Transcription
Why isn't Iran taking this nuclear deal? Because from where we're standing, it makes absolutely no sense that they're not. They have no money. They're almost drowning in sanctions. They've lost their leadership. Their nuclear facilities are in ruins. And right now on the table, there's a deal that solves all of that. All they have to do is walk away from their nuclear ambitions. And yet, they keep saying no. This is the question that nobody seems to be able to answer properly. And that's why you're here.
To answer this, we have to get out of our western mindset for a moment and step inside theirs. Because what is driving this is an ideology so foreign to how we think. But once you understand it, everything Iran is doing. Every rejection, every provocation, every red line that they cross suddenly makes complete sense. This is the me show on JNSTV. Let's dive right in.
Let's start with a small story. The story of how the Messiah comes in the religion of Islam. It begins with chaos, a deliberate and necessary sign that the end is near. A period of global tribulation so severe that the world as we know it begins to collapse. Wars and plagues and suffering on a scale humanity has never seen. Crazy chaos is the beginning signal, the evidence that God's plan is finally unfolding. And out of that chaos, he emerges. The hidden Imam, the Maddi, the Messiah of Islam, a figure who has been concealed from the world for over a thousand years. Yet he is still alive and waiting for the moment. God has determined the time is right. When he appears, he gathers his army and he marches towards Jerusalem because that is where the enemy is and that is where the forces of evil have made their stronghold. And the final battle between good and evil takes place on that land. And the Imam wins and history as we know it ends. and God's justice finally reigns on earth. That is the story.
And in 1979 when Kmeni came into power, the beginning of bringing that story to life began. Most people look at the 1979 Iranian revolution as a political event in which an Islamic government replaced a westernbacked one. And that framing, whilst technically accurate, doesn't really tell the whole story. This revolution, the Islamic Revolution, changed the entire purpose of the Iranian state, declaring that Iran was no longer a nation in the conventional sense, but the first stage of something cosmic, the arrival of the Islamic Messiah.
To understand the full weight of that claim, we need to understand who this hidden Imam actually is and what his position means in Shia Islam. Because this is the belief that runs everything from the nuclear program to the straight of Hermuz, the rejection of the deals the West have been presenting. And it is a belief that goes back not to 1979 but to 874 CE.
Shia Islam, the branch of Islam dominant in Iran, is built around the concept of the Imam. And in Shia theology, that word carries a weight that is no real equivalent in Western religious tradition. Because the Imam is a figure of cosmic significance who is divinely chosen by God, named by the previous Imam, possessing qualities that no ordinary human can acquire through a form of supernatural knowledge of will of God that is passed down through a chain of divine transmission going all the way back to the prophet Muhammad himself. That was a mouthful.
But after the prophet died, the question of who could lead the Muslim community split Islam into the two great branches that exist to this day. Sunni Muslims accepted a system of human consensus to choose their leaders, while Shia Muslims believe that the prophet had already designated his cousin and son-in-law, Ali, as the divinely appointed successor. After Ali, there were 11 more imams, each one designated by the one before him. Each one the rightful ruler not just of Muslims, but of all humanity. Interestingly, every single one of those 11 imams was killed or imprisoned by the ruling powers of their day because according to Islam, the people in power understood that the existence of a true and divinely appointed Imam made their own authority illegitimate.
Then came the 12th Imam and when he was still a young child, he disappeared. He didn't die according to Sharia theology, but he was concealed. God hid him from the world to protect him from the same forces that had destroyed his predecessors. Shia Muslims believe that he is still alive right now after more than a thousand years spiritually present in the world watching events unfold and that he will return when God determines the moment has come to lead the final battle establish divine justice on earth and bring history to its conclusion.
This is the center of Shia Islam which the Islamic Republic believes in. For over a thousand years after the 12th Imam disappeared, the mainstream Shia held the same political position. We are waiting for our messiah. We are patient. We do not take power because no government is truly legitimate until the Imam returns. And the faithful should go about their lives under whatever rulers exist whilst waiting for God's timing. This is what they call quietism. And it is still held by some people today.
However, along comes Kamei who decides to throw this out entirely and makes an argument in which he placed one of the most politically explosive theology claims in modern history because his thought was that the Imam was not waiting for God to create the political environment for the Messiah. The Imam was waiting for the Muslim community to do its part to prepare the ground to build the kind of Islamic civilization that would make his return possible. And this preparation was not passive but rather urgently actively required starting with the establishment of a true Islamic government in Iran right now as the first stage in a process that would ultimately bring to the Imam's emergence.
