Dear Thomas Friedman: Get Real About Iran. I get it. You are frustrated. A war launched without a plan, a president who sounds unhinged every morning before breakfast, and an alliance fraying at the edges. The urge to rally NATO and the Western world around a familiar villain — Iran's "malign regime" with its "poisonous ideology" — must feel like solid ground in a swamp. I understand the temptation. Now get over it. Because that narrative, the one your column breathes like oxygen, is precisely the poisonous ideology that has driven four decades of failed Western policy toward Iran. It is the same caricature that sold sanctions that didn't work, regime-change fantasies that didn't materialize, and wars that left the region in ruins. And here you are, reaching for it again. Let us start with your language. Iran's regime is "malign." Its ideology is "poisonous." Its leaders are "lunatics." Its regional vision is "a kiss of death." You deploy these words not as analysis but as incantation - the verbal equivalent of closing your eyes and refusing to look. It is the language of a man who has already decided what Iran is and arranged the facts accordingly. It is, in a word, propaganda. And it has consequences. For decades, this very framing has misled American and European policymakers into believing that enough pressure, enough sanctions, enough isolation, enough war would eventually cause Iran to buckle or collapse. It never did. It never will. A country of ninety million people, sitting astride one of the world's most strategic waterways, with a civilisation older than the concept of the nation-state, does not disappear because Thomas Friedman calls it malign. What does the Iran you refuse to see actually look like? It looks like a country that, despite forty-five years of the most punishing sanctions regime ever imposed on a non-belligerent state, has produced a film industry that wins international prizes. It looks like a country where women constitute more than half of university students and have built careers in medicine, engineering, law, architecture and the arts. It looks like a country with a pharmaceutical sector that manufactures over ninety percent of its own medicines domestically, a feat of industrial self-reliance that most developing nations could only dream of. It looks like a country with a car industry, a steel industry, a space program, a vibrant startup ecosystem in Tehran that its young people have built in the teeth of every obstacle the West could contrive. You wouldn't know any of this from reading Western coverage, which confines itself to a narrow repertoire of images designed to confirm a verdict already reached. You write admiringly of the Dubai model — a "noncorrupt, responsible bureaucracy," openness to the world, moderate Islam, economic dynamism. You present it as the antithesis of the Iranian model. But let us be honest about what the Dubai model actually rested on: American military bases. The Persian Gulf states, for decades, outsourced their security to Washington and built their gleaming towers on the foundation of that rented protection. This was not a model of sovereign development. It was a business plan predicated on the illusion that you could ring Iran with hostile military infrastructure, participate in its economic encirclement, reject every peace initiative it extended, and somehow build a stable, prosperous future. The current war, the one that is frightening away foreign investors and burdening these states with "huge new defense bills," as you yourself acknowledge, is the receipt for that illusion. The Dubai model did not fail because of Iran. It failed because it was built on the assumption that Iran's security concerns could be permanently ignored. You cannot build lasting prosperity on a foundation of your neighbour's insecurity. And Iran did extend its hand, repeatedly. The Hormuz Peace Endeavour, which Iran proposed to bring Persian Gulf states into a framework of collective regional security, was brushed aside by countries that preferred to keep betting on Washington to solve their "Iran problem" for them. That bet has now been called. The question is whether they will place it again. Which brings us to the Strait of Hormuz and to the charge that Iran is trying to "set up a tollbooth" on the world's critical oil lifeline. Let me offer you a different frame. The Strait of Hormuz passes through Iranian territorial waters. Before this war, that waterway operated under what amounted to unregulated free transit — a transit regime that, in practice, allowed the United States to supply and reinforce military bases across the Arabian Peninsula and to project force directly at Iran. It allowed the launching of a war that your own president described in terms of ending Iranian civilisation. It allowed attacks on Iranian infrastructure that, if visited upon any NATO state, would have triggered Article Five before the smoke cleared. You call Iran's response to this a "tollbooth." Iran calls it the elementary right of a nation not to watch its territorial waters serve as the logistical artery of its own destruction. International waterways are meant to be neutral corridors connecting high seas. The Persian Gulf is currently not neutral. It is a military perimeter constructed by the United States, with one wall facing Iran. No sovereign nation — not France, not the United States, not any country whose right to self-defence you would recognise without blinking — would accept that arrangement. The legal architecture governing international straits makes this point with precision. Under Article 39 of UNCLOS, transit passage is explicitly conditioned on refraining from "any threat or use of force against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of States bordering the strait." This is a binding obligation, not a courtesy. The transit passage regime was designed to balance freedom of navigation with the sovereign rights of littoral states, not to strip those states of any means of self-defence while foreign navies use the same waterway as a forward-deployment corridor. No principle of international law — not transit passage, not freedom of navigation, not the customary law of the sea — confers upon any state the right to convert a littoral nation's territorial waters into the supply line for that nation's destruction. When transit passage is operationalised as a mechanism to arm one shore of a strait against the state whose waters constitute the other, it has ceased to function as a neutral navigational right and become an instrument of belligerency. Iran invoking its rights as a littoral state in response to precisely that situation is not a violation of international law. It is what international law was designed to prevent. But then, a narrative that has spent four decades casting Iran as a permanent exception to civilised norms would struggle to concede that international law might, on occasion, apply in Iran's favour too. Iran is a regional power. It was one before this war, and it is a greater one after it. The countries that line the Persian Gulf need to absorb that reality, not as a threat, but as a geographic and historical fact around which a stable order can be built, if they choose to build one. Iran's patience over these past decades was not weakness. It was the patience of a state that understood the long game and believed, perhaps naively, that its neighbours would eventually tire of arrangements that served Washington's - and Israel's - interests rather than their own. Some of them are now beginning to do exactly that. So here is my appeal, not to NATO navies, but to the columnists, strategists and policymakers who have spent forty years misreading their own country. Drop the caricature. Retire the "malign regime" and the "poisonous ideology" narrative. Recognise that Iran has legitimate security concerns, a genuine weight in the regional order, and real interests that any durable settlement must accommodate. Persuade the Persian Gulf states that the time has come to respond seriously to the extended hand they have spent decades swatting away. That is the harder argument to make. It requires admitting that a narrative you helped construct was wrong. But it is the only argument that has any chance of producing something other than permanent instability. The necessary is still possible. But not if you keep reaching for the same broken tools.