by Roger Kimball
Trump isn’t negotiating with Iran—he’s dismantling its regime piece by piece, leaving a hollow state with nothing left but bluster and collapse.
A famous saying of Anton Chekhov’s has been making the rounds. “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall,” Chekhov advised, “in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”
I wonder if the thugs and theocrats who have been plundering Iran for the last 47 years have read Chekhov. If so, I conclude that they are slow learners. In January, the Iranian authorities slaughtered more than 40,000 protesters—Iranian citizens, mind you, who were fed up with the oppressive death cult that has been oppressing Iran since the dour clown Ayatollah Khomeini waddled off that plane from Paris in Tehran in 1979. Over the course of about a month this past winter, the US assembled a huge military presence in the waters around Iran: two aircraft carrier strike groups and innumerable air assets.
Many observers thought the display was all for show. Notwithstanding Operation Midnight Hammer last summer, an astonishing precision strike that destroyed Iran’s chief nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, many commentators decided that President Trump was too risk-averse to mount a frontal assault on Iran. “TACO”—Trump Always Chickens Out—was the acronym of the moment.
But then, for about six weeks, beginning on February 28, the United States and Israel systematically decapitated both Iran’s military and its political and technological leadership, beginning with the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The list of people “eliminated” is long (those quotation marks are not rhetorical but dispositive). As for the country’s war-making capacity, it was essentially obliterated; its industrial capacity to manufacture armaments was, too. All that remains of Iran’s navy are a few dozen speedboats. Their air force was destroyed, likewise their air defenses. Most of their drones and ballistic missiles were incinerated, along with most of their launchers. Even as this demolition was proceeding, Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, declared that “Trump is hysterical and struggling with last final breaths. Americans are at the end of their rope. Enemy is caught in desperate swamp. . . . Netanyahu pumped up US to attack, we will exact vengeance.” I am not sure exactly when Larijani uttered that prognostication, only that it was before March 17, when he was eliminated by an air strike in Tehran.
In mid-April, President Trump declared a ceasefire in order to pursue negotiations. Iran moved to close the Hormuz Strait to allied shipping. It also said it would exact a “toll” of $2 million for ships passing through the Strait. President Trump upped the ante by directing the US Navy to open the Strait to all ships except those en route to or from Iranian ports. “Saw your bid,” he said, “and raised you two.” President Trump also directed the US Navy to stop ships from Iran anywhere on the high seas. Called that hand. No oil. No money. No economy. Time to bluster, then fold.
The Iranians have been engaged in a Persian version of the Lobster Quadrille, blustering, pretending to negotiate, then walking off in a huff. As I write, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are en route to Islamabad, Pakistan. They were supposed to be going in order to negotiate with the Iranians. But, as usual, the Iranians, once negotiations were announced, are playing hard—not hardball, mind you, but their coquettish version of hard to get. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is in Pakistan. For talks? Yes. Wait, make that No. Witkoff and Kushner went to negotiate. But Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency says that no talks are slated to take place. Vice President JD Vance is “standing by,” just in case the negotiations turn out to be serious for once.
In other words, there is a lot of movement at the moment. But the movement is not confined to Iranians pretending to negotiate and then retiring to their boudoirs to pout and lay mines. The United States is also making some moves. In the last couple of days, the USS George H.W. Bush carrier group has joined the carrier groups USS Gerald R. Ford and USS Abraham Lincoln in the waterways around and within striking distance of Iran. There are also reports of many air transports laden with additional military assets arriving in the area. President Trump, taking a page from Mick Jagger, observed that time was on his side in this pas de deux. Iran is losing something on the order of $500 million per day. Unable to move its oil, its entire petroleum industry teeters on the brink of self-inflicted destruction. The IRGC is said to have seized a ship that “collaborated with the US.” Meanwhile, President Trump has assembled a rifle, or rather an imposing armory. It is hanging on the metaphorical wall around Iran. What remains of the Iranian leadership may posture, bluff, and bluster. Their only real asset at the moment is their disarray. With whom shall President Trump negotiate? With the religious leaders? Many reports say the new Supreme Leader, son of the one who was eliminated on February 28, has also succumbed to his wounds. Does real power rest in theocratic hands? Or is it with the remnants of the political leadership? Or is it with the IRGC, the thuggish “revolutionary guard”? The signals, to indulge in a bit of understatement, are mixed. In the event, they didn’t. At the last moment, Kushner and Witkoff got out of their 17-hour plane ride and JD got to go to the White House Correspondents Dinner.
In the end, which is to say in the next several days, I suspect that President Trump will follow Chekhov’s advice. The weapons began to be put in place weeks ago. The story will not end, I predict, without their being fired. Victor Davis Hanson put it well when he observed that President Trump is not negotiating. He is “crushing” Iran’s regime.
Photo: ARABIAN SEA - APRIL 20: (EDITOR'S NOTE: This Handout image was provided by a third-party organization and may not adhere to Getty Images' editorial policy.) In this handout photo provided by U.S. Central Command, U.S. forces patrol the Arabian Sea near M/V Touska on April 20, 2026, after firing upon the Iranian-flagged vessel that the U.S. accused of attempting to violate the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports near the Strait of Hormuz. (Handout Photo by the U.S. Navy via Getty Images)
Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/04/26/chekhovs-lesson-for-tehran/
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