Following a new round of hostilities, Trump recently declared that the interim ceasefire agreement between Iran and the U.S. is "over." U.S. forces struck roughly 90 Iranian military targets after Iran attacked commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and targeted U.S. military facilities in the Gulf.
Heading home from the NATO summit in Turkey earlier this week after the military drubbing, Trump was asked about the future of the Iran conflict. He seemed to indicate talks were still possible.
"They want to make a deal…badly," he said.
But Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire says the Islamic worldview that holds Iran in its sway does not allow for a negotiated peace.
"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," he noted on his podcast Wednesday.
Meanwhile, competing and conflicting worldviews are at play.
"President Trump looked at Iran on an absolute level, and he kept saying, 'They're dead,' right? Dead economy. Military basically devastated. Nuclear facilities blown up. A navy at the bottom of the sea. And he said, 'Okay, well, I guess they're defeated. Now it's time for them to negotiate their surrender,'" Shapiro posed. "Here's what they saw: an America that was afraid to finish them off."
He asserts that reaching an agreement in the Middle East will require one side to give up the ghost.
"The only way to make a successful deal with people who think like this is to totally and completely devastate their capacity to win," he stated. "You have to crush their hope for victory. Hope is the thing that destroys these agreements."
Shapiro says President Trump has been displaying a western worldview, and it has been perceived as weakness by the mullahs in Iran.
