Delusion Keeps the Iranian Threat Alive

By Danielle Pletka

Thursday, February 26, 2026

 

Danger persists as a result of the United States’ historically rosy view of Iranian politics and Iran’s fantasies about real-world events.

 

In the words of Iran envoy Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump is “curious” as to why the Islamic Republic has not “capitulated” to his threats. As is often the case, this president says out loud what most others have only whispered for decades: Why is Iran an irrational actor? The answer is neither simple nor certain, but it rests at the heart of why Western policy has consistently failed to curb the Iranian threat.

 

Since the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, American and European leaders have layered their own hopes and biases on the regime. In a 1978 cable just before the return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, U.S. Ambassador to Iran William Sullivan described Khomeini, who would go on to preside over Iran’s rise as one of the Middle East’s most tyrannical and destabilizing forces, as a “Gandhi-like” figure. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young memorably predicted that “Khomeini will be somewhat of a saint when we get over the panic.”

 

President Jimmy Carter publicly supported the shah even as he privately urged the embattled Iranian leader to leave. And upon the shah’s departure, Carter publicly insisted that “we have no intention of trying to intercede in the internal political affairs of Iran. . . . We hope that the people of Iran will be able to form a government that will be stable and which will maintain the friendship that we have had in the past.”

 

That 1979 triumph of hope over experience became the framework for 47 years of failed efforts to contain Khomeini’s Islamist, expansionist model. Even the 1981 Algiers Accords, which resulted in the freeing of U.S. hostages taken by the nascent regime, rested on a vain hope that having sorted the hostage-taking of 66 American diplomats and employees, pledged not to “intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs,” unfrozen almost $8 billion in Iranian assets, and waived any claims by victims of Iran’s hostage-taking, Iran would somehow abandon the path of Shiite extremism.

 

Just two years after those accords, Iranian leaders and terrorist proxies plotted the terrorist attack that left 241 American servicemen stationed at the Marine barracks in Beirut dead. What followed were years of Iranian-backed terrorism, hostage-taking (including the murder of CIA Beirut station chief William Buckley), and regional destabilization that continue to rock the Middle East decades later. And yet, hope remained alive.

 

Despite ample evidence that Iran had begun investing in earnest in an illegal nuclear weapons and missile program, and a 1996 Iranian-managed bombing of U.S. military barracks at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the Clinton administration shifted from its earlier containment to an explicit policy of rapprochement. The effort was not entirely ill-placed: For the first time, a “reformist” president — Mohammad Khatami — had been elected in 1997, and Tehran seemed to be looking to dial down tensions with the United States. But, in keeping with tradition, Washington allowed a skewed vision of Iranian history, governance, and policy to dictate its approach.

 

Bill Clinton and his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, leaned in hard to appease what they believed to be Iran’s greatest grievances with the United States: The secretary apologized for U.S. involvement in the 1953 overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, allowing that it was “clearly a setback for Iran’s political development.” She expressed regret for supporting Iraq during the devastating 1980–88 Iran-Iraq War. And Washington lifted sanctions on Iranian luxury goods, approved long-sought-after aviation spare parts, and offered to settle Iranian claims over still-frozen shah-era state assets in American banks. Secret offers promised dialogue “without preconditions” and more. Nothing came of these efforts.

 

Similar such efforts in the George W. Bush administration, notwithstanding Iranian involvement in the murders of U.S. troops in Iraq, met with a similar end. Ultimately the Obama administration was able to come to terms with the Iranian regime because, like the Carter administration, it rationalized that Iran would reform itself before the temporary restrictions it negotiated on Iran’s nuclear program would expire.

 

Obama’s 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the so-called Iran nuclear deal) offered permanent relief from international sanctions in exchange for time-limited concessions. It also effectively gave Iran a pass on its ongoing sponsorship of terrorism and its human rights abuses inside the country. The deal’s promise of a $150 billion cash infusion from the United States, with hints of more from Europe, coupled with the temptation of permanent sanctions relief, was too sweet for Iran to pass up.

 

Trump terminated the deal in 2018, and efforts to restart talks have largely failed. That’s not surprising, given Trump’s reneging on the original nuclear agreement. But why, in light of America’s destruction of Iran’s uranium enrichment program last year and its massive military buildup in the Middle East this year, is the regime still balking at doing serious business with Washington?

 

There have long been debates outside Iran about the nature of the regime. Are there factions? Are there true reformers? Is the supreme leader truly supreme? And the answer is that like any group of humans with power, the officials helming the Islamic Republic are divided into camps, with differing views on issues such as the veiling of women, the nuclear weapons program, and the need for diplomacy with the United States. What most Western leaders fail to appreciate is that these camps are irrelevant on two questions where decision-making rests solely with the supreme leader: regime security and the nature of the Iranian government.

 

Iran’s nuclear weapons program ultimately relates to regime security, as do the missiles that would deliver those weapons. Tehran rationally looks at the examples of Moammar Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein and notes that if both had not given up on the nuclear option, they would, like Pakistan’s and North Korea’s leaders, still be enjoying the fruits of power. This makes sense.

 

What doesn’t make sense to Trump is why, facing annihilation at the hands of the U.S. armed forces, the ayatollah still doesn’t want to give up on his nukes for a time. And this is where persistent faulty analysis again rears its ugly head: because Iran does not see its options the way Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin do.

 

Foreign leaders like Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the current supreme leader, don’t just dress differently and speak different languages. They live in a different reality. In their reality, Iran is a formidable power that killed scores of Americans with a strike on Iraq in 2020, downed Israeli F-35s, and killed hundreds of Israel Defense Forces troops in its 2025 strikes on Israel. Of course, these things didn’t happen, but Iran’s senior-most leaders nevertheless believe they did.

 

It gets worse. Iranian leaders firmly believe that Israel — and Jews — controls decision-making in Washington, D.C. Thus any promises proffered by Trump are merely a trap designed to weaken Iran for the ultimate Zionist takeover. Nor is anything that Trump is promising likely to lead to greater security for the regime; what brought thousands to the streets in January was not the nuclear program but criminal economic mismanagement. And even if Trump extends sanctions relief, that cannot undo the damage that almost half a century of incompetence and thievery have inflicted.

 

Thus the leadership of the Islamic Republic, reassured by lies about its own military prowess, paranoid about the ambitions of its perceived enemies, and uninterested in resolving moot grievances about the past, has decided to hunker down and wait for the blitz, irrationally secure in the belief that it can outlast whatever Washington and Jerusalem have planned.