Iran can’t afford peace at ANY price – Latest News
For the final two months, President Donald Trump’s rhetoric on Iran has seesawed between expressing optimism on negotiations and making specific threats to take away the mullahs from energy.
This week, Trump has returned to pugilistic mode, boasting of the strikes that rapidly adopted a regime drone assault 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 hazard that he’ll attempt to deal with the Islamic Republic in a lot the identical manner as he’s approached the leftist regime in Venezuela after the seize of President Nicolás Maduro by US forces.
That is, that he expects extraordinary army and political strain will pressure a pivot to incentive-based negotiations by which Tehran, like Caracas, might be bargained into behaving like a regular state.
Sign the fitting settlement and ease the fitting sanctions, the pondering goes, and the mullahs will commerce their revolution for a seat at the desk.
The hassle is that Iran’s regime — with its file of wars, inflation, capital flight, water shortages and a currency in free fall — can’t afford the cut price.
It can’t win legitimacy from success, so it has to fabricate it from confrontation.
That’s precisely why, for at least twenty years, the regime has constructed its deterrence upon its neighbors’ borders, not its own.
Yemen gives the clearest instance 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 army allocation that rose by 90% within the 12 months after the nuclear deal’s implementation.
After the United States and Israel struck Iran straight in February, the regime closed the Strait of Hormuz and turned the Houthis unfastened on the Bab al-Mandab, one other chokepoint to the world financial system.
This similar technique of utilizing proxies within the Middle East has crossed into the Western Hemisphere through Iran’s close ally, Venezuela.
In December 2025, the US Treasury sanctioned a Venezuelan firm that was assembling Iran’s Mohajer fight drones for Maduro’s regime, warning that the commerce “constitutes a threat to US interests in the Western Hemisphere, including the Homeland.”
One month later, the US forcibly eliminated Maduro, changing him together with his former comrade Delcy Rodriguez.
And whereas Rodriguez has skillfully managed her relationship with Trump, pulling US investment 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 international coverage stays intently aligned with Iran, Russia, China and different US adversaries.
That’s the peril of altering the dictator however not the underlying regime, as Washington will possible uncover within the coming months and years.
All the more 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 standard means.
This is why a continued cease-fire or a contemporary settlement with the Iranian regime would settle nothing.
The Houthis emerged from a 12 months of conflict stronger and more technically proficient than once they began.
If they and Iran’s different proxies now watch the United States 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 can be squandering its own leverage if it trades strain for the phantasm of calm.
The key level is that this: The Islamic Republic will not be Venezuela.
Rodriguez and her cronies are corrupt autocrats who need to survive; strain can change their calculus.
Iran’s rulers are corrupt too, however the regime’s true believers additionally see themselves as members in a spiritual battle for jihad.
They imagine they’ve a obligation to destroy Israel and defeat America — or die making an attempt.
That makes them a a lot more harmful enemy.
Therefore, breaking the cycle requires sustaining US strain on Iran’s oil, drone and missile-procurement networks — with out trading sanctions aid for guarantees that may 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 thousands and thousands of Iranians who need to convey down the regime — and have been on the streets for years dealing with the brutal Islamist security companies alone.
All of that is grounded in a refusal to permit the regime any lifeline to proceed its exterior aggression and inner repression.
Mark Dubowitz is chief govt of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the place Miad Maleki is a senior fellow.
