This Was How The Iran Deal Was Always Going To End

Well, so much for that Iran-US memorandum of understanding. So yesterday, Iran fired on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, and last night, the United States responded by striking some 80 sites in Iran. And then this morning, President Trump declared that the memorandum of understanding between Iran and the United States is effectively dead. I, for one, am totally shocked. Well, I mean, I'm not, since I said literally the first day that the MOU was a mistake and that it would fail. That's not because I'm smart. That's because there's this thing. It's called reality. And it doesn't stop existing just because we wish it didn't. Islam exists. We, the West, are not like them, the Iranian mullahs. And this has consequences. In just a second, I'm going to explain why that MOU was destined to fail from the beginning, what the West gets wrong about Islam, and what comes next. This is The Ben Shapiro Show. Well, in the least surprising news since Rosie O'Donnell came out as a lesbian, the United States resumed what it called powerful strikes on Iran last night after the Iranians began harassing ships in the Strait of Hormuz again. According to CNBC, the United States began a series of powerful strikes against Iran on Tuesday in retaliation for Iranian attacks on three commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz, according to CENTCOM. Tensions have been rising since Iran attacked vessels moving through the Strait earlier this week, with the United States also revoking a sanctions waiver on Iranian oil earlier on Tuesday. CENTCOM put out a statement via X explaining the strikes that they had committed. Well, U.S. Central Command forces have begun launching a series of powerful strikes against Iran to impose heavy costs for targeting and attacking commercial shipping crewed by innocent civilians in an international waterway. The U.S. strikes are in response to Iranian attacks on three commercial vessels that were transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Iran's demonstrated aggression was unwarranted, dangerous, and a clear violation of the ceasefire. Well, again, there was no actual real ceasefire that was going on, given the fact that Iran has been routinely harassing ships in the Strait, and the United States has also fired back against Iran for doing precisely that. While Iran has also been warning ships in the Strait of Hormuz, we played you the audio on the show for several weeks at this point. Here is some more of the audio that Fox News played yesterday. This is the last warning. This is last warning. You are running danger. Don't put your life in danger. You are ordered to alter course. Support us immediately. Alter course. Support us immediately and use the south of Laraq Island to exit. If you disobey, you will be targeted. This is Stefan Levy, out. So they're not being shy and they haven't been shy. They are in control of the Strait of Hormuz and they are going to continue to maintain they are in control of the Strait of Hormuz. Well, because of all of that, the United States restored sanctions on Iran, according to The New York Times. The Trump administration on Tuesday revoked a waiver allowing the sale of Iranian oil after three tankers were attacked in the Strait. Last month, the Treasury Department had issued a general license allowing Iran to produce, sell and deliver oil for two months. That exemption represented a major shift in America's approach toward Iran, which has been heavily sanctioned for decades. And we talked about it at the time, pointing out that if that had been made permanent, then Iran could have been able to reshape its economy. The reality is that a temporary waiver on sanctions did not actually allow for markets to adjust. People are still not buying Iranian oil because they thought the sanctions would go back on and they did not want to be tied into contracts with Iran that would then make them subject to snapback sanctions. For example, the license that was issued, according to The New York Times, by the Treasury Department in June was designed to give Iran greater access to American currency and it allowed American importers to buy Iranian crude oil. But it turns out that nobody really wanted to do that. Well, President Trump then came out and he said, essentially, the deal is over. Here he was this morning at the NATO conference in Ankara, Turkey, saying we attacked very powerfully last night. We attacked very powerfully last night. The very dangerous people from Iran, they're sick. There's something wrong with them. We said, go and do your funeral stuff. And instead of that, they start shooting rockets at ships yesterday. And so we hit them very hard last night. Very hard. I would say 20 to 120 times tougher. I told him every time you hit, we hit. And of course, they're dirty players. So they they go after everyone, probably including me. I've been number one on their list for years. And they're a bunch of scum. You want to know the truth? They're scum. And the president seems to have had enough of all of this. The president then said about the memorandum of understanding, as far as