At the height of negotiations with the Iranian regime over its nuclear program, Western advocates of a deal found themselves rationalizing the Islamic Republic’s uncompromising belligerence towards Israel. They did so as part of their bid to persuade a skeptical public that the mullahs would honor their agreements. Thus was born the “domestic consumption” theory of Iran’s internal politics, advanced by, among others, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

In a conversation with The Atlantic, Kerry acknowledged Iran’s “fundamental ideological confrontation” with Israel, but wondered aloud whether the regime was materially committed to the goal of eliminating the Jewish state. One month after the signing of the Iran nuclear deal, UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond made a similar observation on a visit to Tehran for the reopening of the British Embassy. “We’ve got to distinguish between revolutionary sloganizing and what Iran actually does in the conduct of its foreign policy,” Hammond told the BBC. “We’ve got to, as we do with quite a number of countries, distinguish the internal political consumption rhetoric from the reality of the way they conduct their foreign policy.”

Actually, nothing in the present conduct of Iranian foreign policy—which, in its immediate neighborhood, involves a destabilization strategy based upon support for proxy terrorist groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon—suggests that the Islamist regime is becoming less revolutionary or, in Hammond’s phrase, “more nuanced.”

Just as puzzling is the idea that while there is now an expectancy in Western societies that politicians will be held to account for everything they say as well as do, the bellicose threats of Iranian leaders should, by contrast, be ignored. The implication is that Tehran’s leaders, in threatening Israel’s very existence, are catering to a domestic desire to hear such rhetoric. This assumes that erasing Israel from the map is a bigger priority for ordinary Iranians than rescuing their economy or bolstering the miserably poor levels of political freedom they currently enjoy.

Read the article in full at The Tower.