Dr Martin Parsons is the author of a book on Conservativism and is a former overseas aid worker in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In the 1980s BBC sitcom Yes Minister the minister Jim Hacker’s principal private secretary Bernard explains a series of standard civil service excuses used when things go wrong:

‘We now know certain things that we didn’t know then’, adding ‘we used that one after the Munich agreement’. Incredulously, Hacker asks ‘what do we now know that we didn’t know then?’ Bernard replies ‘We didn’t know that Hitler wanted to rule the world…!’

Unfortunately, as with most Yes Minster scripts there is more than a grain of truth here and this certainly applies not just to the present situation with Iran, but to a number of agreements the West has made in broadly similar situations in recent years.

Instead of seeking to understand how other countries and their governments think, we fall into the trap of assuming they broadly think the way we do – and do deals the way that we do deals.

The Iranian regime’s view of war

Yet Islamic regimes like Iran or the Taliban do not think the way we think. They have a wholly different worldview which is essentially eschatological – looking forward to a golden era when Islamic government and shari’a enforcement spread across the entire world. While jihad is a means to means to achieve that.

That’s why the Iranian constitution gives the IRGC a specific duty of protecting the revolution at home – hence their horrific killing of thousands of street protestors earlier this year, as well as spreading it across the world through jihad:

“The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps are to be organized in conformity with this goal, and they will be responsible not only for guarding and preserving the frontiers of the country, but also for fulfilling the ideological mission of jihad in God’s way; that is, extending the sovereignty of God’s law throughout the world”

The Iranian regime’s view of peace agreements

Shari’a, as formulated by both the Sunni and Shi’a schools of classical Islam hundreds of years ago, does not envisage any permanent peace treaty with a non-Islamic government, merely a temporary truce.

The model for such a truce is Hudabiyah, a 10 year truce which according to early Islamic texts, Muhammad, then the ruler of Medina, made in 628CE with the pagan Quraish tribe who controlled Mecca. Two years later, following a minor dispute he dispensed with the ‘treaty’, having by then become strong enough to take Mecca by force.

Whilst for many Muslims in the West this is simply a piece of Islamic history, for Islamists it is a model to be followed today. As such, they regard any ‘treaty’ they make with a militarily stronger non-Islamic government as one that can legitimately be broken when it is advantageous to do so.

This is paradigmatic for the Islamist approach to international relations – and western nations ignore it at their peril.

The Oslo Peace accords

For example, shortly after signing the 1993 Oslo Peace Accord in which Israel traded ‘land for peace’ Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian nationalist Fatah (PLO), was recorded in what he believed to be an off the record talk in a mosque in Johannesburg. In this he described the Oslo Accords as being akin to the truce of Hudaybiya, saying:

“I see this agreement as being no more than the agreement signed between our Prophet Muhammad and the Quraysh in Mecca,”

adding that:

“we now accept the peace agreement, but [only in order] to continue on the road to Jerusalem.”

President Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal

There was also a clear failure to understand this in Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal which deal sought to bring Iran into the mainstream of the global community. In exchange for sanctions being lifted it agreed to temporary limits on the extent to which it could enrich uranium and develop its centrifuges. The deal was agreed despite the Iranian regime having a long history of building secret nuclear facilities such as Nantaz, Arak and Fordow without declaring them to the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA).

In November 2019 the IAEA found evidence of enriched uranium at a warehouse complex in Tehran which strongly suggested Iran had been covertly enriching uranium between 2015-18 when Obama’s nuclear deal was in force. We also know that during that time the Iranian regime was continuing its longstanding policy of either directly or via proxies planning assassinations of Iranian dissidents and terror plots in western countries, including the UK, something which has significantly increased in recent years.

President Trump’s 2020 deal with the Taliban

There was a similar failure to understand this in the  2020 US deal with the Taliban, something I warned about in an article on ConservativeHome  a fortnight before the deal was signed.

That deal withdrew US forces from Afghanistan in exchange for a mere reduction in Taliban attacks and a promise that al-Qaeda would not be allowed to return to Afghanistan.

However, only three years later, a report to the UN Security Council warned that not only had al-Qaeda returned to Afghanistan, but the Taliban were actually paying them monthly allowances. While those with al-Qaeda links now held significant government posts, including the governors of at least two Afghan provinces, and the deputy director of Afghanistan’s intelligence directorate. Al-Qaeda had also set up five suicide bomber training camps – the very issue the post 9/11 western military intervention has been designed to prevent.

In fact, it is precisely because those camps are now training members of the Pakistani Taliban who then carry out terrorist attacks in Pakistan, that air strikes between Pakistan and the Taliban began a few months ago.

A new deal with Iran

So suggestions the US is about to reach a permanent deal with the Iranian regime need to be treated with some caution. This is particularly if, as some reports suggest it involves ‘promises’ by the Iranian regime to dilute enriched uranium. In other words, a similar Iranian commitment to that which the regime made in Obama’s nuclear deal – and which we now know they failed to keep.

So, is a permanent peace treaty with Iran possible?

Yes – but not under the current regime.

Iran is an ancient and extraordinary civilisation which predates the 1979 Islamic revolution by more than a millennium and a half. It has a culture that produced poetry of great beauty such as the Divan of Hafiz and the Gulistan of Sa’di which in places provides a profound ethical critique of political rulers (’when the pure soul is about to depart this earth, what does it matter if he sits on the highest place in the land, or with his face in dust?’).

It is that distinction between Iran and the current regime that the West must keep in focus. As I have argued previously on Conservatvehome, the most pragmatic hope for Iran may well be a Gorbachev type reformer who will allow the true Iran to emerge from beneath the suffocating tyranny of the regime and abandon its expansionist ideology.

If that were to happen – then just as Mrs Thatcher found in Gorbachev, a leader with whom the West might not always agree, but could do business with, so might we.

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