he is concerned, is over. Mr. President, is the ceasefire over? Is the ceasefire done? Is the MOU dead? It's a very interesting question. To me, I think it's over. I don't want to deal with them anymore. They're scum. You know what scum is? They're scum. They're sick people. They're led by sick people. And they're vicious, violent people. And if they had a nuclear weapon, they'd use it. As far as I'm concerned, it's over. Okay, so again, you've now swiveled from they're very reasonable and rational people to they're very sick people. He is right now. And he was right before. And he was wrong in the middle. Here's President Trump saying that the Iranians want to assassinate him. And we have to rid the world of their cancer. Again, this is correct. We took out their first set of leaders. We took out their second set of leaders. They want to take out the US leader, me. I'm on every list. I saw things this morning. I'm on every single one of their lists. And so far, I guess I've been a little bit lucky. But that maybe doesn't last very long. Because that's the way it goes. But we have great people. But these are evil, sick people. And we have to rid their cancer. Their cancer. And you know what you do? You got to cut out cancer early. And that's the way I feel. Folks, in a second, we're going to get to how we got ourselves into this sticky situation. First, when we started Daily Wire, it was very, very small. A couple of shows. Very small staff out of a pool house. And now it's a very large company with merch and books and clothing and tumblers and all that. Well, the Daily Wire shop has grown over the years because we've made it easy for people to find what they want and actually complete their purchase. And that's where Shopify comes in. Shopify checkout helps more customers finish their purchase. And when they come back, their information is already saved. One tap and they're done. That's always a satisfying sound. The best part is that Shopify handles the infrastructure so you can focus on building. Whether you're selling merch, books, artwork, products nobody else has thought of yet, Shopify removes the friction between having an idea and actually making a sale. Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide. From companies like Mattel and Gymshark to businesses that are just getting started. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make it one. Start your free trial at Shopify.com slash Shapiro. That's Shopify.com slash Shapiro to start your free trial today. Again, Shopify.com slash Shapiro. Go check them out. We've used them for years. You should use them as well. Shopify.com slash Shapiro. OK, so let's take a step back for just a second. How did we arrive at this particular impasse? Well, we in the West keep making a pretty large scale mistake. We assume that Islamic actors in the Middle East are just like us. They want the same things for their kids. They want the same ends. Human flourishing, right? That's what we want. That's what they want. We all just have different roads to get there. Wrong. If you're going to sit down and negotiate with somebody, you need to understand them. You need to understand their worldview. And you have to be very, very clear eyed about the differences between their worldview and our worldview. And if you don't, you are likely to walk away with a bad agreement that isn't really an agreement at all that ends in missiles and tears. So let us begin with the Western worldview. What is our worldview, the way that we operate in the world? But we here in the West are what Harvard professor Joseph Heinrich has referred to as WEIRD. It's an acronym. Western Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. WEIRD, right? We are committed to a different set of values than cultures all around the world. We're WEIRD. Right? That is not the norm. It's not what everybody thinks. It is what we think. Those values are naturalistic outgrowths of our Judeo-Christian heritage. They did not come from nowhere. They came from originally Old Testament and then the New Testament and then church. And they make us different from other cultures. So what are some of those values that make the West different? Well, some of those values are things like analytic thinking. And by the way, this is not rooted in some sort of theorizing. This is rooted in actual testable hypotheses about how people in the West think about problems, for example, and how people in, say, the Islamic world think about problems. So we in the West, we like analytic thinking. We like to break problems down and then strip them of context in order to solve them. Other cultures see problems holistically. They look at relationships between problems as sort of the key to life. So, for example, we may see the closure of the Strait of Hormuz as an isolated problem with an isolated solution. Right? We pay a little bit of a bribe money and the Iranians let it go and everybody goes home happy. The Iranians don't see it that way. They see the Strait of Hormuz as a problem that is part of a larger interwoven series of problems. They see it as part of their global conquest strategy connected with everything from shooting protesters