There’s a classic scene in “Hoosiers” where the interim coach offers to help Gene Hackman’s character. Hackman declines, and the coach delivers one of the most memorable lines in sports movie history:
“There’s two kinds of stupid in this world. One is the kind where a man gets naked and barks at the moon in the middle of the woods. The other is the man who does the same thing in my living room.”
Well, the ayatollahs in Iran have officially moved from the woods… to the living room.
And the problem is—they don’t seem to know it.
Because if you look at what’s happening right now in the negotiations involving the United States, Iran, and intermediaries like Pakistan, you don’t see strategy.
You see a regime that has completely misread the moment.
For decades, Iran’s leadership has operated under a very specific assumption: that every American president ultimately behaves the same way. Tough talk, red lines, then retreat. Pressure, followed by accommodation. Escalation, followed by relief.
They’ve watched it play out since Carter. They saw it under Obama—where red lines vanished and pallets of cash showed up on runways. They’ve learned to stall, posture, and wait out the storm. And so they assumed this would be no different.
That was their first mistake. Because this president is not that guy.
Recent reporting makes clear that negotiations—some of them routed through regional players like Pakistan—are happening alongside sustained pressure that is not easing. The strategy is not complicated: compress the regime’s options until it has to choose between survival and stubbornness.
That’s not theoretical diplomacy. That’s leverage. And leverage changes behavior—if the people across the table are smart enough to recognize it.
That’s where the ayatollahs are failing.
Because even as their position weakens—militarily, economically, diplomatically—they continue to act as though they are dictating terms.
They stall. They reject. They posture. They delay. And in doing so, they reveal something that should alarm anyone watching closely: They don’t understand the room they’re in.
This is not the familiar negotiating table where time is their ally and American resolve is temporary. This is a narrowing corridor. Every delay costs them more. Every rejection isolates them further. Every miscalculation reduces their already shrinking leverage. And yet, they continue as if the old playbook still applies.
That’s not strategy. That’s the second kind of stupid.
Now, to be fair, their confusion is not entirely self-generated. They’ve been trained—by years of inconsistent Western responses—to believe that endurance equals victory. That if they simply outlast the moment, the pressure will dissipate and the world will move on. But that assumption no longer holds.
And what makes this even more remarkable is that some of the president’s critics here at home still haven’t figured that out either.
We’ve watched the same pattern play out again and again. Underestimate him, dismiss him, assume he’ll follow the same tired script—and then watch as he bulldozes straight through it.
The ayatollahs are making the exact same mistake. They are treating this like a normal negotiation. It isn’t.
Internally, their regime is under strain. Years of economic mismanagement, corruption, and repression have eroded public trust. Waves of protests—especially among younger Iranians—have made it clear that the population is not nearly as compliant as the regime pretends.
Externally, their influence is weakening. The networks they built through proxies and intimidation are under pressure. Regional actors are recalculating. Isolation is no longer a distant threat—it’s an active reality.
And now, in the middle of all of that, they are being presented with a choice. Adapt… or absorb the consequences.
Instead, they’re stalling.
It would be almost comical if it weren’t so consequential. Because history is filled with regimes that behave this way in their final chapters. They misread strength as bluff. They interpret restraint as weakness. They assume the future will look like the past.
And then, suddenly, it doesn’t.
That’s the moment they’re in right now.
They walked into a living room thinking they were still alone in the woods. They assumed the same old tricks would work. They believed the same old patterns would hold. But the room has changed. The stakes have changed. And the man across from them is not playing by the old rules.
So, yes, there are two kinds of stupid in this world.
And right now, the ayatollahs are demonstrating—on the global stage, in real time—which kind they’ve chosen to be.
The only question left is whether they realize it before the consequences finish teaching the lesson for them.