Why aggressors keep winning at the negotiating table

When I was a young lawyer, I learned a simple lesson about negotiations: If someone creates a problem and then demands payment to stop causing it, you are not negotiating. You are being extorted.

Yet that increasingly is the model by which the West deals with terrorist organizations and rogue regimes.

Consider the latest reports concerning Hamas. Nearly three years after the atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023—after the murder of civilians, the taking of hostages and a devastating war that has brought untold suffering to Israelis and Palestinians alike—Hamas reportedly insists that it will not disarm before Israel withdraws from the Gaza Strip.

Pause and consider that proposition.

The organization that launched the war is now demanding guarantees before surrendering the weapons that made the war possible.

Iran employs a remarkably similar strategy. It threatens international shipping, sponsors proxy attacks throughout the Middle East, menaces its neighbors and periodically raises fears about freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz. Then, when tensions rise, the international community begins discussing what incentives, guarantees or concessions might persuade Tehran to reduce the aggression it initiated in the first place.

The pattern is impossible to miss. The aggressor creates the crisis. The world pressures others to resolve it.

This doesn’t happen because Hamas and Iran are stronger than the countries confronting them. Militarily, they are not. Hamas has suffered enormous losses. Hezbollah has been battered. Iran and its network of proxies have sustained serious setbacks.

Yet military weakness and political leverage are not the same thing.

Terrorist organizations like Hamas and the Islamist regime in Iran understand something that democratic societies often forget. They don’t have to win; they just have to survive.

Western governments are accountable to voters. Citizens worry about rising energy prices, prolonged conflicts, civilian casualties, disruptions to commerce and the possibility of wider wars. Democracies therefore seek stability. Terrorist organizations and revolutionary regimes exploit that desire.

For them, violence is not a failure of policy. It is policy. As a result, the side that initiated the conflict often faces less pressure than the side attempting to stop it.

Notice how these discussions frequently unfold. Hamas refuses to disarm, and the debate quickly turns to what Israel must do to preserve negotiations. Iran threatens regional stability, and the conversation shifts to what America and its allies must do to avoid escalation.

The burden somehow migrates from the aggressor to the target.

The lesson being taught is dangerous. If every crisis eventually produces diplomatic attention, economic incentives, political concessions or military restraint from the victim, then creating crises becomes a rational strategy. This is not merely an Israeli problem. Russia employs variations of the same tactic in Europe. China tests it in the Pacific. North Korea has practiced it for decades. Create instability, raise the stakes and then negotiate over returning to conditions that existed before the provocation.

The international community often treats the restoration of normal behavior as though it were a concession deserving reward. It is not.

A terrorist organization does not deserve credit for agreeing not to commit terrorism. A regime does not deserve compensation for refraining from attacks it had no right to conduct in the first place.

The question is not whether diplomacy should be used. Diplomacy remains an essential tool of statecraft. The question is whether diplomacy is backed by consequences.

No withdrawal should precede verified disarmament. No sanctions relief should precede verified compliance.

No agreement should depend solely on promises from parties with long histories of violating agreements.

And no aggressor should receive benefits merely for suspending behavior that should never have occurred. Israel learned after Oct. 7 that intentions matter less than capabilities. A movement committed to your destruction does not become harmless because it signs a document. The true test is whether it retains the ability to carry out its threats. The same principle applies beyond Gaza.

As the father of an American student murdered by Iranian-sponsored terrorists, I have watched this cycle repeat itself for more than three decades. The names change. The tactics evolve. The slogans are updated for a new generation. But the underlying strategy remains remarkably consistent. First comes the act of terror, aggression or intimidation. Then comes the international demand for restraint. Then comes the negotiation over what must be offered to persuade the aggressor to stop doing what it never had the right to do in the first place.

I have seen Iran and its proxies benefit from this pattern for years. Others have learned from it. Hamas certainly has. The West often wonders why terrorist groups and rogue regimes seem to possess so much leverage. The answer is not that they are stronger; it is that they have become skilled at convincing civilized societies to pay them for temporary restraint.

Until that changes, the next aggressor will learn the same lesson as the last one: create a crisis, survive the response and wait for the world to pressure your victim into making concessions. That is not a path to peace. It’s an incentive for endless conflict.

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