How to Think About Iran Negotiating with Trump

Everyone keeps talking about what Iran wants, what the regime is planning, what the Mullers will do next. But what if I told you there’s a specific cognitive bias identified by the CIA’s own internal training program that explains why almost everyone is getting Iran wrong right now. It’s called the bias towards centralized direction. It comes from Richard Huer’s psychology of intelligence analysis. He’s the man who literally wrote the training manual for how CIA analysts are supposed to think and write. And here’s what it says. Human beings have a natural tendency to assume that what happens in a country is the result of centralized intentional planning by whoever appears to be in charge. We see a flag.

We see a supreme leader. We assume that the leader controls the action. Now apply that to Iran. Most Western analysts still treat Iran as a unitary actor. The supreme leader issues the decree. The IRGC executes it. The proxies carry it out. One brain, one chain of command. But here’s something most people don’t know. Only about 57% of Iran’s population even speak Persian as their first language. You’ve got Azerbaijani Turks at 14%, Kurds at 9%, Gilocks, Maseranis, Balac, Arabs, Turkmen. Nearly half the country is not ethnically Persian. Now think about what that means when the regime is under pressure. This is a Persian dominated theocracy that has been holding a multi-thnic empire together through religious authority and security force coercion.

When the sanctions bite, when the proxies collapse, when Hezbollah gets decapitated and the Houthies are getting hammered and Assad fails, you’re not just watching a regime lose its foreign policy tools. You’re watching the binding mechanism of a multi-ethnic state come under severe stress. And here’s where centralization bias gets really dangerous. Because when Western analysts say Iran will do X, they’re assuming a level of internal cohesion that may no longer exist. They’re assuming that the Azerbaijani general and the bail commander and the Kurdish population on the border with Iraq are all going to follow the same script from Thrron. But what if those factions are already hedging? What if the IRGC commander in one province is cutting deals while the foreign ministry is signaling something completely different to Washington?

And what if it looks like a coherent strategy from the outside, but really it’s the emergent behavior of a system that’s fracturing along ethnic lines that were always there, they’re just suppressed. Huer warned us about this decades ago. When you see complex behavior from a state actor, your first instinct is to assume someone’s in charge, that there’s a plan. But sometimes there is no plan. There are 12 plans. There are factions fighting for survival in a country where the ruling ethnicity is barely a majority. And everyone on the inside knows a transition is coming soon. So next time you see a headline that says Iran signals something or tan responds to something, ask yourself which Iran, which faction is this?

The IRGC hardliners? Is this the foreign ministry trying to cut a deal before the transition? Is this the regional commander who stopped taking orders from Tyrron 6 months ago? And underneath all of that, what are the Kurds thinking? What are the Azeris calculating? What happens to a multithnic empire when the center cannot hold? That one question, who specifically is the antidote to centralization bias? And it’s the difference between professional analysis and amateur assumptions. Keep thinking.