Greek newspaper Ta Nea published a striking analysis arguing that the fundamental problem driving the conflict is not a lack of messages between Washington and Tehran but a profound failure of mutual understanding. The piece contends that Iranian leaders think in decades while Americans — and Israelis — think in days or weeks. Iran’s “Eastern culture” prizes patience, endurance, and even martyrdom, while Western strategic thinking craves rapid results and quick rewards.
The analysis notes that Iranian leaders “generally mean what they say and follow their words with concrete actions,” a pattern that many former American officials who have negotiated with Tehran have corroborated. Iran’s diplomatic tactic, they say, is one of exhausting the adversary. The regime is fighting for survival and, paradoxically, doing so effectively — deploying clearly inferior military means against the U.S. and Israel but using them with strategic cunning.
A separate opinion column in the same paper posed the million-dollar question: how long will this crisis last? The answer, the writer suggested, depends on the endurance of both sides — but logic, unfortunately, “is absent from the management of this crisis by its stronger party, the United States.”
