When an Iran deal rewards the regime, its victims should worry

David Ignatius of the Washington Post recently described President Trump’s proposed Iran framework as a possible “escape ramp” from war.

The phrase is telling. Everyone wants an escape ramp from war. No sane person wants missiles flying, oil markets shaken, American forces at risk, or Israel under siege. But there is a difference between ending a war and rewarding the regime that made the war inevitable.

For those of us who have felt the hand of Iranian terror, the reported proposal is more than risky. It is frightening.

According to Ignatius, the framework would include Iran reopening the Strait of Hormuz, pledging not to seek nuclear weapons, and negotiating the details of denuclearization over the next 60 days. In exchange, the United States would stop hostilities, release frozen funds, and gradually remove sanctions. The hope is that Iran’s divided leadership will choose modernization, prosperity, and normalcy over continued confrontation.

That is a very large hope on which to rest the security of the free world.

The Islamic Republic has had nearly half a century to choose normalcy. It has chosen hostage-taking, assassination, repression, terror financing, and the export of revolution. It has armed and funded Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, and other violent proxies. It has turned large parts of the Middle East into battlefields. It has murdered dissidents, threatened Jews across the world, and made “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” part of its political vocabulary.

So, when the mullahs are offered sanctions relief, access to frozen funds, and the prospect of international investment in exchange for another promise about nuclear weapons, the first question should not be whether they will claim victory in the Western press. Of course they will. That is what regimes like this do.

My greater concern is what millions of Islamists around the world will see.

They will see that the Iranian regime survived a confrontation with the United States and Israel. They will see that after years of terror sponsorship, nuclear deception, and regional aggression, Iran was still invited back to the negotiating table. They will see money beginning to flow. They will see sanctions being eased. They will hear the regime proclaim that it stood up to the “Great Satan” and the “Little Satan” and lived to tell the story.

That perception matters.

In the West, diplomats and columnists may distinguish between survival and victory. Serious strategists may understand that Iran has been battered, its economy weakened, and its military capacity exposed. But on the radical street, symbolism is powerful. Survival becomes triumph. Sanctions relief becomes tribute. A negotiated pause becomes proof that violence works.

Jews should understand this better than anyone.

We have watched terror organizations turn defeat into mythology. We have watched murderers become “martyrs” in the eyes of those who glorify violence. We have watched regimes and movements build entire political identities around the claim that simply surviving Israel or America is itself a sacred victory.

This is not an academic concern for me. My daughter Alisa was murdered in 1995 in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian Islamic Jihad attack. I have spent three decades watching Iran evade accountability, finance proxies, and outlast the attention span of Western governments. Every time the world is told that a new deal, a new channel, a new incentive, or a new “moderate” faction inside Iran will change the regime’s behavior, I ask the same question: Where is the evidence?

The answer usually is silence.

There is another group whose voices are in danger of being drowned out by talk of diplomacy: the Iranian people themselves.

Ignatius notes that many Iranians would welcome a modern, prosperous country. That is undoubtedly true. The people of Iran repeatedly have shown extraordinary courage. They have taken to the streets against the mullahs. Women have challenged compulsory religious rule. Students, workers, writers, and activists have risked everything to demand a different future. Many have died in demonstrations. Many more have been dragged into prison, tortured, silenced, or executed.

What do they receive from this proposal?

Not liberation. Not justice. Not even a serious plan for internal change. They are being asked, once again, to watch the world bargain with their jailers.

The regime that crushed them now would be offered a path to economic recovery. The same rulers who enriched themselves while ordinary Iranians suffered would be invited to preside over “modernization.” The same Revolutionary Guards who helped export terror abroad and repression at home would remain power brokers in whatever new arrangement emerges.

That is not a peace plan. It is a rescue plan for the regime.

Yes, America must think carefully before prolonging a war. Yes, the global economy matters. Yes, the Strait of Hormuz matters. Yes, Israel and the United States must weigh military costs and political realities. I do not dismiss any of that. Statecraft is hard, and slogans are not strategy.

But neither is wishful thinking.

A deal that depends on the mullahs acting like a normal government ignores the fact that they are not a normal government. A deal that provides cash before verified transformation risks financing the next round of terror. A deal that leaves Iran’s internal machinery of repression intact abandons the very Iranians who dared to imagine a different future. A deal that focuses only on nuclear promises while discounting terrorism, missiles, and proxies repeats the central mistake of earlier diplomacy.

Iran must be denied nuclear weapons. That is nonnegotiable. But preventing a nuclear Iran cannot mean strengthening the Islamic Republic in every other way. It cannot mean easing pressure while hoping that investment bankers will succeed where protesters, sanctions, and military pressure have not. It cannot mean treating the regime’s survival as the starting point for regional stability.

For the Jewish community, the lesson is plain. We should not be lulled by the language of ceasefires, frameworks, and phased incentives. We should ask who benefits, who pays, and who is forgotten.

If the answer is that the regime gains money, legitimacy, and breathing room, while terror victims and Iranian dissidents are asked to trust the process, then the process is already morally upside down.

Peace is a noble goal. But peace purchased by rewarding the architects of terror is not peace. It is a pause before the next danger.

Stephen M. Flatow of Long Branch, formerly of West Orange, is an attorney and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is author of A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror (now available in an expanded paperback edition on Amazon) and is the president of the Religious Zionists of America-Mizrachi.

Opinion