He also did something else that transformed this theology into a military mission. He told his followers that preparing the ground for the Imam's return was their responsibility. It required actively resisting the forces of oppression that had always stood against divine truth. The same forces that had imprisoned and poisoned the 11 imams back years ago. And the same forces that Kame identified in the modern world as American imperialism and Zionism which he called isbar, arrogance, the eternal oppressor. And he created the IRGC specifically to wage that resistance.
What gave him the legitimacy after all the years? Well, there is a doctrine that declared that in the absence of the hidden Imam, the most qualified Islamic scholar must govern as his deputy. And this is why the supreme leader of Iran holds the formal title of the deputy of the Imam, ruling as the earthly representative of a figure who has been hidden for 12 centuries, exercising an authority that is therefore not really political, but rather theological and divine. When an Iranian soldier is told his supreme leader is the deputy of the hidden Imam. Disobeying him is not insubordination. It is a sin against God. And that's what transformed the IRGC's loyalty from military discipline into something much much harder to break.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Cause is an ideological force created right after the 1979 revolution with the explicit purpose of defending not Iran's borders but the Islamic Revolution itself. the divine mission it represented to bring the Messiah or at least to prepare the ground for it. Its soldiers undergo intensive theological indoctrination alongside their military training. Taught systematically and deliberately that they are not soldiers of the Iranian nation but rather soldiers of the hidden Imam. That their loyalty runs not to any president or parliament but directly to the supreme leader as the Imam's deputy and through him to God.
Critically, the IRGC does not think of itself as a national army with a national mission. It explicitly rejects the concept of the nation state, as a western construct. It divides the world instead into Dar al-Islam, the realm of Islam, and Dar Alfir, the realm of the unbelief and understands its mission as a cosmic one that transcends any particular country's border. which is why it funds and arms and trains proxy forces across the Middle East. Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, militias in Iraq and Syria as elements of the Imam's army. Pieces being positioned on a board whose final configuration is the end of history. They look at the world as the countries that are rightfully belonging to Islam by their religion. They are never able to give that land up or those seas up and the countries that belong to the disbelievers. Those are the infidels that need to be fought and it is really that black and white from their perspective.
Now let's go back to the story of how the Messiah comes because the details matter enormously for understanding why the IRGC behaves the way it does. The first and most important detail is that the period before the Mai's return, the Fitna, the great tribulation, the chaos, it is not a tragedy that precedes salvation but a necessary precondition for it. It is divinely ordained. Meaning that in the IRGC's theological framework, global chaos is not something that you want to prevent. It is what you recognize as the signal that God's plan is unfolding. And the worse things get, the more chaotic, the more faithful understand that the Imam's return, the Mahadi's return is close.
This is interestingly enough the point where western strategic thinking and the IRGC's theology are operating in completely different universes because every institution that the west has built even though they failed at this NATO, the United Nations, armed control agreement, deterrence theory, diplomacy itself exists on the foundational assumption that stability is the goal and catastrophic conflict is the failure. However, the IRGC's theology tells them that the catastrophic conflict is the beginning of salvation and that working to prevent it is working against God's plan. Simply put, they want chaos. They want confusion. They want war because that means the Mai, the Messiah is coming.
The Madi emerges from that chaos accompanied by exactly 313 companions. And the IRGC genuinely understands itself to be the institution preparing those companions right now in real time. Which is why their indoctrination is so total and their fighters willingness to die is so absolute because they understand themselves to not be training for a national war but for the Imam's final campaign. And those who survive, who actually keep to God's words, might be the ones who accompany the Imam.
Then what happens? The Mahai then leaves his forces towards Jerusalem because that is where the Dal, the Islamic Antichrist, a figure of catastrophic deception who draws the armies of evil to him has made his stronghold. And in a detail that always surprises Western audiences, Jesus returns at that moment because in Islamic theology, Jesus is actually a revered prophet. And at the end of times he descends and joins the mahadi. And together they pursue the dal to baba aloudud today central Israel. And there they destroy him. And with that forces of evil are finished. The Imam establishes God justice on earth and history as we know it ends.
This explains by the way the deep investment they have in pushing propaganda like Tucker Kazen to get the followers of Jesus Christians to turn on Israel. They understand that the Christian support of Israel gets in the way of the Mahadi's return, but that's for another time. This hopefully explains their obsession with Israel because Israel and Jerusalem are the center point for their Messiah arriving. When the IRGC looks at the state of Israel, they're not looking at a political rival or even simply at an occupying force on Muslim land, although they absolutely see it as both of those things. They are looking at the Dal's stronghold built on the exact territory where the final battle must take place. Populated and protected by the forces of Istikbar, the same Western imperialism that they identified as the eternal oppressor of divine truth. Israel's existence, strong and nuclear armed and backed by America and in control of Jerusalem, is a real problem for them and for their prophecy. The Madi's return cannot be fulfilled. The land where the final battle must happen is in the wrong hands and the Imam cannot come. This is by the way why they were so excited by October 7th. It felt like the first steps towards taking over Israel and they pushed that narrative over and over and over again despite it being false.