in the streets of Tehran to the maintenance of the terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon to the increased power of the Houthis in Yemen and dominance over the Babamandam Strait. So all those things are intertwined, according to the Iranians. How about individualism? Well, we in the West, we are highly individualistic. We think of ourselves as individuals with individual motivations. We have a hierarchy of needs and wants. And so we are focused on individual flourishing. Other cultures see themselves and their personal identities as interwoven into networks, religious networks and kinship networks. So we say things like, hey, you guys, you should want to preserve the life and the lives of yourselves and your citizens. And they say, we want Islam to win. Totally different worldview. And we here in the West, we have something called impersonal prosociality. So we have high levels of trust in the people who surround us. That's why we don't require as much government interventionism. It's why if you drop your wallet on a normal American street, there's a fairly good shot that somebody will return the wallet to you. That's because we don't predominantly operate in kinship networks like your cousins and your friends. We operate as a larger society with larger societal obligations. That also means we tend to think of rules as ways of governing the entire society, not merely as ways of screwing over other people. We are offended by dishonesty. In a lot of other cultures, that's not the case. It's your kin first. It's your tribe at first. I mean, literally your tribe. And that means that agreements with people like that are not worth the paper they're printed on because they are just methods of them getting something over on you. We here in the West, we focus on internal intentions a lot. There are lots of studies to back this. In the West, our murder laws, for example, are rooted in, did you intend to do it? Did you plan to do it? Or did you do it by accident? And that's unusual. There are a lot of other cultures where that isn't the case, where the cause of accidental death means very little when it comes to the actual punishment. Other cultures have sort of a strict liability system of morality. If you did something I don't like, I don't have to analyze your intentions. I don't have to try to get in your head. You're bad and you ought to be destroyed. So this means that when we project our frame of mind onto other people, when we try to impute intentions to people who don't share our intentions, we make a category error. And finally, self-enhancement. We tend to think of ourselves in the West as competent, as in control, more in control than sometimes we are. Other cultures tend to think of people as out of control, as weak, as only strong in the collective. So what does all of that mean in terms of our rules for negotiation? Well, in the West, it means that we tend to focus on incentives and strategies that appeal to people like us. We try to look for win-win solutions where everybody is better off than they were before. And we try to set up incentives like economic prosperity or individual flourishing or safety or health. And we engage in strategies like logical problem solving, like we'll meet you in the middle, conciliation. That's the stuff that the West prizes. But here's the thing. We're weird. We're not like other cultures at all, which is why every single major agreement with an Islamic opponent has ended in tears unless you have completely defeated and destroyed the possibility of that Islamic opponent actually coming back and winning. Those are the only agreements that are durable at all in the history of agreements with Islamic states. We are certainly not like the Muslim theocracy in Iran. President Trump calls them crazy. And from our perspective, they are because they don't share our way of thinking. But from their perspective, we're both crazy and also stupid and also weak because we don't think like they do, but we assume that they do. And so they look at us and we're saying things like, why can't we just focus on human flourishing like you fricking pansies? We'll just cut your head off. So what exactly do they believe? Well, the Islamic Republic of Iran believes that in the absence of the infallible 12th imam will arrive at the Eschaton to make the world Muslim. A qualified Islamic jurist possesses the absolute divine authority to rule both the state and society to ensure fidelity to Sharia law. But that is their actual worldview. That is why it is an Islamic regime. It can't be a democratic regime because that runs directly in the teeth of the idea that there is a divine authority absolutely invested in an Islamic jurist to rule society. That's why all of the talk about a moderate wing inside the Iranian government versus the radical wing inside the Iranian government. Bunch of nonsense. In the end, the Ayatollahs run the place and the IRGC, which in some cases is more extreme than the Ayatollahs. The Iranian regime believes that it is their duty to prepare the entire world for the arrival of the 12th imam. Their worldview centers on replacing the current Western led international