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When Western diplomats finally emerge from marathon negotiation sessions with Iran, exhausted but triumphant, they often believe they’ve secured a binding agreement. They haven’t. What they’ve actually signed is the opening move in an entirely different game—one where the rules are fluid, the language is deliberately vague, and patience isn’t just a virtue, it’s a weapon. Iranian negotiators are widely regarded by international relations experts as some of the most skilled, patient, and precise dealmakers in the world. But their genius isn’t in what they agree to. It’s in how they’ve already planned to reinterpret it. Rather than viewing an agreement as a final, static contract, Tehran treats every signed document as a fluid baseline for the next phase of competition. This approach is deeply rooted in a blend of traditional bazaar-style haggling, historical grievances, and specific cultural and religious concepts that most Western negotiators barely understand—and certainly don’t anticipate. The result? Iran consistently “loses” individual negotiating battles—and often the battlefield ones too—while positioning itself to win the longer war. Here’s how they do it.

Gad Saad (pictured in an illustration with President Trump) is an evolutionary behavioral scientist, marketing professor at Concordia University in Montreal, and host of The Saad Truth podcast. He has become one of the most provocative cultural critics of modern American progressive ideology. Building on his 2020 book The Parasitic Mind, which argued that political correctness and “idea pathogens” are destroying Western reason, Saad’s focus has increasingly centered on a specific framework outlined in his work on suicidal empathy. His central thesis is straightforward yet explosive: America is engineering its own civilizational decline because its greatest virtues—compassion, tolerance, and empathy—have been weaponized by progressive elites and pushed into pathological extremes that threaten the nation’s survival. In the 2020s, as American cities grapple with rising crime, universities become battlegrounds over free speech and identity politics, corporations implement sweeping DEI mandates, and progressive antisemitism surges on college campuses, Saad’s framework has gained remarkable traction among conservatives, tech leaders, and cultural commentators who see his theory as explaining the seemingly inexplicable self-destruction of American institutions. The Core Theory: What is ‘Suicidal Empathy’? Saad defines suicidal empathy (or “maladaptively irrational altruism”) as the psychological inability to make rational, self-preserving decisions because a society has