This paper focuses on successful communication involving an uncooperative interpreter in strategic contexts. Faced with the utterance of an expression that, inherently, is amenable to more than one interpretation, uncooperative interpreters choose the interpretation they know is not the speaker’s intended one. This poses the following questions: Does this still count as successful communication in Grice’s [15] sense? Can we motivate such cases by means of Grice’s theory, do we need additional tools or do we have to abandon it? I think this type of communication can be viewed as successful, at least with respect to rational intention-recognition. It is therefore necessary to distinguish the kinds of cooperation intended by Grice to account for the interpreter’s behavior in these cases. To do so, I propose a two-step process: In the first step the interpreter understands the speaker’s intended meaning and the ultimate aim in compliance with Grice’s cooperative rational, and (largely) unconscious intention-recognition. The second step involves the interpreter’s conscious decision not to act according to what would be fully cooperative while they also make clear that they do not opt out of the exchange. To model that, I borrow the term Rhetorical Cooperativity coined by Asher & Lascarides [4] as a label for the interpreter’s strategy of upholding some cooperation while steering the conversation towards their own, personal ultimate aim. This form of communication involving an interpreter who is not cooperative in a colloquial sense forces us to rethink what it means for communication to be successful. I present a range of data that shows how pervasive these cases of uncooperative communication are and how my model can explain the basic strategy behind the interpreter’s behavior.