order with a global system dominated by Islamic values. And this is where they get coalitional with Russia and China because, again, they agree on the first step, replacing the current Western led international order, and they disagree on the second step. What replaces it? Russia wants a Russian world order. China wants a Chinese world order. And Muslim states like Iran want an Islamic world order. They believe that Islam must become the dominant geopolitical and spiritual force on planet Earth and that secular capitalist Western systems are corrupt and destined to fail. So what does all that mean in terms of Islamic rules for negotiation? If you're negotiating a deal? Well, it means that lying to Kia is the Islamic term for it is totally fine in wartime. It is encouraged if it gets you to where you need to go. In fact, Mohammed performed to Kia in the middle of the Koran and it is praise. It means the power and perception of power are literally the only coin of the realm. If you are perceived as weak, some other tribe will come, rape your wife and sell your kids into slavery, historically speaking. OK, so how do you make a deal with people who think like this? We set of incentives is different. Logical thinking is different. Whose approach to negotiation is totally different. The only way to make a successful deal with people who think like this is to totally and completely devastate their capacity to win. You have to crush their hope for victory. Hope is the hope is the thing that destroys these agreements. You want to know why there has long been a feasible agreement between Israel and Egypt? It's not because Egypt is wonderful and moderate. You may have been watching the World Cup over the course of the last few days. Let's just say the behavior of the Egyptian team gives the lie to the idea that that Egypt is filled with Muslim moderates. But why is there a durable agreement between Israel and Egypt? Because Egypt knows that if they go up against Israel, Israel will destroy them. And they know that because they tried it in 67 and Israel destroyed them. And then Israel destroyed them again in 73. And why is it that Oslo failed? Well, because not only was Israel not destroying its opposition, Israel was offering them hope and an olive branch that they could destroy Israel. The only way to have a successful agreement in the Middle East is for one side to be so thoroughly devastated that the only way out is to basically give up the ghost and try to play it as a win. And by the way, even if you do, you might get shot by your own people, because that's what happened to Anwar al-Sadat in Egypt when he did this with Menachem Begin in Israel. And this is why the MOU was bound to fail, because we didn't do that. Now, President Trump looked at Iran on an absolute level and he kept saying they're dead, right? Dead economy, military basically defenestrated, ballistic missile facilities gone, missile launchers tremendously damaged, nuclear facilities blown up, a navy at the bottom of the sea, a leadership class entirely dead. And he said, OK, well, I guess I guess they're defeated. Now it's time for them to negotiate their surrender. Here's what they saw in America that wanted to negotiate, in America that was afraid to finish them off, that in America that was not going to forcibly open the strait and in fact was begging for the strait to be open, begging them for the strait to be open. OK, so that's why the MOU was going to fail because total misalignment. And that requires us to answer another question. So why is Iran doing this now? Why didn't Iran just wait this thing out? Right. Why didn't they take their oil money and their sanctions relief and basically string us along and then go ahead and violate the agreement? Why go so hard? Why harass shipping in the Strait of Hormuz? Well, the answer is something fundamental. Iran cannot appear weak. That is the entire game. And because Iran never cannot appear weak, the minute they appear weak is the entire game in the Middle East. Once they appear weak, their regime is in danger. It's the reason they were seeking a nuclear weapon in the first place. They never interpreted the nonsensical and empty memorandum of understanding negotiated by the vice president the way that we did. They did not. Here's what actually happened. In a second, we'll get to what actually happened in these benighted negotiations. First, you know, there was this light bulb in our home and it was out for solidly a year and a half, really a year and a half. It was hanging on one of those big fixtures over our kitchen island. We just left it there, mainly because I was being lazy. And eventually, eventually I went and fixed it. But here's the thing. It's amazing how quickly people get used to systems that aren't actually working. And businesses do the exact same thing. Sometimes we've had the same insurance set up for years simply because nobody has had time to revisit it. And that's where SuperShore comes in. If your company has more than 25 employees, SuperShore is a super agency built specifically for businesses that need more than a policy sitting in a filing cabinet. They're licensed in every state