Trump’s most dangerous blind spot has always been his belief that every enemy ultimately wants a deal. He understands businessmen. He understands leverage, pressure and the desire to walk away with a win. But radical Islamist regimes and movements do not necessarily define winning the same way. For them, negotiations can be another battlefield: a way to gain time, divide opponents, secure concessions and survive until the balance of power changes. Iran has demonstrated the problem repeatedly. Its leaders negotiated while advancing clandestine nuclear work, arming proxies and attacking Americans and their allies. Even after the latest agreement, Tehran returned to escalation rather than genuine accommodation. Trump now appears to be learning - at tremendous cost - that a signed document is worthless without verification, enforcement and the credible destruction of the capabilities being negotiated away. The latest truce has unraveled, and American forces are again striking Iranian military targets. The lesson is larger than Iran. It applies to Hamas. It applies to the Muslim Brotherhood. It applies to Erdoğan’s Turkey, Qatar and Ahmed al-Sharaa - the former Abu Mohammed al-Jolani - in Syria. Then there is Taqiyya. Islamist movements have a documented record of using tactical ambiguity, temporary truces, front organizations and reassuring language for strategic purposes. The Holy Land Foundation trial offered a disturbing window into that world. A federal jury convicted the foundation and five leaders of providing material support to Hamas through organizations presented as charitable. Prosecutors also introduced internal Muslim Brotherhood documents describing a long-term “civilization-jihad” project and a Palestine Committee designed as "a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within". The convictions were for material support - not for merely possessing an ideological memorandum - but the evidence showed how humanitarian and civic structures could be exploited to sustain a terrorist movement inside the USA. That matters because Hamas is not merely adjacent to the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas is its Palestinian branch. And Qatar and Turkey are not neutral referees. Qatar has hosted Hamas leaders, amplified its propaganda ecosystem and used money and diplomacy to preserve its influence over Gaza. Turkey has treated Hamas officials as political partners rather than terrorists, while Erdoğan openly embraces the Brotherhood’s ideological world. Both countries can serve as intermediaries when necessary. But an intermediary is not automatically an honest guarantor - and a state invested in Hamas’s survival should not be entrusted with deciding whether Hamas has genuinely been dismantled. That is the central danger of giving Qatar and Turkey significant influence over Trump’s Gaza Board of Peace. Their objective may be to repackage Hamas, move its visible leaders aside and preserve its networks under a different name. A ceasefire that leaves Hamas’s commanders, weapons, tunnels, finances, indoctrination and coercive machinery intact is not peace. It is an intermission before the next October 7. The same mistake infects the automatic demand for a two-state solution. A Palestinian state created before deradicalization would not magically become moderate because diplomats called it a state. The Palestinian Authority still carries the legacy of rewarding terrorists and their families, glorifying “martyrs” and educating children through a system saturated with rejectionism. UNRWA schools use Palestinian Authority textbooks; a 2026 U.S. government review confirmed that the PA supplies those books to UNRWA and that American funding supported the broader education system in which they were used. U.S. Government Accountability Office Hamas did not emerge from a political vacuum. It emerged from decades of incitement, antisemitic mythology, terrorist glorification and the teaching that every Israeli concession is evidence that violence works. Creating another sovereign launching pad under those conditions would not solve the conflict. It would internationalize and fortify it. Peace requires more than new borders. It requires the disarmament of Hamas, the removal of its governing apparatus, the destruction of its tunnel and financing networks, the end of “martyr” payments, and the replacement of an education system that teaches children to inherit a war. Until that transformation occurs, only Israel has both the ability and the existential incentive to ensure that Hamas does not survive underground and reappear under a new logo. The same caution belongs in Syria. Ahmed al-Sharaa spent years as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, leading al-Nusra - al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate. “Jolani” refers to the Golan, and his ambitions were never confined to overthrowing Assad. In 2018, he told his fighters: “If Allah wills it, we will reach not only Damascus, but Jerusalem awaits us as well.” After his forces conquered Damascus in 2024, armed rebels were filmed proclaiming: “From here we are coming, O Jerusalem. Be patient, O people of Gaza.” There is little evidence that al-Sharaa has genuinely deradicalized - and considerable evidence that he has not. Forces belonging to or aligned with Syria’s new authorities have been implicated in massacres and grave abuses against Alawites and Druze. Christians have faced killings, kidnappings, intimidation and attacks, including the deadly bombing of a Damascus church. Even around the time al-Sharaa was being welcomed at the White House, reports continued to emerge of Christians and other minorities being abducted, tortured, murdered or threatened by Islamists, some connected to the new security apparatus. Trump praised a supposed transformation in Washington while the people expected to trust it were still burying their dead in Syria. The direction of the education system is no more reassuring. The new authorities announced curriculum changes that increased religious content, removed or diminished parts of Syria’s pre-Islamic heritage, changed “defending the nation” to “defending Allah”, replaced a general reference to those who had "incurred divine anger or gone astray" with an explicit reference to “Jews and Christians”, and redefined martyrdom in more religious terms. Some proposals were reconsidered after public outrage, but the underlying intention was unmistakable: Islamization extending beyond religious studies and into Syria’s broader national curriculum. Deradicalization is not demonstrated in interviews. It is demonstrated in what a government teaches its children, how it treats minorities when cameras are absent, whom it incorporates into its security forces and whether it punishes jihadists - or merely gives them uniforms. Trump may finally be learning the Iran lesson: ideological enemies do not necessarily negotiate because they have abandoned their objective. Sometimes they negotiate because they have not yet achieved it. Now that lesson must be applied consistently. No faith in signatures without enforcement. No trust in rebranding without transformation. No “peace” administered by Hamas’s patrons. No Palestinian state before genuine deradicalization. No assumption that Iran, Qatar, Turkey, Hamas or Jolani define peace as we do. Iran showed what happens when wishful thinking is mistaken for strategy. Gaza must not become the next demonstration.