Hey everyone.
So this in this video we are going to talk about how the Iranians approach negotiations.
And we’re going to talk about it in a general sense.
What is their approach? Because even from before the war started on this channel and certainly throughout the war and the ceasefire and where we’re up to now over these last few months, I’ve continually said things about how the Iranians view negotiations, how they view compromise, how they approach negotiations differently than the Americans do.
And I really instead of just throwing that out every now and then, I want to actually share with you uh the overall picture of how they view negotiations.
and it will help explain everything that we’re seeing.
It will help you explain all their behavior and the this whole this whole dysfunctional dynamic going on now between the Iranians and the Americans.
Uh we’ve all been watching this kind of stalled negotiation situation, this back and forth, the demands, the threats, the impass, and a lot of people are confused.
They don’t know why Iran won’t make a deal.
What are they doing? What’s their strategy? What’s their what’s their endgame? And I’m going to answer all of that today.
So stick around.
stick around.
It’s very important conversation.
Um, I also want to remind you to check out the Israel 365 News channel.
Make sure that you’re subscribed there, that you’re catching all the interviews that we do.
I’m going to be talking about uh uh one of the interviews that we did there last week, an important interview.
Today, we just put up another conversation that I had with Dr.
David Worms of the Center for Security Policy in Washington DC.
Is one of the top experts on the Middle East in the world and uh we talk to him once a week.
fantastic conversation.
So, go over to Israel 365 News.
Make sure you’re catching all the content there.
Okay, we’re going to start off with Jack Keane, one of our favorites and what he had to say a couple days ago about the state of the negotiations.
And we’re going to use that to talk about this whole topic of how Iran negotiates.
Welcome back.
An adviser to Supreme Leader Mustaba Kame threatening a wider war and calling for the US to unfreeze billions in Iranian assets.
This as the US and Iran have been exchanging strikes overnight.
Here to react this so-called test of trust is Fox News senior strategic analyst and chairman of the Institute for the Study of War for General Jack Keane.
General, thank you for being here.
Obviously, this is going on and on for weeks now.
The president has demonstrated great patience to try and get this deal.
I want to play for you a soundbite.
We’re hearing now from a military adviser to the Supreme Leader about the negotiations.
Here’s what that adviser had to say.
Listen here.
Okay, pay close attention here.
We’re going to be referring back to what this senior adviser to the Supreme Leader has to say.
This is a sign of trust building.
If Trump takes the negotiation seriously, $24 billion is not much to America.
If he wants to reach an agreement with Iran, this $24 billion is a test of trust that Iran wants to have with Trump.
This is a test that America must pass and the path will be opened.
This is our own money, not America’s money.
General, what’s your reaction to that and where do things stand as far as you see it? Yeah.
Well, I think the that leader there has his head literally in the wrong place.
He thinks this is some kind of arbitration, you know, where each side is going to make concessions to get to a common point.
That’s that’s not what this is about.
I mean, we President Trump brought us the first president in almost 50 years brought us to this consequential point to take Iran off the map as a predator to its neighbors in the region and to worldwide sponsor of terrorism once and for all.
We’re going to stop the killing that they’ve imposed on others and they’ve imposed on their own people.
That was generally the objective of Epic Fury.
And President Trump stopped it after they took shut down the straits for moons because they appeared to use that as a negotiating lever to make a deal.
And they said that they would open the straits in two weeks and they never did.
And we are here in negotiations trying to work something out.
But what we’re insisting on and we have the leverage to do it.
We have five weeks of epic fury with two more to go to finish them.
We have the naval blockade which is creating economic peril along with the very long list of things that Secretary Besson and his outstanding economic team is doing to impose economic pressure on Iran.
So those are our leverage points.
But what we are trying to achieve in the negotiations is pretty simple.
We want our maximalist demands that we would achieve if we were using military force.
That is what we want from the regime.
We don’t intend to throw them a lifeline and unfreeze frozen assets to them and give them billions of dollars so that they can recover, reverse the tenants and implementation of the deal and go back to where they were.
