Same Old Song, Different Fools Playing It

Washington keeps dealing from the bottom of the deck and calling it diplomacy.

I have watched Washington play this particular hand so many times I could deal it myself in the dark. Sanctions on Iran, big announcement, stern faces at the podium. Ali Madanizadeh is probably right now sitting in his office with a cup of tea and the expression of a man who has seen this particular dog trot up his driveway before and knows exactly what it wants.

Iran has seven land borders and decades of practice routing around inconvenience. That counts for something. But land routes do not move oil the way sea lanes do, and everybody at that table knows it. China has already said the sanctions are illegal, which is the kind of thing you say when you have already decided what you are going to do and want the paperwork to match. Washington thinking it can strong-arm Beijing and Tehran's neighbors into line is harder to pin down than a greased hog on a county fairground.

Here is the part that gets my good hip aching. Say Washington pulls this off. Say they make a real dent. Who feels it? Not the men in Tehran making policy. It is Negin, thirty-four years old, scraping by on a hundred dollars a month. It is Mona, two kids, trying to keep the lights on. They are the ones who absorb the wave of pain Washington is so proud of, while the people Washington is actually annoyed with eat lunch and move money around.

And what does that accomplish, besides handing the hardliners in Tehran exactly the argument they wanted? They will point at those sanctions and say, look, this is what talking gets you. They only understand force. And then we are right back where we started, which is roughly where we have been since before some of you reading this were born.

I have seen this kind of thing play out before. Like the year the county fair ran nine days longer than it was scheduled and nobody could leave. It was a mess, and it sorted itself out eventually, but not before people made decisions they would not have made on an ordinary Thursday. Pressure does that. It does not produce wisdom. It produces desperation dressed up as resolve.

And Iran should not fool itself either. Every month that ticks past, every rial that slides, every tanker sitting idle is time that does not come back around for a second look. Waiting is a strategy right up until it is not, and the difference between the two is not always obvious until you are standing on the wrong side of it.

Old man Miller down the road spent years trying to grow prize-winning squash. Kept losing because he picked too early, every single time. Could not stand the waiting. The squash was right there, looked nearly done, and he could not leave it alone. He never did win that ribbon. The lesson is not complicated, but it requires a patience that is apparently in short supply in most capital cities.

Both sides here are picking too early. Washington is betting on a hand that has already lost twice and calling it a new strategy. Tehran is calculating that endurance is the same as leverage, which is only true if you have more time than the other side, and that is a crapshoot nobody should be comfortable making.

Put the cards down. Step back from the table. Not because it is kind, not because it is fair, but because the people absorbing the consequences of this particular standoff are not the people running it, and that should matter to someone somewhere.

The third porch step is not there on Sundays. I have learned not to reach for it. Some things you accept and work around. Some things you do not push on just because you can. That is not weakness. That is the kind of sense that keeps a household running when everything else has gone sideways.

My late husbands, God rest them, would have agreed. You cannot force a thing to work by wanting it harder. You just end up with a broken thing and sore hands.

Watch your footing and trust nobody's press release. , Aunt Dot
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