Iran sees itself as the victor. And in this case, Donald Trump’s old warning fits perfectly: Iran has never won a war, and it has never lost a negotiation.
Those who truly understand the Middle East — not from studio panels on CNN, but from the hard reality of the region — know how this process works. First, Tehran and its allies make absurd claims. The West laughs. Then, slowly, those same claims become “positions.” Then they become “demands.” And finally, Western diplomats begin treating them as legitimate points for discussion.
That is exactly the danger zone talks are now in.
Iran has survived the latest round of confrontation and is already trying to turn survival into victory. Its leaders and proxies will claim that America backed down, that Israel was restrained, that the so-called “resistance axis” forced the world to negotiate. It does not matter whether those claims are true. What matters is that, in the Middle East, repetition creates political reality.