Who do they think they’re talking to? Are we fools? Before we go on, we’re going to play the rest of the clip.
Just to interject here, President Trump did say at the very beginning of the war that he would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender and that he wanted his negotiators to insist on all of his demands.
And when they stopped the hostilities at the time, Trump’s intent was, okay, we’re stopping the hostilities so they can come to the table and surrender and basically give in to Trump’s demands.
That’s the way the Americans see this, but it’s not the way the Iranians see it, as we’ll see.
That’s not who we are.
What President Trump is insisting on, I’m offering you something.
You give me what I’m trying to achieve through military force and economic pressure or I return to military force.
That’s the deal that’s on the table.
What what this government official is talking about is something quite different.
We’re not conducting an arbitration between a labor union and a and a business firm here and we try to work something out equitably.
That’s not what this is about.
This is meet our objectives without having to impose more military force on you or not.
That’s kind of the the impass we have.
So, General, this has been going on for eight weeks now.
The president showing great patience here and even I was at the White House this week.
the president was talking about if this deal gets signed, some of the details would allow would include Iran allowing the US to go in and get that so-called nuclear dust that’s near bomb grade enriched to 60%.
But yet, as this drags on, are you concerned that we are headed down a path that’s going to lead to renew the fighting? I think we’re pretty close to one or the other right now, and I think we’ll probably in a couple of days get an answer.
It seems to me that the administration is at a point where they have run out of strategic patience.
They have given Iran lots of rope here over the as you noted eight weeks we have been at this.
And I think the Iranians intention is not as earnest as their negotiators indicate to our negotiators.
I think where the the leaders who are actually controlling the regime are is drag this thing out as far as possible get closer to the midterm elections in the United States because then they believe the likelihood of the president pulling the trigger and going back to combat operations are slim to none.
That I think is their I don’t buy that.
I I don’t think they have miscalculated with President Trump was before.
Remember, Greff, for our audience, prior to the 12-day war, he went into a 60-day negotiating clock with this same regime over the same issues we’re discussing now, and they didn’t fulfill that 60-day clock.
They were not willing to make a deal.
On the 61st day, he greenlighted the 12-day war that began with Israel attacking Iran for the first time in its history.
I think we’re at that point now in terms of the president running out of patience having given them all this time to make a deal here that makes sense.
In other words, you have to meet our objectives or we return to military operations and put as much economic pressure on you along with that which would likely put the regime on a path to economic collapse and certainly quite vulnerable to the Iranian people.
Something that we had in mind from the very beginning.
That’s right.
And it’s good to remind our viewers of that.
Great insight as always, General Jack King.
Okay.
So, that’s General Jack Keane.
And I got to say that, you know, yeah, you you know, when you when you listen to what he’s saying, he’s so confident.
He’s so so confident that, you know, President Trump is not looking for an off-ramp and and not worried about the midterms and is more than willing to go back to kinetic action and that the that the uh that the calculation the strategic calculation of the Iranians of the regime that if they get closer to the midterms there’s less of a chance of kinetic action and Jack Jack Keane poo poos that and says that they’re mis that they’re misreading Trump.
I wish I had his confidence.
Um because it certainly looks like Trump is signaling that he does not want to go back to kinetic action.
In any event, uh so that’s so that’s Jack Keane’s that’s Jack Keane’s take here.
And I want to show you this article which I’m going to be I’m going to be quoting from.
Let me first uh let me first sum up what we just saw here.
You have this military adviser of the Supreme Leader who goes on TV and basically says, “Give us $24 billion as a test of trust.
This is what America needs to do to prove it’s serious.
” And Keane’s reaction is exactly right.
Right.
He says, “That’s not what this is.
This isn’t an arbitration.
This is this isn’t two sides sitting down to work out a compromise.
This is meet our demands or we go back to military force.
That’s the deal.
Again, I I I hope he’s right that that’s the type of resolve that President Trump is bringing to this.
Who knows? But here’s what I want to do today because what Keen is describing, you know, he’s Keen is describing what he’s seeing and he’s reacting to it.
