You don't negotiate with vermin

US President Donald Trump issued his most searing assessment yet of the Iranian regime on Wednesday, threatening to resume military strikes if Tehran fails to honour the memorandum of understanding signed last month, and describing its rulers in terms that stripped away any remaining diplomatic veneer.

"If they don't make a deal, we're going to bomb them again, and it won't be pretty," Trump declared. He went further, calling Iran's leadership « garbage », and then further still, describing them as "liars, cheaters and murderers."

On the substance, Trump is right. The Islamic Republic has built its survival on deception. It lied about its nuclear programme for decades. It lied about shooting down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, killing 176 people, and then lied about lying.

It funds, arms and directs proxy militias across the Middle East, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, while insisting it seeks only peace and stability. Its negotiators sign agreements in Switzerland while its Revolutionary Guards continue operating in Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq as if nothing has changed.

The theocratic regime's foundational operating principle is not governance, it is survival through deception.

Washington's Miscalculation

The deeper problem is that Washington has consistently underestimated the nature of what it is dealing with. The Islamic Republic is not a normal state that can be reasoned into compliance through clever diplomacy and economic incentives. 

It is a revolutionary theocracy whose legitimacy rests on permanent confrontation with the West, with Israel and with the very concept of compromise.

Every deal it has signed, the JCPOA, the current MOU, has been treated by Tehran not as a commitment but as a breathing space. Time to regroup, rebuild and prepare the next move while the international community congratulates itself on its diplomatic achievement.

The Only Answer

Trump's instinct, that Iran's rulers cannot be trusted and that force is ultimately the only language they respect, is not warmongering. It is a recognition of forty-six years of evidence.

The MOU may yet produce something. But if it follows the pattern of every previous agreement with the Islamic Republic, it will be another delay tactic, more enrichment quietly continued, more proxies quietly rearmed, more inspectors quietly blocked.

The regime that rules Iran is not reformable from within through negotiation. History has demonstrated that repeatedly. 

The people of Iran, who did not weep for Khamenei and who have been risking their lives for real freedom for decades, deserve better than an international community that keeps making deals with their oppressors.

Trump called Iran's leaders liars, cheaters and murderers. The record supports every word. What comes next, whether America acts on that assessment or retreats into another round of talks, will define the next chapter of Middle East history.