Negotiating With Terrorists

April 17, 2026

Doug Leyendecker

Welcome to This Week’s Leyendecker View

To get through the hardest journey, we need take only one step at a time, but we must keep on stepping.
– Old Chinese Proverb

FAVORITE READS OF THE WEEK

Progressivism, the threat to our country
Justice Clarence Thomas’s eloquence.

This is Iran’s strategy
The radicals have a long-term plan.

It’s not oil driving up inflation
Inflation will keep rising after the war.

THINKING OUT LOUD

Negotiating With Terrorists
It doesn’t work

Radical Iranian leaders aim to eliminate Israel, expel the United States from the Middle East, and assert regional hegemony through a resistance network. Their strategy includes exploiting regional instability to advance economic, military, and ideological goals, often utilizing proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah to wage a long-term war of attrition.

If your ultimate goal is the elimination of an entire country and the complete removal of US influence in the Middle East, and your strategy is carried out by proxy armies that constantly commit terror attacks, who are the terrorists? Iran’s regime, their proxy allies, or both?

If we consider both to be terrorists, then how does one negotiate with them? Unfortunately, one does not. You cannot negotiate with a terrorist. Here’s why—

Terrorists do not play by rational, Western social or political rules. Western governments are accountable to laws, institutions, and public scrutiny. Terrorist groups, by contrast, operate outside these constraints. They are not bound by norms of compassion, good faith, or long-term responsibility.

The radical Iranian regime’s goals are of an extreme nature. They seek the complete annihilation of those who don’t acquiesce to their belief systems and behaviors. This significant imbalance between radical zealots and more liberal and non-fundamentalist nations puts Western societies at a huge disadvantage in negotiations.

The radicals use every pause in combat and every attempt at diplomacy to prepare for the next terror event. That terror is meant to keep people in constant fear, so much so they give in or give up. The citizens of Iran are a perfect example.

An analysis of Iranian religious preferences suggests about 70% of Iranians oppose the continuation of the Islamic Republic. Given the potential repercussions for Iranians declaring their disdain for the regime, 70% is quite a feat and likely low. The data is not clear, but insiders suggest the Iranian regime may have murdered over 30,000 citizens in the recent months’ protests.

This is how the terror strategy works. The choice between living under totalitarian rule or death is straightforward for most people. The WWII Nazis used a similar strategy.

Outside of their own country, the Iranian regime has attempted to keep the terror events that their proxies execute at arm’s length. These proxies threaten all non-believers of the regime’s radical Shia values. It’s why numerous Sunni Muslim countries are hoping for regime change. Bowing down to a supreme leader in Tehran is not their wish.

Using proxies as their tip of the spear, the regime can claim the various terrorist attacks, like those of October 7th in Israel, did not directly involve Iranian forces. This flimsy ruse allows Iran’s allies, those sovereign nations dependent on Iranian trade, and all anti-Western cohorts to do the same. “It wasn’t Tehran! It was those other guys!”

That misdirection of blame has carried the regime for decades, while the violence it has underwritten has continued. And now, after the Israel and US attacks, the regime wants to claim it is the victim.

This is an extremely good strategy. Play the victim all the while continuing to pursue the underlying goal of Israel’s destruction and using terror and fear to tear apart other Muslim nations and Western democracies.

One way of sustaining the regime’s strategy is to always appear open to a “deal.” With “diplomacy,” they seek to keep the opposition hoping for a resolution, which makes their targets more vulnerable to the next terror event. Yet history shows that diplomacy with terror-based actors only allows them to keep acting badly. Diplomacy did not stop Hitler in WWII.

So here we are in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.

Leave the Iranian regime alone, and it will remain the force behind the terror campaigns of their proxies. Leave it alone, and it will continue to spread radical Islam, infecting more of the world with ideologies that destroy freedom and fair play. Leave it alone, and it will continue to work toward obtaining nuclear weapons it can use to threaten any disbelievers.

Go after the regime, as the US and Israel have done, and the world gets a dose of chaos and uncertainty. For how long, we do not yet know.

No one likes chaos or uncertainty. But only the naive can believe the regime’s goals are going to change. Until Trump and his team came along, no other country was interested in taking the needed step. Was it too soon? Or was it too late?

The old saying that to kill the snake, one must cut off its head does not apply here. The regime had long prepared for that battle.

The radical Islamists are less like a snake and more like a cancer that, over time, has spread across many parts of the globe. To defeat the regime will likely require a very well thought through strategy that in a way mirrors the regime’s own tactics.

At the end of the day, the only way to defeat a terrorist is to out-terrorize them. You have to make them more afraid of you than you are of them. Taking out a few regime leaders and some military facilities will not be enough to eradicate this cancer. Not doing so will only allow the cancer to further metastasize.

We should prepare for a longer and likely more brutal conflict. If resolution happens quickly, then it would show how well prepared the US military and our leadership was before starting this campaign.

We should hope and pray not just for a quick victory but also a lasting change that frees the Iranian people and citizens of many countries from the radical ideologies Iran’s regime demands of the world. Doing so will make everyone in the world safer.

THE RANDOMS

When a shoe company announces it’s now an AI company, it likely signals the peak of a gold rush, a fad, or both.

Remember when people believed eating eggs was bad for our health? This is but one of countless examples of “conventional wisdom” that is eventually recast as misguided or foolish. What other conventional “wisdoms” today—social, economic, cultural—will prove wrong in the future? Is conventional wisdom actually just “conventional fad”?

Why do some people do evil things to innocent people? Do animals do things to other innocent animals out of some evil drive, or is their violence exclusively to survive?

Why do so many people vote against their own self-interest? Is it because they know little about their self-interests and a lot about their favorite sports teams, fashions, and hobbies?

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through the Economic Opportunity Act and established the Office of Economic Opportunity to launch his “War on Poverty” as a cornerstone of the Great Society agenda. Sixty-two years later, we’re still talking about widening income and wealth inequality, a housing crisis, inflation, and unaffordable health care. So why didn’t Washington legislation accomplish its goal?

Google suggests that 50% of the countries that hold elections are not true democracies. A recent example is Uganda, which shut down the internet prior to an election. The leaders in countries like Uganda rig elections one or many ways.

Has too much information and too many opinions disguised as truths destroyed critical thinking?

ECONOMIC NEWS

Economy

US health care is way overpriced
US is set to double aluminum capacity
Consumer sentiment at record low
As US fertility rate hits record low

Labor

What it takes to get hired these days
Consulting no longer a dream job
LA teachers get heft pay raise
The rise of the college-educated working class

The Lone Star

Jet engine factory going up near Austin
Texas to build first US refinery in 50 years
NY losing high earners to Texas

BUSINESS

Finance

The new hedge fund craze
Goldman issues private credit warning
Big bank traders are making big bucks
Has investing drifted into gambling?
Princeton cuts expected PE returns

Real Estate