Here’s how negotiations with Islamic terrorists in general, and Iran specifically, invariably play out.
1. Negotiators meet with the terrorists. If the terrorists are weak, they agree to deals they have no intention of keeping when they grow stronger. If they sense weakness on the part of the other side, they start demanding preconditions and threatening to walk away.
2. Once the agreement is announced, the terrorists take the agreement hostage, betting that the prestige of the leader of the other side is involved and that he or she will be willing to make more concessions to keep the deal from falling apart.
3. Islamic terrorists never accept the notion of a final agreement. Their goal at every stage is to extract as much as possible while giving as little as possible. They constantly reopen negotiations, unilaterally modify the agreement according to their own interpretation, flagrantly violate it and drag whoever they’re negotiating into an abusive relationship that is much like an Asian or Nigerian ‘pig-butchering’ scam in which people keep paying more and more in the hopes of recovering their sunk cost.
4. In the absolute best case scenario, e.g. Taliban, the Jihadists just lie their way through, sign meaningless papers that they never intend to keep, and then attack. In the worst case scenario, they play endless mind games in which the illusion of the agreement itself becomes the thing that the other side keeps trying to salvage by offering them more and more.
All of this has played out time and again with Iran and other terrorists. I’ve gone into more details in the past in articles like The Gentle Art of Negotiating With Terrorists.
That’s why the first rule of negotiating with Islamic terrorists is don’t. It achieves nothing, The only point of such negotiations is to state firmly and clearly what our intentions are. That is why they are also best conducted with heavy artillery. Terrorists will not end their attacks in response to concessions or negotiations. They will temporarily end them in response to successful attacks or permanently in response to their total destruction. That is how you negotiate with terrorists.
President Trump has done that, but once negotiations were launched, Iran defaulted to the same old game of taking the negotiations and the agreement hostage. This is a test. Fail it and Iran will take charge.
