Know your enemy

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. 

I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

As the U.S. weighs its next moves in the Middle East, one question looms: Do we really understand the adversary we’re dealing with? 

WORLD commentator Cal Thomas says that question may matter more than any battlefield success.

CAL THOMAS: President Trump recently canceled a planned round of negotiations with Iran—after it became clear the Iranians weren’t even planning to show up.

That alone should raise a deeper concern: Do we know what drives the regime we’re negotiating with?

The ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu put it this way: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”

But if you misunderstand—or assume your enemy thinks as you do, or values what you value—you are already at a disadvantage.

Sorry to say, I see little evidence the United States truly understands Iran and its theology.

Retired Israeli diplomat Yoram Ettinger argues the key lies in Iran’s founding document—their 1979 constitution. He says it lays out, plainly, a religious and ideological mission: to export the Islamic revolution, to oppose the United States, and to establish a global order rooted in its interpretation of Islam.

That is not a negotiating position; it's a worldview.

And if that worldview is rooted in theology—if leaders believe their mission is divinely mandated—then it is not something easily bargained away.

Yet listen to the confidence from Washington. Here’s the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, testifying to the House Armed Services Committee yesterday:

HEGSETH: President Trump, unlike other presidents, has had the courage to ensure Iran never gets a nuclear weapon, and he’s ironclad in that. We have the best negotiator in the world driving that deal. … two months in on an existential fight for the safety of the American people... and we are proud of this undertaking. I am proud that President Trump has had the courage to do it …

That's one way to see it.

But there is another view—one voiced even inside Congress. This is the ranking Democrat on the committee, Congressman Adam Smith of Washington state:

SMITH: One of the big questions that we need to get answered today is—where is this going? What is the plan to achieve our objectives? We’ve seen the cost, and the cost is very, very high. … All we keep hearing on the objectives is we keep seeing all of the targets we have struck. And again, that is an incredible accomplishment from a tactical standpoint—but we’re not in this for a tactical advantage. … because one of the oldest clichés in the military is—the enemy gets a vote. They don’t have to do what we tell them to do...

And that is the point.

Iran’s leaders are not coy about their aims. They speak openly about opposing the West. They support proxy wars, terrorism, and regional instability—not as tactics of convenience, but as extensions of their ideology.

They even have a concept—taqiyya—which permits deception in the service of advancing their cause.

That means diplomacy, for them, is not an end, but a tool. A means to buy time, to gain advantage, to move closer to their long-term goals.

If that is true—and their own words suggest it is—then the United States is not negotiating with a partner seeking compromise. We are negotiating with a regime that believes compromise may be a form of disobedience to God.

And that changes everything.

America tends to assume that other nations want what we want—stability, prosperity, peace. 

But not all do.

Some regimes are willing to sacrifice their own people to advance their cause. They do not share our moral framework. They do not measure success the way we do.

And when we ignore that—when we substitute wishful thinking for clear-eyed analysis—we risk losing not just negotiations … but the larger conflict.

Israeli diplomat Yoram Ettinger gets that. Do we?

For WORLD, I’m Cal Thomas.

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