According to many supporters of the nuclear deal with Iran, Tehran is deeply divided between “moderates” and “hardliners.” Thus, we are told that the hardliners take Americans hostage while the moderates free them, and that the lifting of sanctions will inevitably strengthen the moderates. This misunderstanding, writes Michael Rubin, has animated American Iran policy since 1979, and has always led to damaging conclusions:

The simple fact is that sometimes [America’s] adversaries use fluency in English or their American experience less to embrace Western values and more to learn better how to pull the wool over the eyes of the U.S. Likewise, the notion that [Iran’s supposedly moderate president Hassan] Rouhani’s internal struggles are just beginning is based on an assumption that he sincerely wants to wage factional struggle to moderate the regime, rather than simply to project an image of moderation to relieve pressure. Again, it’s the tried and true good-cop, bad-cop strategy that Tehran has played to great effect. Nor is the fact that the Guardian Council, [Iran’s highest governing body], has banned 60 percent of candidates seeking to run for parliament [anything] new. . . .

Rouhani became president—likely with some regime massaging of the returns to give him a first-round victory—with one goal: to relieve the financial pressure under which the Iranian government labored.

This is not to suggest that factions do not exist; they do in all countries. . . . But just because factions exist does not mean that they represent true debate about the character or ideology of the regime. To believe they do is to be guilty of projecting a Western sense of political debate onto our adversaries, and that is a recipe not for success but rather for the continued failure of U.S. intelligence and diplomacy.

Robert Satloff has some harsh words for the U.S. government in this regard, words I take especially seriously because Satloff is someone inclined to political moderation. Why, he asks, have American diplomats failed to achieve anything in their endless rounds of talks in Doha and Cairo? Because

there is simply not enough pressure on Hamas to change course, accept a deal, and release the remaining October 7 hostages, stuck in nightmarish captivity. . . . In this environment, why should Hamas change course?

Publicly, the U.S. should bite the bullet and urge Israel to complete the main battle operations in Gaza—i.e., the Rafah operation—as swiftly and efficiently as possible. We should be assertively assisting with the humanitarian side of this.

Satloff had more to say about the hostages, especially the five American ones, in a speech he gave recently:

I am ashamed—ashamed of how we have allowed the story of the hostages to get lost in the noise of the war that followed their capture; ashamed of how we have permitted their release to be a bargaining chip in some larger political negotiation; ashamed of how we have failed to give them the respect and dignity and our wholehearted demand for Red Cross access and care and medicine that is our normal, usual demand for hostages.

If they were taken by Boko Haram, everyone would know their name. If they were taken by the Taliban, everyone would tie a yellow ribbon around a tree for them. If they were taken by Islamic State, kids would learn about them in school.

It is repugnant to see their freedom as just one item on the bargaining table with Hamas, as though they were chattel. These are Americans—and they deserve to be backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.