for business insurance and employee benefits. They stick with you throughout the year. I especially like their fine print fax tool. It takes legalese and turns it into plain English so you can understand exactly what you're paying for. Their business value calculator helps estimate what your business is worth because it's hard to protect something if you don't know its value. Go to SuperShore.com slash Shapiro. That's SuperShore.com slash Shapiro. One super agency, one powerful platform, all your policies in just one place. Again, that is SuperShore.com slash Shapiro paid for by SuperShore Insurance Agency LLC, a licensed insurance agency. Vice President J.D. Vance and the administration came home waving that MOU with Iran and shouting peace in our time. But as I said at the time, it wasn't a deal, not just because it wasn't a final deal, but because it wasn't a deal at all. A deal requires an agreement on the terms. And this is fundamental to contract law. If you and I have an agreement, that means nothing. There are no words in the agreement. It is not an agreement. You have to have defined terms where both sides have a meeting of the minds. There was no clarity on the single most important issue. What happens to the Strait? The United States said it's open. The Iranians said, nope, we control it. Or the second most important issue, Lebanon. The United States said totally disconnected. And the Iranians said, no, no, no. Israel has to stop attacking our terrorist proxy, Hezbollah. Or the third most important issue, nuclear weapons. The United States said, oh, it'll be disarmed. And the Iranians said, we're not even letting inspectors in. Or the fourth most important issue, ballistic missile and drone development. We said, we're going to have to stop some of that. And they said, that's not in the agreement at all. It was not written from a position of strength. The administration misinterpreted what it was that was supposedly in the agreement. The vice president, there are two possibilities here. One was that he was wish casting. That he was trying to will into reality this fiction that Iran would somehow accept publicly that the United States controls the Strait of Hormuz. That's the thing he was selling publicly. And that's what President Trump was selling, presumably because J.D. Vance and Steve Whitkoff and Jared Kushner told him that that was the case. But that was never the case. Iran was always in control of the Strait. Duh. We actually tried to do an operation that we then allowed the Saudis to shut down. By the way, I will never understand this. I'll never understand this. Supposedly, according to people on the left and the woke right, Israel is the bad ally. Israel is flying literal sorties alongside the United States and essentially acquiescing to the demands of the United States on every level. Meanwhile, the Saudis who do nothing, literally nothing. The Saudi royal government has American bases there defending them. And they said to the United States, you can't use our bases to open the strait. That would mostly benefit the Saudis. And somehow we acquiesce to that. Why? We should have just told them there are bases and we'll do with them what we please. In any case, there was never any agreement by Iran to open the strait. So, again, either J.D. Vance is really, really naive and he thought that the Iranians were good, solid people in the Pakistanis. He loves the Pakistanis. He loves Pakistan. It doesn't matter that Pakistan and Iran are hand in glove. It doesn't matter that the prime minister of Pakistan literally went to Iran over the weekend and pledged fealty to the Iranian government. It doesn't matter for these negotiators that Qatar is an Iranian cutout. They're just naive in this possibility. They're naive. They got played or all these negotiators basically knew that the Iranians were never going to agree that the Strait of Hormuz was open and they were fibbing to the president to try to get President Trump to buy into letting the Iranians off the hook, hoping that the Iranians would basically tap this out over time. Trump would get bored. He'd go home and everything would go back to normal, except that the Iranians would control the Strait. But here's the thing. Iran could never in a million years have lived with the public perception that they don't control the Strait. That chokehold is the whole game for them. Assume for a second for a second that Iran didn't control the Strait. Everyone would know that the war was over and they had lost. This is just a reality. If that is their big weapon, everyone knows that's their big weapon. Lose the Strait and it's over and they know it. So they were never going to sign a piece of paper admitting that they didn't control the Strait. The only thing that keeps them relevant, we spent months hammering the regime, Air Force, Navy, missile sites, nuclear program. That was the exact moment to press not to sign an MOU because the moment you see weakness from Iran is the moment you ought to show aggression because that's the way they think. You have to think like they think. You want to get a good agreement? Put yourself in the side of the other, put yourself