But I want to go a level deeper.
I want to explain to you why Iran behaves this way.
Where does this come from? Why do they keep doing this? Like why does this pattern repeat? So I recently came across a paper.
It was shared with me by the author that I think every single person following the situation needs to read.
It was written by Dr.
Harold Road.
R H O D.
Dr.
Harold RH.
And before I tell you what’s in it, let me tell you who he is because this matters.
Harold RH got his PhD in Islamic history from Columbia University.
He speaks Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Turkish.
As a young scholar, as a student, he actually lived and studied in Iran.
He was there during the early stages of the revolution in the 70s, the revolution that brought Kmeni to power.
He watched it happen.
He was there on the streets.
He then spent 28 years as the senior adviser on the Islamic world inside the office of the US Secretary of Defense.
Okay? So he’s not a journalist.
He’s not a pundit.
He’s not a political person.
He’s an expert on that part of the world.
Okay? He’s someone who was in the room at the highest levels of American national security for nearly three decades writing strategy papers on Iran, on Iraq, on the broader Islamic world for the people making the decisions.
Okay? He’s a protege of Bernard Lewis.
They were very close.
Bernard Lewis is widely considered the greatest western scholar of Islam in the Middle East in the 20th century.
So after retiring from the Pentagon, Harold RH became a senior fellow at the Gatesstone Institute and also at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, which is really like the premier Middle East analysis think tank in the Middle East.
And I had the honor of meeting Harold recently.
I interviewed him on the Israel 365 news channel last week.
You could go find that interview and watch it and we talk about some of these issues there.
But Harold is one of the most credentialed, most experienced voices on the subject of Iran in the world.
Period.
And he wrote a paper, you have it here up on the screen, called the sources of Iranian negotiating behavior.
Not a very exciting title, but look at that title again.
The sources of Iranian negotiating behavior.
And here’s the thing I want you to understand before I tell you what’s in this paper.
He wrote this paper in 2010, 16 years ago.
I want you to keep that in your head as I walk you through the key points because when you hear what he wrote, you’re going to feel like you’re reading a description of your news feed from this morning, from every day that we’re dealing with now.
every pattern we’ve been watching, the stalling, the demands for confidence building measures, the uh that sounds like they’re into compromises, but they’re not really uh the the the calm and the warmth that you get, you know, like like with these Iranian leaders, they seem so relaxed, right? Where is this is coming from? And and their whole way that they try to kick the can down the road and run out the clock, it’s not just about this situation.
These are all tactics of Iranian negotiation that Harold RH laid out 16 years ago in this paper.
This isn’t hindsight.
This is someone who looked back after this isn’t this isn’t someone looking back after the fact and saying, “I told you.
” This is someone who understood Iranian political culture so deeply that he essentially wrote out a playbook that we’ve been watching Iran run ever since and especially throughout this war and through these negotiations.
So when someone writes something 16 years ago and it reads like today’s headlines, it’s it’s worth looking at.
Okay, lesson one.
So he goes through in the piece he wrote it in different sections and there’s a number of different lessons that he pulls out about or or just key axioms key ideas about how Iran views negotiation and it’s not just about the regime it’s about the culture Persian culture history he’s an expert in all this stuff so he he talks about this from real knowledge here we go number one lesson one is strength is everything and weakness is an invitation for aggression so wrote explains that in Iranian political culture, compromise is not a virtue.
It’s not a sign of being reasonable.
They know that we view it that way.
So, they say things like this guy said about building trust.
But in their world, compromise is not something that reasonable people do to reach a mutually beneficial outcome.
In Iranian thinking, if you compromise, it’s a sign of lack of confidence.
It’s a sign of weakness and it’s a sign that you’re submitting and it brings shame on the person who compromises.
So if you flip that around, a person who forces someone else to compromise, who induces a compromise.
If I can induce you to make a compromise, that’s a win for me.
And that and that that changes the balance in the relationship.
That increases my honor and my power.
That’s how the game works.
And here’s the part that you should really make you think.
