The October 7 massacre shattered the comforting idea that the best war is the one we prevent. It also revived a question the West keeps trying to dodge: What do you do when you face ideological aggression that treats compromise as weakness and negotiations as a tactic rather than a path to stability?
Two approaches have long competed on this issue. One sees negotiation as a universal tool for managing conflict. The other warns against negotiating with total ideological actors who view talks as a stage on the road to domination, not reconciliation.
Israel has learned the hard way that with radical ideological aggression, especially fundamentalist Islam in its state form (Iran) and its non-state form (Hezbollah or Hamas), negotiations rarely produce stability. They tend to deepen instability, empower extremism, and erode the foundations of international order and liberal democratic norms.
Winston Churchill understood in the 1930s that Nazi Germany was not a rational actor in the classic sense. Its goals were not limited; they were messianic, total, and inherently violent. The strategic conclusion followed: compromise is meaningless with an enemy that rejects the legitimacy of your very existence.
Margaret Thatcher applied a similar logic in confronting terrorism and state aggression. Aggression that is not met with strength gets replicated. Negotiating with terrorist organizations, or with states that sponsor them, does not reduce violence; it normalizes it.
That principle is not confined to a single historical moment. Churchill and Thatcher were driven by values. What drives Donald Trump? Interests, values, or both? In practice, the line between interests and values can be blurry. Values shape long-term interests, and a world order cannot stand on power alone without normative legitimacy.
Trump’s Middle East plan, even if anchored in clear American interests (some would argue personal ones), reflected a conscious mix of interest and value: returning hostages as a moral and national principle, dismantling terrorist organizations as a strategic objective, and demanding real Lebanese sovereignty through the disarmament of all armed militias, first and foremost Hezbollah.
This approach reflects a view that stability is achieved by denying violence legitimacy rather than by absorbing it.
Still, these plans lacked a central component: confronting the ideological and organizational core of the Iranian regime.
Confronting Iran's ideological and organizational core
Iran is not merely a regional player. It is the core state of a transnational extremist system, operating a network of proxies as part of a revolutionary worldview. Negotiating with such a regime, while it remains in power, does not neutralize the threat. It reorganizes it. It gives the regime time, legitimacy, and resources, while strengthening domestic repression and external aggression.
Europe’s silence, and the broader Western world’s silence, in the face of systematic repression of the Iranian people for nearly half a century, is a strategic failure. It is also, first and foremost, a moral failure. When the West gives up on a values-based struggle, it creates a vacuum. Radical forces fill vacuums.
The liberal Left in the West has, for years, embraced de-escalation almost at any price. מול fundamentalist movements, avoiding confrontation does not reduce violence. It encourages it. The result is ongoing harm to human rights, state sovereignty, and the international order.
That is why it is wrong and misleading to claim that confronting Iran means fighting the previous war. Anyone who supports negotiations with the current regime acts against the most basic values of Western civilization. In the name of short-term “quiet” and an illusion of stability, they preserve an extremist regime that guarantees insecurity and instability over the long term.
There is no place for negotiations with Iran’s current regime unless those negotiations lead to the end of the ayatollahs’ rule.
The West, and especially Western Europe, has lost its way. The only real chance for change now depends on one person: the US president. Until now, he has done what seemed impossible on the international stage. In some respects, he has acted in ways that echo Churchill and Thatcher.
If he applies the same approach to Iran, the world, in general, and our region, in particular, will become more stable and safer. If, after the impressive display of power now unfolding before our eyes, he goes to negotiations with the regime in Iran, it will be a personal defeat for him, an American defeat, and a sad moment in human history, especially for the citizens of Iran.
If that happens, Israel, if it has not yet defined this explicitly, will need to act on its own in every way it can to bring down a regime that has pledged to destroy us. A regime that sees Trump as a passing wave that will be gone in three years, while the ayatollahs’ messianic vision is eternal.
The writer is the former commander of the Judea and Samaria Division during the Second Intifada and Operation Defensive Shield, former head of the IDF Home Front Command, and former deputy commander of Northern Command (emergency).