The Handshake of Death: Iran and the Fatal Mistake of Negotiating with Evil

Every resistance movement that sat down with empire walked away as its enforcer. Iran is now being invited to the same table.

I listened today to Alon Mizrahi’s monologue, in which he asked, with a frustration that bordered on anguish, “Why would you negotiate with evil?” His question lodged itself in me because it names, with a directness most commentary studiously avoids, something I have been wrestling with for a very long time. Why do we negotiate with evil?

Why, when every historical instinct and every piece of accumulated evidence screams against it, do we keep walking back to the same table, sitting across from the same smiling face, and convincing ourselves that this time the outcome will be different?

I have come to believe the answer is not strategic. It is not even, at root, political. It is psychological.

The Stockholm Mind

There is a sickness among us. Among us normal people. I call it the Stockholm mind when confronted with psychopathy. We think we can convince the psychopath to be spared, to see us as an equal, a negotiating partner. We see that the psychopath is ruthless, we see how he bullies a…