Road says there that Iranians do not see weakness as a reason to engage an adversary in compromise.
They see it as when you see weakness in the enemy, when you see them capitulating and them compromising, them rolling back some of their demands, that’s when you push harder and that’s when you that’s when you go on the offense.
So when the Iranian adviser, when this guy goes on TV and says, “Give us 24 million as a test of trust,” what’s he doing? It’s a probe.
What are they doing? They’re testing.
They’re not looking for a confidence building measure.
They’re testing to see if the Americans will give into their demand and make that compromise.
Is there any softness in their position in the American position? And if they can extract a concession, then they know that they can push for the next concession.
It’ll prove to them that pressure can yield concessions.
Okay? So he gives a in the paper, Harold Road gives a stark example from history.
He talks about the Obama administration and that when they signaled their desire to sit down and negotiate with Iran, Iran immediately hardened their position on the nuclear issue.
They always seem to do that.
They always it’s like and that baffles us like why are they why are they driving a harder bargain right why do they do that because in Iranian thinking if you ask to talk at any point where you say we want to negotiate if you say that you say we’d like to talk to you for them and if you do that before you’ve won it proves that you don’t believe you can win because why why would you talk to me if you could beat me you must not really have confidence that you can win so the offer offer to negotiate is itself a sign of weakness in their thinking and when Iranian and when they smell weakness when this when these people smell weakness they go in for the kill now look at what Trump is doing and what Keen is describing Trump didn’t come to Iran with an outstretched hand he launched military operations he imposed a naval blockade he has this economic pressure through secretary Besson’s team he’s negotiating from a position of demonstrated force and road would tell you that’s the only posture around respects the problem is that the Americans are also talking about all sorts of concessions.
They’ve rolled back some of their demands.
Some of the demands they were making earlier, they’re no longer making.
Ballistic missiles, funding for proxies.
There’s things that have fallen away.
And the Iranians see that.
When the Iranians are demanding that the Americans get the Israelis to stop attacking, part of the reason they’re doing that is a power play.
Because if they then when Trump then looks at BB and says stop the Iranians and you see this in their media they say you see he’s compromising he’s giving into our demands and it emboldens them to dig in for more.
Okay so that’s lesson number one that how weakness and strength are understood and how and how there’s no such thing as compromise the way we understand it.
Lesson number two from Harold Road is a concept in per that in Persian is called Ketman uh that they’ll tell you what you want to hear.
This is a concept that is most important to understand about Iranian communication.
So wrote again he introduces this word ketman in Arabic.
The same word is takia which means dissimulation or deception.
Uh you might have heard that word.
The idea is simple but profound.
what Iranians say publicly is very often not what they believe privately and they don’t think of it as lying in the way that we understand lying road is very careful about this he says that’s not the way they see it in Iranian culture it’s a form of self-preservation it’s like defensiveness that you don’t reveal everything they don’t think right so and it goes back like over 2500 years long before Islam it’s not an Islamic concept it’s a Persian concept um and it developed by Being the subject of conquest and foreign rule, when saying the wrong thing to the wrong ruler could get you killed, Iranians became extremely culturally skilled at wrapping their true intentions in a layer of politeness and calm and warmth and telling powerful people exactly what they want to hear or saying things in a very calm voice that makes them sound reasonable.
You ever notice that about these guys? Whenever you listen to their to their foreign minister or to this guy speaking, they’re always very relaxed and calm and composed.
That is very that is that is a very well-honed cultural behavior.
Now, Road describes it with a beautiful image.
He says that Iranians love the symbolism of the onion and an onion has a core surrounded by many protective layers.
Iranian culture road explains has developed layer upon layer of protection around its true core to the point where someone sometimes even Iranians themselves don’t even know exactly what they believe and here’s the problem for Americans specifically road points out that westerners and especially Americans who place enormous value on cander directness and honesty if someone agrees to something like they say they they make a commitment like we saw this with Gaza you know it was so laugh affable where the Americans kept saying, “Well, Kamas agreed to disarm.
They said they would like as though it means anything.
