Dialogues with the Wolves

It must be stated plainly, without equivocation: one of the recurring blind spots of Western democracies lies in their relationship to time.

Democratic time—defined by alternation, electoral urgency, limited mandates, and the constant need to produce visible results within a short horizon—is indeed a rhythmic, segmented, fractured time… and therefore a fragile one. By nature, it is impatient, perpetually searching for exits, compromises, and provisional stabilizations. It clings to the belief, rooted in a teleological and almost gnostic conception of History, that history itself can be bent through goodwill, negotiation, and shared rationality. That it inevitably advances in the right direction.

Totalitarian time, by contrast, never plays the same score. It is neither hurried, nor linear, nor subjected to the ordeal of suffrage. On the contrary, it is freed from all such constraints, which it considers futile. It is a long, obsessive, telluric time. A time devoted to the preservation of power at any cost.

The Iranian regime is one of its most accomplished incarnations. It exists outside the democratic calendar, far removed from popular sanction, and even beyond ordinary moral temporality. It can wait, retreat, feign, and temporize at will. It understands that the essential thing is not to convince, but to endure. By any means necessary.

It is this asymmetry that the current hesitations of the Trump administration vis-à-vis Tehran once again reveal, despite themselves. Not that Trump should “strike” Iran, nor even seek direct military confrontation. That would most likely offer the clerical regime exactly what it has always awaited: a posture of victimhood, nationalist mobilization, and the sanctification of power through the figure of the external enemy. The “Great Satan” has always been a convenient foil. It would also mean continuing a logic of international bullying and opening Pandora’s box, risking a generalized escalation. Such force has never resolved anything in the long run.

The danger lies elsewhere. It resides in the illusion that a regime founded on duplicity, structural repression, and the ideological export of violence could transform itself through dialogue, gradual integration, or the promise of international recognition. Since at least 2008, and even more so since the wave of brutal repression of recent weeks—marked by massive civilian casualties—it has become clear that this regime negotiates solely to gain time. Time to rebuild its forces. Time to pursue its nuclear and ballistic programs. Time to continue financing, arming, and instrumentalizing militias within an imperial logic that has never wavered.

The dark and immobile time of despotism is its ally; democratic time is its prey.

Here, all moral ambiguity must be lifted. Just as Benjamin Netanyahu will sooner or later have to answer for the crimes committed in Gaza, the Iranian ruling apparatus must be held accountable for the methodical, continuous, and massive repression inflicted upon its own people. This is not a facile or lazy comparison, but a principle: no regime can indefinitely exempt itself from law and justice under the pretext of sovereignty or geopolitical complexity. Even in a disordered world reduced to spheres of influence abandoned to megalomaniacs of all kinds, renouncing this principle would mean definitively legitimizing chaos as the foundational pillar of the international order. Even in a world marked by a general regression toward pre-, or even anti-democratic forms, indifferent to the time of international law and its demands.

The clerical regime is out of time in every sense of the term. Out of democratic time, which it despises; out of moral time, which it tramples; out of historical time itself, insofar as its project rests on a rigid, monolithic, sclerotic political theology, incapable of producing anything other than violence and death in order to sustain itself.

To demand anything other than its departure and the dismantling of its martial being in all its ramifications would constitute a major strategic error, if not an act of complicity. Experience has demonstrated this cruelly with the 2015 agreement under Barack Obama: the idea of Iran’s return to the international community under this very regime—championed by a Washington-based Iranian elite bordering on bad faith—was not only an illusion, but worse still, a destructive utopia. It strengthened the hardliners, weakened internal forces of transformation, and provided the regime with the financial and political means to pursue its imperial enterprise. How much blood has been spilled over the past decade because of these naïve utopias stubbornly clung to by a handful of mythomaniacs or cynical actors devoid of any moral compass!

More gravely still, such a negotiation would constitute a profound moral failure. A silent betrayal of all the blood that has been shed; of those who, for years, have taken to the streets of Iran knowing that the price of their courage could be death, torture, or erasure itself. A failure that will inevitably rebound upon those in the United States or Europe who still claim to defend humanist and democratic values—yet who have so often looked away in the past from the suffering of subjugated peoples.

If a regime is no longer capable of governing its people except by crushing them, then it no longer possesses any legitimacy. Why re-infuse it? In the name of realism? By wielding the carrot and the stick in this manner, without fixed points of reference—namely, the primacy of human life and the freedom of peoples—Trump sends yet another paradoxical message about American power: that it is, in fact, a non-power, whose interventions oscillate, devoid of any values, between brute force (the abduction of Maduro, the handling of the Greenland affair), complicit silence (Gaza), weakness (Ukraine), and now, murky compromise (Iran).

Certainly—and this is a fundamental flaw of the post-1945 international system—the UN “machinery” is more than ever confined to the role of a stunned spectator in the face of conflicts and massacres, indefinitely paralyzed by rival power interests. Bernard Kouchner’s famous “duty to intervene,” supposedly meant to operationalize it? According to which norms, which mechanisms, which tools? The mystery remains. American unilateralism, with its double standards and partial agendas? European multilateralism, which waited until 2026 to tentatively place the Revolutionary Guards on the sanctions list? The question itself breeds profound confusion… and yet more chaos.

Be that as it may, and to remain firmly grounded in practical reality, the only possible “discussion,” the only one commensurate with reality, must concern the departure of Khamenei and his vast repressive, death-driven, martyr-obsessed apparatus, and the abolition of the vilayat-e faqih, the ideological and institutional matrix of this totalitarianism.

The dignity of the victims of recent weeks demands no less.

Anything short of this would merely constitute yet another episode in the same cycle of blindness, a repetition of history masquerading as realism.

Worse still, it would offer the clerics and their regional satellites a new delirious Pyrrhic victory… at the expense of their own citizens, as usual.

Trump and his companions would do well to remember this.

The time Iran pretends to request is never a time of reform; it is always a time of predation, always that of a ticking time bomb.

From Riyadh to Washington, one wonders whether cynical strategists have ever read the story of Little Red Riding Hood and her fatal fascination with dialogues with wolves disguised as grandmothers.

And whether they have ever heard the grim refrain of Leonard Cohen’s testament-song, You Want It Darker:

A million candles burning for the help that never came / You want it darker; we kill the flame.