The Middle East is defined by uncertainty.
No one knows whether the United States will remain the region’s primary security guarantor. No one knows whether Saudi Arabia will ultimately align more closely with Washington or Beijing, whether the Gulf states will continue drifting apart or move back toward cooperation, or how today’s alliances will look a decade from now.
Almost everything in the region is fluid.
Except for two things.
First, Israel is not going anywhere.
Whether you see Israel as a colonial project or as a refuge for the Jewish people, whether you identify as Zionist or anti-Zionist, whether you believe Israel should exist or should not is ultimately beside the point. Israel has existed as a sovereign state for more than seventy-five years. It possesses one of the world’s most capable militaries, a resilient economy, and deep international relationships. It is a permanent feature of the Middle Eastern landscape.
Any strategy that depends on Israel disappearing is not a strategy at all. It is wishful thinking. Policies that fail to survive contact with reality inevitably fail in practice.
The second constant is that Iran will continue to overplay its hand.
This is not a moral judgment. It is a structural consequence of the nature of the Islamic Republic. Iran is not merely a nation-state pursuing conventional national interests. It is a revolutionary state whose legitimacy is tied to exporting its ideology, projecting influence, and leading what it sees as a broader civilizational struggle.
Because of that worldview, compromise is rarely viewed as a mutually beneficial bargain. Concessions are interpreted as proof that pressure works. Every gain becomes evidence that more can be achieved. Success encourages greater ambition rather than restraint.
That dynamic makes overreach almost inevitable. Every victory raises expectations for the next one. Every concession invites another demand. Revolutionary systems rarely know when to stop, because stopping would undermine the very ideology that justifies their existence.
These two constants have an important implication.
If Israel is a permanent feature of the Middle East, and if the Islamic Republic is structurally inclined to overplay every strategic gain, then any long-term settlement between the two rests on a false premise.
For decades, Western policymakers have operated under the assumption that Iran can be gradually integrated into the international order. Offer sanctions relief. Recognize a sphere of influence. Include Tehran in regional diplomacy. Give the regime enough political and economic incentives, and eventually it will become a stakeholder in stability rather than a revolutionary force seeking to reshape it.
That assumption misunderstands the nature of the regime.
For a conventional state, compromise is often the end of a negotiation. For a revolutionary state, compromise is often interpreted as validation. If pressure produces concessions, then more pressure should produce even greater concessions. Every agreement becomes a starting point for the next demand rather than the conclusion of the last one.
The pattern has repeated itself across the region. Iran’s influence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and the Gulf has rarely been treated by the regime as an endpoint. Each gain has instead become the foundation for pursuing the next objective. More recently, Tehran’s willingness to threaten shipping through the Strait of Hormuz demonstrated the same instinct: strategic leverage is not preserved for deterrence alone; it is exercised to extract additional political advantage.
This is why memoranda of understanding and grand bargains with the Islamic Republic consistently disappoint their architects. The problem is not that the agreements are poorly negotiated. The problem is that they assume the regime seeks a stable equilibrium. Its ideological foundation rewards continual expansion of influence, not acceptance of limits.
That is why attempts to normalize relations with the Islamic Republic repeatedly end the same way. What one side considers a final settlement, the other often regards as evidence that further pressure is working.
Ironically, this tendency may also prove to be the regime’s greatest weakness. States that consistently overestimate their leverage eventually miscalculate. They assume that every adversary will yield, every red line is negotiable, and every success can be repeated.
Overplaying one’s hand ends not in victory, but in strategic defeat.