” Like they place Americans, it almost seems naive, but Americans place a lot of value on people being direct and honest and meaning what they say.
And therefore, Americans are very susceptible to ketman, to this device, to this strategy of the Iranians.
So when an Iranian negotiator is warm and gracious and engaging and friendly, Americans read that as genuiness.
And that’s why you’ll have you you’ll have these Americans saying, “Oh, I met these people and they were lovely people and they’re reasonable and the people or when Trump says the people we’re talking to are very reasonable people because they’re they are so skilled at coming off as reasonable as possible.
” Um, and and that’s why they think that they want to make a deal even though they don’t.
A road says, “Don’t judge Iranians by their words, judge them by their actions.
” That’s the way to beat this ketman thing.
Just don’t pay attention to what they say.
Only pay attention to how they behave.
Think about this Iranian adviser again.
This $24 billion is a test of trust and then the path will be open to more negotiations.
Very warm language.
It’s very consiliatory, you know, framing, right? He’s like it it’ll be a test of trust and then the path will be opened.
But what’s he saying? He’s basically saying, “We’re holding you hostage.
Give us $24 billion.
” Does he think that Trump should hand over money? Right.
He he makes it sound like just such a reasonable thing, but it’s really just he’s trying to get money while giving nothing in return yet to see but he also also wants to test the Americans.
Will they give into this? Will they make the compromise? And if they do, aha, now we go in for more.
So Ketman, you know, uh that’s Ketman.
So Jack Keane, he he he’s not having any of it.
Like you see in his comments, he’s like, “We’re not here to give you a lifeline and unfreeze frozen assets so you can recover and reverse everything.
That’s not who we are.
” But that’s and that’s exactly what Harold Rhodess said 16 years ago.
Pay no attention to what they say.
Only everything should be based on actions, your actions and their actions.
Just do not pay attention to what they say because that’s where they start deceiving you.
Lesson three from Harold Road is patience.
And this is the one we’ve talked about a lot over the last few months that they’ll wait you out.
It’s part it is their it’s not just their negotiating strategy in this negotiation.
It’s always their negotiating strategy.
Harold RH points out that Iranians invented or adopted very early uh adopted as their national game the game of chess.
And there’s a reason for that.
Chess is a game of patience, of calculation, of thinking many moves ahead, of anticipating your opponent’s response.
Road says that Iranians bring that same mentality to geopolitics.
They plan and they calculate many, many steps ahead and they’re extraordinarily patient.
And that’s why it sometimes seems insane like they’re under so much military pressure and they just seem so patient and so calm and just drag things out.
They are.
This is their culture.
In Iranian thinking, the one who can wait out an opponent usually wins.
And this is a direct clash with Western especially American culture, right? Because in American culture, we want everything to happen quickly.
And you know, so on all these different points on the deception issue, Americans like directness and cander and your word being your word.
and they believe that it’s it’s a sign of strength to deceive your enemy.
They don’t even view it as immoral.
It’s just part of that’s how you that’s how you win.
That’s how you negotiate.
We see compromise as a virtue and as and as and as trust building.
They see compromise as a show of weakness, right? They we want things to be done rather quickly to just move to solutions.
They want to drag things out.
Now listen to what Keane says about what the Iranian leadership is actually doing in these negotiations.
Like he says this.
He says their strategy is to drag things out past the American midterm elections because they believe that once the political calendar tightens up, Trump is going to be less likely to return to military operations.
And again, Jack Keane’s very confident that that’s not true.
We’ll see.
But bottom line is from the Iranian perspective, that’s what we’re talking about in this video.
They’re not trying to reach a deal.
They’re not.
What’s their endgame? That’s that’s the wrong question.
They’re they want to always run out the clock.
Run out the clock.
They know that their negotiating position improves as time passes.
Westerners get impatient.
Westerners start to come up with another maybe another compromise they can live with, another confidence building measure they can live with.
Maybe I’ll drop that demand or drop that demand and then maybe we could get a deal.
That’s how Westerners think.
and they know that.
