OPINION:
President Trump called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “crazy” in a phone conversation last week about Israel’s strikes against Hezbollah, Iran’s terrorist proxy in Lebanon.
To get a deal with an enemy, he insulted a friend.
Try to imagine Mr. Trump’s response if the cartels were raining missiles and drones on us from Mexico every night. Hezbollah’s strikes have depopulated dozens of communities in northern Israel.
Our president is piqued by Israel’s defensive action, which he believes gets in the way of his pursuit of a paper peace with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Despite his reputation as a hard-headed businessman, Mr. Trump seems not to understand that the art of the deal does not work with communists and Islamists.
As we wait for an illusory peace with Iran — as well as the outcome of indicting Cuban leader Raul Castro and the next chapter of our relationship with Red China — we need to come to terms with this reality: You cannot do business with totalitarian thugs. Their mindsets are alien to the citizens of free societies.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s Munich mistake was a failure of imagination. He could not conceive of how someone who had witnessed the carnage of World War I could risk another global conflict for territorial gain. He did not understand the ruthless determination of Adolf Hitler.
For 47 years, Iran’s Islamist regime has shown itself impervious to reason and as much our enemy today as it was when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in 1979.
In the recent bombing campaign, which took out much of Iran’s leadership, the president believed that if he hit enough targets and offered sufficient inducements, the regime would come to its senses, surrender its fissionable material, open the Strait of Hormuz and unicorns would amble by.
If it came to a choice between sacrificing half the population or ending its nuclear program, Mr. Trump apparently believed, the regime would not hesitate in choosing the former.
Totalitarians have a different calculus than the rest of us. The trains that Hitler used to send Jews to death camps could have been used to transport troops and material, improving the prospects of a German victory in World War II. Yet killing Jews was a higher priority for the Nazis.
Cuba should be begging us for help and offering any reforms necessary to secure it. The people are starving, garbage is piling up in the streets, and hardly any fuel is left in the country.
Still, Havana does not care how much its people suffer. It will not accept any arrangement that imperils communist rule.
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini said, “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” That encapsulates the totalitarian mindset.
For communists, the party is everything. At the Stalin purge trials, old Bolsheviks went to their deaths believing that if the party said they were guilty, then they must be guilty.
In Arabic, Islam means “submission” or “surrender.” Throughout the course of history, conversion to Islam was mainly by the sword.
When Mao Zedong came to power, his cadres did not ask the populace: “Hey, you want to be part of our people’s republic?” For totalitarians, it is always submit or die.
Negotiations with totalitarian regimes are a subterfuge. Iran and Cuba are playing for time. Both have histories of broken promises going back to their beginnings.
When he took power in 1959, Fidel Castro swore he was not a communist. After the Islamic Revolution, Khomeini said he looked forward to good relations with the United States. Both avowals were intended to avoid conflict while the regimes consolidated their power.
We fall for it every time.
It is Charlie Brown, Lucy and the football all over again. Despite fantasies of a deal, Iran will snatch away its fissionable material at the last minute, leaving poor Uncle Sam flat on his back.
In 1958, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote a book about communism: “Masters of Deceit.” Islam has a principle called taqiyya, which allows lying to infidels to advance the faith.
Still, we go right on pretending that we can do business with ideological killers, whether it is Hamas, Hezbollah, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or communist China. We think we can somehow change their essential nature.
Yet the only way to deal with our enemies today is the way the Allies dealt with the Axis powers in World War II: Accept nothing less than unconditional surrender.
• Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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