Don’t buy Iran’s charade — this regime can’t 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 Western Hemisphere via Iran’s close ally, Venezuela.

In December 2025, the US Treasury sanctioned a Venezuelan firm that was assembling Iran’s Mohajer combat drones for Maduro’s regime, warning that the trade “constitutes a threat to US interests in the Western Hemisphere, including the Homeland.”

One month later, the US forcibly removed Maduro, replacing him with his former comrade Delcy Rodriguez.

And while Rodriguez has skillfully managed her relationship with Trump, pulling US investment into Venezuela’s oil sector, supposedly giving Washington a say in where its oil goes and toning down her regime’s anti-American rhetoric, her foreign policy remains closely aligned with Iran, Russia, China and other US adversaries.

That’s the peril of changing the dictator but not the underlying regime, as Washington will likely discover in the coming months and years.

All the more crucial, then, to avoid that same mistake with Iran — especially as Tehran has, with Venezuelan consent, been doing in the Caribbean what it did in Yemen: pre-positioning a capability against a target it cannot reach by conventional means.

This is why a continued cease-fire or a fresh agreement with the Iranian regime would settle nothing.

The Houthis emerged from a year of war stronger and more technically proficient than when they started.

If they and Iran’s other proxies now watch the United States reach for the familiar off-ramp — sanctions relief and a deal that lets its terror network survive intact — they’ll read it as confirmation that pain pays, just as Tehran taught them.

And a presidential administration that has shown its readiness to act would be squandering its own leverage if it trades pressure for the illusion of calm.

The key point is this: The Islamic Republic is not Venezuela.

Rodriguez and her cronies are corrupt autocrats who want to survive; pressure can change their calculus.

Iran’s rulers are corrupt too, but the regime’s true believers also see themselves as participants in a religious struggle for jihad.

They believe they have a duty to destroy Israel and defeat America — or die trying.

That makes them a much more dangerous enemy.

Therefore, breaking the cycle requires maintaining US pressure on Iran’s oil, drone and missile-procurement networks — without trading sanctions relief for promises that will only evaporate.

It also requires treating Iran’s proxy network as a single target, from the Houthis astride Bab al-Mandab to the shops in Venezuela assembling Iranian drones, rather than chasing each flashpoint after it ignites.

And it requires providing US support to the millions of Iranians who want to bring down the regime — and have been on the streets for years facing the brutal Islamist security services alone. 

All of this is grounded in a refusal to allow the regime any lifeline to continue its external aggression and internal repression. 

Mark Dubowitz is chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Miad Maleki is a senior fellow.