The only path to a real solution is the one already underway: the destruction of the regime that makes the problem possible.

Let’s be honest about what is actually happening in Islamabad.

American and Iranian diplomats are sitting across a table exchanging proposals about enrichment percentages, inspection regimes, sanctions tranches, and frozen assets. The White House describes this as progress toward “fundamental change” in Iranian policy. Tehran’s Supreme National Security Council, while warning that “our hands remain on the trigger,” declares the talks a victory. Both statements can be simultaneously true — and that convergence tells you everything you need to know about why these negotiations will never resolve the Iran problem.

They are solving the wrong problem.

The Category Error at the Heart of Every Iran Deal

The word resolve comes from the Latin re-solvere — to loosen again, to dissolve. A genuine resolution makes the problem cease to exist in its original form. Negotiation, by contrast, accepts the problem as permanent and seeks a tolerable equilibrium. These are not the same instrument. Reaching for negotiation when only resolve will do is a category error — and it is the governing error of thirty years of Western policy toward Iran.

The items on the Islamabad table — enrichment levels, inspection protocols, sanctions relief — are divisible. They can be traded, split, sequenced, and memorialized in a document. But the Iranian regime’s foundational commitments are not divisible. They are not policy preferences the Supreme Leader happens to hold. They are what the Islamic Republic is: the theological vanguard of a revolutionary Shia order, the patron of a forward-deployed proxy architecture from Beirut to Sana’a to Baghdad, the determined seeker of a nuclear threshold........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)