So, they’re running out the clock.
They’re playing chess.
Now, Road wrote this exact pattern.
He wrote everything I’ve just said in 2010.
He warned that with Iranians offering to come to the negotiation table before winning can actually escalate the situation.
It can invite more demands.
It can invite a It can make them dig in and give them confidence that they’ll survive and that they’re not at risk of losing their regime.
That’s what happens when you stop fighting and you go to the negotiating table.
So, every week that you’re at the table from their perspective, from the Iranians perspective, is a week that you’re not using military force where you could use it.
And if you don’t use military force where you could use it, you’re weak and you lack will.
And then now I know I can make demands on you.
Keane makes the critical point, Jack Keane makes the critical point that Iran has miscalculated with Trump before, right? He pointed out that before the 12-day war, they had a 60-day negotiating window.
And then on day 61, uh, the way Keane puts it, Trump greenlighted the war.
And King, you know, Keane, Jack Keane thinks we’re at the same point now.
Okay, maybe I think, okay, let me sum all this up.
Harold RH wrote this paper in 2010.
2010.
And you should go read it.
Every one of you, you should go read it.
You could find it on JCPA, I’m sorry, JCFA, JCFA.
org, jcfa.
org, the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.
Look up JCFA.
org.
Harold Road, RH OD.
The article is called The Sources of Iranian Negotiating Behavior.
Amazing, amazing article.
You all have to read it.
So, but think about it.
16 years ago.
He’s describing the deception, the warmth and calm describe, you know, which is designed to lull you into thinking you’re dealing with someone reasonable.
The Iranian view of compromise as shame.
Uh the chess player patience, the strategy of waiting out an opponent, the whole thing, how goodwill gestures don’t work.
They don’t they don’t get you closer to a deal.
they actually project weakness and embolden the Iranians.
And here we are in 2026, 16 years later.
And I’m looking at this paper and I’m looking what Jack Keane is saying on Fox about where we are.
And and this is this Iranian behavior is not irrational.
It’s not random.
It’s not crazy.
And it’s not it’s not something that we didn’t that we didn’t that we shouldn’t have expected.
The fact that the Trump administration has said at various points that they’re surprised at the Iranian behavior is shameful.
It means that they have not done their homework.
This behavior of the Iranians is deeply rooted in a culture and a way of thinking that goes back 2500 years through Persian empires through invasions and conquest and different dynasties coming in and ruling over them.
This is Persian culture.
It’s an ancient civilization.
And when you understand that history, when you internalize what Harold RH is teaching us, nothing Iran does will surprise you anymore.
You know, on on this channel, when I’m saying these things in these videos about the Iranians, I’m not just a guy reading the news, okay? I I mean, I am, but I I try to become as knowledgeable as possible on the subject.
And this essay by Harold RH is an absolute must readad.
you’ll read it and now you you start to understand how to read how to listen to the Iranians to listen to what they’re saying.
One thing that we learned from this is that Western policy makers have had access to this information.
Harold RH published this a decade and a half ago and why aren’t these people reading it? Now, I hope that Trump’s team internalizes this.
I hope they’re starting to understand who they’re dealing with and that there should be you have to you have to if if we’re going to take Harold RH’s advice, what does it mean? It means maximum pressure.
It means no concessions before victory.
It means stop paying attention to what they say and only pay attention to their actions.
Don’t give any concession that is not in exchange for something they have done.
Not that they’re committed to do, but that they have done.
Right? Like the Iranian demand for $24 billion as a test of trust.
Harold RH would say to you don’t give them a single dollar.
It’s not trust building.
When he said when that Iranian adviser said it’s a test of the Americans, he he meant I mean he said it’s a test of trust.
You know what it’s a test? It’s a test whether you’re going to capitulate, whether you’re going to compromise, whether you’re weak.
2010 he wrote this and it it’s like explains everything.
All right, that’s what I wanted to share with you.
Please share this video.
This is exactly the kind of background knowledge that people need that helps make sense of everything we’re watching.
And always as and as always, God bless you.
Be well.