A senior IRGC affiliated cleric stated this officially by the way in 2015. Not the October 7th part but the thing about Israel in his address to the IRGC members. He said the mission of the IRGC is to remove the obstacles to the emergence of the Imam of the age and the most important of those obstacles is the existence of the state of Israel. That by the way is not a radical fringe position with in the IRGC. This is its official institutional theology, the mission statement of the organization that controls Iran's nuclear weapons programs, its ballistic missile arsenal, and its network of proxy forces across the Middle East.
But what has this got to do with them giving up the nuclear plan? You see, now everything starts to connect because the end of times requires chaos and the Madi's return requires the destruction of Israel. But Israel, unfortunately for them, cannot be conventionally destroyed. It has the most sophisticated air defense systems in the region. It has American backing. It has its own undeclared nuclear arsenal. And conventional military campaigns against it have failed repeatedly over the decades. So the question the IRGC is answering from within their theological framework is what instrument is capable of generating the scale of disruption that the end of time scenario requires? What force could simultaneously shatter the existing order, create the conditions of global tribulation that precedes the Imam's emergence and make possible what no conventional army has been able to achieve? And that answer in their framework is nuclear weapons because they are the only force that can take out Israel and more importantly because it is the only instrument capable of operating at the scale that their theology demands. The only thing that can create chaos on the level the fitnner describes which is why the nuclear program is not a bargaining chip or a deterrent in the western sense of the world. It is the instrument of a divine obligation. The tool that makes the end time scenario physically achievable and therefore surrendering it is not a political concession or something that they are ever going to be willing to do. It is an act of theological betrayal.
By the way, you see from this why they're so obsessed with Israel failing and why they push everywhere that they have succeeded in attacking Israel. If Islam and Judaism are competing full what the Messiah is going to look like and for Islam to actually be correct, Israel needs to fail right now, Israel's success is something that really, really messes with their theological belief, which is why they are getting angrier and angrier and more and more intense in their attacks on Israel.
But it gets a little bit worse than this because in the western deterrence theory, the theory that Israel held for a long time, the concept of mutually assured destruction, which means both sides will be destroyed, therefore both sides won't use nukes, holds that nuclear weapons keep the peace precisely because both sides fear annihilation equally. And that mutual terror is what stops anyone from pressing the buttons. But this logic rests entirely on the assumption that both sides want to survive. The Islamic Republic's theology has spent decades systematically dismantling the assumption in its fighters, creating a worldview in which dying in the final conflict as a soldier of the Mahadi is martyrdom of the highest possible order. death at the most cosmically significant moment in all of human history in the service of the divine mission that everything in their lives has been preparation for which means that mutually assured destruction is not a deterrence to the Islamic Republic especially not to their most mahadi faction. It is a description of exactly the kind of worldending chaos their theology says must preede salvation. The entire edifice of Western deterrence, built on the assumption that the other side's primary goal is survival, is operating on a foundation that simply does not apply to the people actually making decisions about Iran's nuclear program. Which is why when Israel and America say that the threat was actually growing and it was becoming imminent, it's because there is an understanding that Iran had full intentions of actually using their nukes.
Now, it's important to note here that Iran is not speaking with one voice on this. And when I say Iran, of course, I'm talking about the Islamic Republic, not the majority of people there. But even within their government, there is a real internal divide between the hardcore MAI faction inside the IRGC and a more pragmatic group that subscribes to the traditional Shia position. That it is not the job of any military force to bring the MAI and this is God's timing and not theirs, and that the Islamist Republic's survival should come first. The foreign minister, by the way, appears to belong to this group. And whether that makes him a genuine moderate or simply the good cop in a very deliberate good cop, bad cop routine, we honestly don't know. But the divide appears to be real. And we're seeing it across negotiations.
The problem is that it doesn't actually really matter because when Iran's diplomats move towards a deal with America, the Islamic Republic can torpedo it within hours. And we have watched them do this exactly in real time. The reason the pragmatists can't stop it is the same reason they can't stop anything right now. But because they have no access to Majami, the new supreme leader, who has not been seen or heard from in any meaningful way since taking power and may very well be dead or severely incapacitated, with nobody outside of the IRGC's inner circle actually knowing his condition. Because once Khani died at the beginning of this war, well, who's the new deputy of Imam? Good question. And they decided it was Majaba. But that is the most dangerous part of this because in the Islamic Republic, the supreme leader, the new deputy of the hidden Imam, the word of God on earth right now, that word is being filtered exclusively through the most fanatical hardliners with nobody knowing if it's true or not. no public accountability and no way for the outside world to know whether they are hearing from Tehran actually reflects a decision made by a living supreme leader or a fiction being managed by the people who benefit most from it.
