The events of the past several weeks should surprise no serious observer of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Tehran entered direct talks with the Trump administration in Islamabad, presented itself as a negotiating partner, demanded that Israel halt its ongoing operations against Hizbullah as a precondition for any agreement, and then walked away when the nuclear file remained unresolved. Days later, under the pressure of a U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports, the regime announced that the Strait of Hormuz was “completely open,” only to have its Foreign Ministry dispute, within hours, the terms of what had reportedly been agreed. This sequence is not a diplomatic breakdown. It is the regime functioning precisely as it has functioned for forty-six years.
The conduct has a name, in fact, two names. In Arabic, it is taqiyya, the religiously sanctioned practice of dissimulation in the service of the faith. In Persian, it is ketman, a broader tradition of concealment in which the believer is permitted, and at times obligated, to say one thing while believing and pursuing another. These are not theological footnotes. They are operating doctrines, and the regime in Tehran has refined their application across four and a half decades of dealings with the West.
The Iranian Negotiating Doctrine
In his writings, Dr. Harold Rhode, co-author of his article, Senior Fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, and a former longtime Pentagon analyst of Iran and the Islamic world, has set out the civilizational logic of Iranian strategic behavior in terms that Western policymakers continue to ignore at their cost. His analysis identifies several consistent features of the regime’s conduct.
- The chess mentality. Iranians are adept at outfoxing their opponents by appearing polite and cooperative while simultaneously working to destroy them. The courteous posture at the table is not a departure from the strategy. It is part of it.
- Negotiation as submission. In the Iranian worldview, negotiations are for discussing terms after one side has already won. To seek negotiations before victory is read as a sign of profound weakness and emboldens them to up the ante. Every Western overture is filed accordingly.
- Horizontal and vertical escalation. Iran expands conflicts geographically by engaging multiple countries through its proxy network, while simultaneously increasing the intensity of attacks against civilian populations and critical infrastructure. The Houthis, Hizbullah, the Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, and Hamas are instruments of a single doctrine, not independent actors.
- Exploiting internal divisions. Rhode has documented the regime’s aim to destroy the Sunni Gulf states, which he argues has driven those states toward tactical alignment with Israel. The Abraham Accords did not emerge in a vacuum. They emerged because Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Manama understood the Iranian project directed against them.
- Buying time with deception. Iran uses negotiations to buy time to strengthen its position and, specifically on the nuclear file, to await more favorable conditions to strike. Every round of talks is, for Tehran, an interval purchased before the next move.
Measured against this framework, the events of the past month require no further explanation. Iran entered talks. Iran attempted to use American diplomatic leverage to shield Hizbullah from further Israeli degradation. Iran held out on the nuclear question, which Vice President Vance correctly identified as the only point that ultimately mattered. Iran then closed the Strait of Hormuz when closure served its purposes, reopened the Strait when pressure mounted, and is now walking back the terms of that reopening through official channels. The doctrine is not concealed. It is on display.
A Documented Record of Deception
The historical record forecloses any claim that recent events represent an aberration. The late President of the Jerusalem Center, Ambassador Dr. Dore Gold, set out the modern record of Iranian deception in exhaustive detail in his 2009 volume, The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies the West. The evidence assembled there is not a matter of interpretation.
Following the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, Western intelligence services discovered that Iran had been operating a covert nuclear weapons program in direct violation of its international commitments. The regime had been deceiving its supposed interlocutors for years while the International Atomic Energy Agency conducted inspections of the sites it was permitted to see.
Following the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the deception continued. In 2018, Israeli intelligence extracted approximately fifty thousand documents from a warehouse in the Shorabad district of Tehran, the regime’s own nuclear archive, preserved by the regime itself. The documents demonstrated, in Iran’s own words and engineering diagrams, that Tehran had systematically misled the P5+1 about the history, scope, and intent of its weapons program. The JCPOA was not an agreement with a reformed state. It was an agreement with a state that was deceiving its counterparties in real time.
Gold’s thesis is unambiguous: a durable arrangement cannot be negotiated with an apocalyptic regime. The term apocalyptic is descriptive rather than rhetorical. The Islamic Republic’s governing ideology is structured around an end-times theology in which the survival of the regime and the acquisition of decisive weapons are understood as religious obligations, not as policy preferences. Ordinary diplomacy presumes that both parties ultimately seek a stable outcome they can accept. The regime in Tehran operates on different premises.
Hizbullah, Hormuz, and the Trap Set for Washington
The specific maneuver of the past weeks merits plain description. Iran sought to use the Islamabad talks to compel Trump to restrain Israel on the Hizbullah front. That was the operational purpose of including an Israeli ceasefire in the Iranian negotiating package. Following the degradation of Hamas and the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, Hizbullah remains Iran’s most valuable surviving asset in the Levant. Tehran required Washington to restrain Jerusalem, and calculated that an American president seeking a visible diplomatic achievement might trade Israeli operational freedom for the appearance of a deal.
That trade did not materialize. When the nuclear file remained unresolved, the blockade was ordered. Iran’s response, announcing Hormuz as open while its Foreign Ministry almost immediately contested the terms, is the regime’s characteristic move: concede in public, renegotiate in private, and reserve the right to deny tomorrow what was stated today. Taqiyya, in this context, is not a metaphor. It is the governing logic.
The implication for American policymakers is the implication that JCFA has argued consistently across administrations. The regime in Tehran does not honor agreements. It exploits them. Every concession offered at the table is interpreted as weakness and priced into the next round of pressure. Every pause is time purchased for enrichment, for proxy reconstitution, and for the next phase of horizontal and vertical escalation. The only language the regime has historically respected is the language of force, which must be credible, continuous, and overwhelming pressure, economic, diplomatic, and, where required, kinetic.
The answer for the question posed in this essay is obvious. No serious observer should be surprised by the Iranian regime’s deception. The regime has identified itself openly, in Arabic, in Persian, and in the documents its own hands preserved in a Tehran warehouse. The remaining question is whether Washington will at last choose to believe what it has been shown.
