'You Don't Negotiate With Dajjal': Dugin Says Iran Cannot Bargain With the West
In a new essay, the Russian philosopher argues that open talks with Washington are a trap, that escalation must be answered with escalation, and that Tehran gains nothing at the negotiating table
The Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin has argued that Iran can reach no genuine peace with the United States, contending in a new essay that negotiating with the West is a trap and that the only effective response is mutual escalation.
Writing for Multipolar Press under the title “You Don’t Negotiate With Dajjal,” Dugin points to what he describes as the collapse of any Iran–US settlement: Washington, in his account, resumed its bombing of Iranian territory, while Tehran struck American military bases in Bahrain and once more closed the Strait of Hormuz. The talks were doomed from the outset, he argues, because — in a principle he draws from Shia metaphysics — there can be no compromise with Dajjal, the one-eyed false messiah and ultimate deceiver of Islamic eschatology, who embodies absolute evil.
‘Escalation must be mutual’
At the heart of Dugin’s argument is a doctrine he says applies equally to Iran’s confrontation with the West and to Russia’s own war: escalation must be mutual. When the enemy escalates, he writes, the other side must escalate in turn; only then can it shape the course of events. To do otherwise is to let the adversary escalate unilaterally on its own terms while one is reduced to passive reaction — a dynamic he characterises as a form of external control imposed during wartime. Merely delaying conflict and maintaining the appearance of negotiations, he contends, always works to the West’s advantage.
Dugin extends the same critique to Moscow, faulting Russia for what he sees as its failure to respond forcefully to Western involvement in the war against it, and questioning why his own country does not answer such pressure in kind.
Negotiations as an information weapon
Talks themselves are not the problem, in Dugin’s telling — publicity is. Negotiations may be conducted, he argues, but only in one’s own interest and never in the open; the moment they become public, they turn into an information weapon that, in his view, only the West knows how to wield, and always for its own ends. On this logic, he claims, even the mention of figures associated with backchannel diplomacy can sap the morale of soldiers at the front and dampen a nation’s resolve.
He applies the same reasoning to Iran. At the funeral of the martyred Leader Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei, Dugin notes, angry curses were directed at those associated with negotiating with the West — naming Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. He adds, however, that he does not consider them personally to blame, attributing the hostility instead to the logic of information warfare, whose rules he says the West sets and exploits unilaterally.
Dugin also claimed that, in the wake of the initial US and Israeli strikes on Iran’s leadership, the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps had moved against what he called a “sixth column” of internal enemies, suggesting that some such elements remained.
The essay, translated from the Russian, closes on Dugin’s central conviction: that for both Iran and Russia, the open negotiating table is not a path to peace but an instrument the West turns against those who agree to sit at it.
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