On the topic of Machaba, I also want to address something else that you've probably heard. Iran's government has for years pointed to a religious ruling, a fatwa issued by Supreme Leader Kame declaring that nuclear weapons are forbidden within Islam. they are haram and they have waved this around as proof to the world that whatever they are building is not actually a bomb. Now besides the fact that hopefully you're familiar with tea which means that they are allowed to publicly lie through their teeth in order to keep the honor of Islam there are a few things you need to know about this specific fatwa if you hear about that in an argument. The first that in Shia law a fatwa is not actually a permanent law. It is a ruling tied to the circumstances of the moment and the life of the scholar who issued it. Meaning it can be revised or reversed entirely when circumstances change. Senior Iranian officials have said exactly that on record with one former diplomat stating plainly that a fatwa is not permanent and can change if America or Israel act in a dangerous matter. The second thing however is a little bit more simple. The man who issued the fatwa is dead. Kame was assassinated in the February strikes and his son Machba has never reissued it. And so there with it went the one religious constraint that gave Iranian diplomats cover at the negotiating table. The one argument that drew a line between their program and a weapon is no longer relevant. So don't fall for that argument.
Now, Trump's current offer asks Iran to hand over its entire stockpile of enriched uranium, shut down all enrichment on Iranian soil, dismantle its facilities at Natan's ferdor and isahan, curb its ballistic missile program, and end its support forbalah, the Houthis, and every other proxy force it funds across the region. In exchange, the US will lift sanctions and freeze approximately 20 billion dollars in Iranian assets and allow Iran back into the global financial system with the only nuclear activity permitted being small research reactors for medical purposes, all of them above ground and fully visible.
Now, on a purely political and economic scale, this is a wonderful offer. Iran's economy has been devastated by sanctions and the cost of war. The Iranian people are suffering and the pragmatis faction within the government kind of wants this relief. But the pragmatis faction does not control the nuclear program and it does not control the strait of hermuz and it does not control access to the supreme leader. The IRGC does and for the IRGC the offer looks entirely different. It's not just about them giving up nukes so that they can have economic prosperity. What Trump is asking in their theological framework is for them to permanently disarm the Imam's army before the final battle to surrender the one instrument capable of creating the chaos that their theology requires to hand the enemy the victory that has been denied to the forces of Vistbar for 12 centuries of Islamic history and to do it in exchange for money. They're not seeing a reasonable trade between two parties with combatible interests. They are seeing an invitation to commit apostasy, to betray the mahadi, to dismantle the divine mission, to be the one who delays their messiah's return. That is why there is no deal. That is why they're going back and forth on the negotiations. Chaos. Chaos is the name of the game. It's not that the Islamic Republic are irrational, which happens to also be true, but because this is just not a political calculation. This is a theological obligation and no political offer in the world can compete with that. So why aren't they taking the deal? Well, now you know and the answer isn't complicated once you see it from their perspective. It's actually completely logical, just not in any framework that Western diplomacy is built to handle.
Now with all of that being said, could some kind of agreement still happen? Yes. And here's why. Because there is a principle in Shia Islamic governance called Maslatisam which essentially means that the survival of Islamic order overrides everything else. And when the regime is genuinely threatened when the walls are closing in, the pragmatists can argue that a tactical retreat is not a betrayal of the mission. It is what's going to end up keeping the mission alive. And they have made that argument before and it has worked before. The 2015 deal was exactly that, a calculated pause that let them pretend to denuclearize while they kept rebuilding. And they knew it. It brought them time. And time is what they are always playing for, betting that the West will eventually lose patience, lose stomach, lose interest, and pull back the way it always has.
But this deal is different from 2015, and they know that, too. This is not a deal that lets them keep the infrastructure and pause the enrichment. This is a deal that asks them to actually give it up. And that crosses their line from a tactical retreat into something that their theology cannot absorb because they genuinely believe that they are living in messianic times right now. And the fact that they are still standing after being bombed by the most powerful military force on earth, after losing their supreme leader, after everything they have gone through, that doesn't make them feel defeated. It's actually making them feel like they are chosen, that it is proof that God is with them, that the fitna is unfolding exactly as theology promised, and the Imam's return is closer than it has ever been. So, will they win? Almost certainly not. But they are they planning on caving anytime soon? Not likely either, because you cannot outgot a man who thinks he's living inside of a real life prophecy. And that brings me that to the two most important rules of negotiation. Rule number one, you need to know who you are negotiating with and what they believe. And rule number two, guys, don't ever negotiate with terrorists, especially not with fanatical religious ones. I'm K and I will see you next time.