Iran in the Mirror of Negotiations: Peace for Whom, and Who Bears Its Cost?

Peace, Justice, Historical Memory, and the Place of the Iranian People in the Politics of Power

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Highlights

• Whenever negotiations, agreements, de-escalation, or peace are discussed, public attention usually turns toward negotiating tables, political figures, and global actors. Yet amid all these discussions, one fundamental question has remained unanswered for years: Who has paid the real price of these negotiations?
• When a country is kept in a state of chronic crisis, its economic independence, bargaining power, and national capacity gradually erode. A weakened, isolated nation under constant pressure becomes more easily transformed into an arena for competition among major powers. Under such conditions, the country is no longer treated merely as an independent nation; it becomes a field in which interests are divided.
• Are we confronting only a repressive government, or a more complex structure in which hidden regional and global actors also benefit from Iran’s weakening?
• Iran is not merely a contemporary political unit; it is one of the world’s oldest civilizational continuities. The loss of part of Iran’s maritime or territorial borders is not merely the loss of geography, but the loss of part of a nation’s historical memory. More painfully, the Iranian people are rarely a party to the negotiations. Iran is discussed, but Iranians are not spoken with.
• The Iranian people are no longer the silent nation of the past. Collective memory has awakened. People observe, compare, remember, and judge. They know what has been taken from them—from oil and gold to the opportunity to live, and from security to national dignity.
• The message of Iranians today is clear: We will not forget—neither what was done to this nation from within, nor what was traded away abroad at the expense of this land.

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Whenever negotiations, agreements, de-escalation, or peace are discussed, public attention usually turns toward negotiating tables, political figures, and global actors. Yet amid all these discussions, one fundamental question has remained unanswered for years: Who has paid the real price of these negotiations?

If we answer this question honestly, one party stands above all others: the people of Iran.

Not the global powers that bargain behind closed doors, not the governments that speak in the language of diplomacy, and not the regimes that call themselves representatives of the people. It is the Iranian nation that, for decades, has paid the price of every delay, every crisis, every bargain, and every compromise with its life, youth, wealth, security, and future.

One of the greatest errors in political analysis in recent years has been to reduce the Iranian question merely to a conflict between the Islamic Republic and foreign powers. Such a perspective conceals the central issue. The question is not only who prolongs the negotiations. The deeper question is: Who has benefited from the continuation of this condition?

Is the Islamic Republic truly the only force responsible for the exhausting length of these negotiations, or has this situation also created enormous advantages for other powers?

When a country is kept in a state of chronic crisis, its economic independence, bargaining power, and national capacity gradually erode. A country that has been weakened, isolated, and subjected to constant pressure becomes more easily transformed into an arena for competition among major powers. Under such conditions, the country is no longer treated merely as an independent nation; it becomes a field in which interests are divided.

During these years, the Iranian people have witnessed a multilayered plunder—one that is not limited to underground resources. Oil, gas, minerals, gold, and natural reserves represent only part of what has been removed from Iran or surrendered at negligible value through unequal agreements. Less visible is the plunder of Iran’s above-ground wealth: its human resources, social capital, scientific minds, labor force, the hopes of its younger generation, and the civilizational capacity of an entire nation.

Iranian youth may have suffered more than any other group under these conditions. A generation that could have built one of the region’s most advanced countries is now trapped between repression, migration, hopelessness, and psychological exhaustion. The sociology of crisis teaches us that the destruction of a nation does not always begin with military occupation; sometimes it begins by taking away the future horizon of its young people.

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Perhaps the most painful part of this story is the issue that is discussed least: the destruction of Iran and its people.

The question must be asked plainly: Those who, over more than four decades, have engaged in the repression, killing, and destruction of Iranians—ultimately, in the service of which structures of power have they acted?

When we speak of killing, we do not refer only to official executions or documented murders. We are speaking of a continuous process of physical, psychological, economic, and cultural elimination—a process many observers regard as a form of systematic erosion of the Iranian nation.

When, over a short period, tens of thousands—or according to some estimates, hundreds of thousands—are victimized during bloody repression, and when over forty-seven years millions of Iranians have suffered in different ways through direct violence, forced migration, economic collapse, addiction, imprisonment, repression, and the destruction of life opportunities, the matter can no longer be explained merely as an internal crisis.

At this point, a more difficult philosophical question emerges: Are we confronting only a repressive government, or a more complex structure in which hidden regional and global actors also benefit from Iran’s weakening?

History has shown that great powers do not always require direct occupation to dominate a civilization. Sometimes it is enough to weaken that nation’s historical memory, erode its educational institutions, disperse its intellectual class, and deprive its youth of hope for the future.

From this perspective, the issue is not merely the government; it is the civilizational survival of Iran.

In what some theorists describe as a restructuring of the global order, the Middle East has once again become a central arena for the redrawing of power. The experience of countries in the region has shown that, in many cases, borders remain fixed only on maps, while in reality sovereignty, resources, and independence are divided among foreign actors.

For Iran, this danger carries far deeper dimensions. Iran is not merely a contemporary political unit; it is one of the world’s oldest civilizational continuities. The loss of part of Iran’s maritime or territorial borders is not merely the loss of geography; it is the loss of part of a nation’s historical memory.

More painfully, in most negotiations the Iranian people are not a party to the conversation at all.

Iran is discussed, but Iranians are not spoken with.

Even if an agreement is signed tomorrow, the essential questions will remain: Who will speak about returning the wealth that has been plundered? Who will answer for stolen resources, unequal agreements, damaged borders, and historical losses?

A peace that ignores justice is, in many cases, nothing more than the consolidation of injustice.

Today, more than ever, the Iranian people understand that no political contract, economic bargain, or geopolitical agreement can erase a nation’s historical memory.

Perhaps this is the most important transformation of our time.

The Iranian people are no longer the silent nation of the past.

Collective memory has awakened. People observe, compare, remember, and judge. They know what has been taken from them—from oil and gold to the opportunity to live, and from security to national dignity.

For this reason, the message of Iranians today is clear.

We will not forget.

Neither what was done to this nation from within, nor what was traded away abroad at the expense of this land.

Nations with historical memory may remain patient for years, but when they rise to reclaim their historical rights, they no longer struggle only for the present. They stand for the future and for the dignity of their own history.

Today, Iran stands less at the negotiating table than at the edge of history.

And the final question is this: Does the world intend to bargain with a wounded Iran, or to engage with the Iranian people, who sooner or later will rise to reclaim what has been taken from them?