for the phantasm of calm.
The important thing level is that this: The Islamic Republic isn’t Venezuela.
Rodriguez and her cronies are corrupt autocrats who wish to survive; stress can change their calculus.
Iran’s rulers are corrupt too, however the regime’s true believers additionally see themselves as members in a spiritual wrestle for jihad.
They imagine they’ve an obligation to destroy Israel and defeat America — or die making an attempt.
That makes them a way more harmful enemy.
Subsequently, breaking the cycle requires sustaining US stress on Iran’s oil, drone and missile-procurement networks — with out buying and selling sanctions aid for guarantees that can solely evaporate.
It additionally requires treating Iran’s proxy community as a single goal, from the Houthis astride Bab al-Mandab to the outlets in Venezuela assembling Iranian drones, quite than chasing every flashpoint after it ignites.
And it requires offering US help to the hundreds of thousands of Iranians who wish to convey down the regime — and have been on the streets for years going through the brutal Islamist safety providers alone.
All of that is grounded in a refusal to permit the regime any lifeline to proceed its exterior aggression and inside repression.
Mark Dubowitz is chief govt of the Basis for Protection of Democracies, the place Miad Maleki is a senior fellow.