in the shoes of the other side and then think like they do. Instead, we showed up as dumb Westerners and shook their hand and looked for a mutually beneficial arrangement. Listen, if Iran wanted to engage in mutually beneficial arrangements with the West, they could have done so any time over the course of the last 47 years. If Iran wanted a humming economy, they could have just not been Islamists. They could have not done that. They could have even been an Islamic state. Saudi is an Islamic state. UAE is an Islamic state. Bahrain and Qatar, Islamic states. All they had to do was just open up and not fund gigantic terror apparatuses around the Middle East and not try to overthrow surrounding regimes. They could have normalized any time they wanted to. They didn't do any of that. Why? Because that's not their logic. They didn't want the handshake. We extended a handshake and they slapped us in the face, which is absolutely predictable. So here are three things that we need to take away from all of this. First, they do not think like us. They don't think like us. They have a different worldview. They have a different theology and projecting our thinking onto them is not just wrong. It is catastrophically stupid because they do not think the way we do to. There is no such thing as a good agreement with an evil enemy unless you absolutely force them to the floor. And third, it is now time to force them to the floor. If this is just another of the myriad twists and turns in the journey of life, if it turns out that this is just prelude to another set of dumb negotiations where we completely misinterpret what they want. If this is just prelude to, oh, no, the MOU is still on. It was just tit for tat. Then this will not end and it will not get better. And believe you me, right around the time of the election, the Iranians will shut the straight to screw Trump right before the midterms because they know that the Democrats will be far friendlier. So what exactly could be done? Well, first, we could force open the straight. I know we haven't even tried it. We didn't try it. We could do it. We could. If you think that the U.S. military does not have contingency plans for opening the straight of Hormuz along with our allies, you're out of your mind. We do. We just decided we didn't want to because we got chicken with Saudi and we were told by our magical negotiators that a deal was in the offing, which was a lie. It wasn't true. We could open the straight. We could destroy Harge Island, which is their oil export facility. We could destroy the South Paris gas field. We could basically put their economy on unsupportable legs. We could put the regime into its death throes. Those are all things that we could do. Or we could just walk away and let our allies do any or all of those things. We could do any of those things. But here's the thing we should not do. Demonstrate weakness by going back to the table and pretending once again that they are reasonable, rational people. The greatest prize you can hand to Islamic terrorist regimes is the perception that they are rational actors in the way that we mean rational actors, because that is the whole game. They use that perception, they twist it on you, and then they use that perception to destroy you. If that's a lesson that we haven't learned over the course of the last several decades, then again, we are too stupid for words. Well, here's the thing. The summer can be torture for you because I mean, it's really, really hot outside in here in Florida. It is just hot and humid. It's basically a sauna. But also my kids are home and that's the good part. But it also means it's really, really busy. I don't have lots of time and we're going to have a baby and I'll have even less time. What I don't have time for is waiting through a bunch of confusing insurance websites trying to figure out if I'm getting a good deal. That's where policy genius comes in. Here is the reality. Most people know they need life insurance. They just keep putting it off because it feels complicated. Policy genius makes it simple. It's an online insurance marketplace where you compare quotes from America's top insurers side by side for free coverage amounts, prices, terms, all laid out clearly, no guesswork. Their license team handles the paperwork, answers your questions and advocates for you throughout the entire process. They're not trying to upsell you. They're working to get you the right policy at the most affordable price. Protecting your family financially isn't a someday task. It's a priority. And with thousands of five star reviews on Google and Trustpilot, people are finding great policies and checking this off their list for good. Get it done in minutes and get on with your summer with policy genius. You can see if you can find 20 year life insurance policies starting at just 276 bucks a year for a million dollars in coverage. Head on over to policygenius.com slash Shapiro to compare life insurance quotes from top companies. See how much you could save. That's policygenius.com slash Shapiro. What an amazing video you just watched. Wasn't that amazing? Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.