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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/04/16/why-iran-benefits-when-negotiations-never-end/
Will Tehran Outlast U.S. Deadlines while Preserving Its Leverage?
(Washington Post) Hamid Biglari - I left Iran in 1976. In the five decades since, I have watched American administrations cycle through every conceivable strategy toward the Islamic Republic - containment, engagement, sanctions, covert operations, open war - and arrive each time at the same destination: a regime more consolidated than before, and a population more abandoned than when the policy began. One error is the U.S. addiction to the myth of the Iranian moderate. Leading Iran's delegation in Islamabad is Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a man who has spent his entire career inside Iran's security establishment. He is a general playing a diplomat. The system does not produce moderates. It produces two varieties of hard-liner: those who favor confrontation as the instrument of regime survival, and those who favor tactical flexibility. Every figure the West has labeled a moderate belongs to the second category. Their objective is identical to that of the generals who wanted to keep fighting: the preservation of the Islamic Republic. They differ in method, not in goal. The second error is failing to recognize Iran's master strategy: the deliberate maintenance of a conflict in permanent near-resolution, close enough to keep sanctions pressure manageable, far enough from conclusion to prevent binding constraints from taking effect. Permanent negotiations are the ideal vehicle for extracting concessions while committing to nothing.