Power in Tehran has moved even further away from elected institutions and into the hands of the security state. The presidency and parliament still exist, but they no longer appear to be where decisive choices are made. What matters now is the surviving security establishment, its reading of the war, and the worldview that has shaped the Islamic Republic for decades.

That worldview is simple: the regime does not see compromise with the West as a political bargain. It sees compromise with the West as a threat to its survival.

President Masoud Pezeshkian was never the central figure in the system. Since the war, he has become even more irrelevant. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, despite serving as speaker of parliament and briefly emerging as the chief nuclear negotiator, also appears increasingly sidelined. Since the Islamabad talks with Vice President J.D. Vance in April, his public language has turned defensive. He keeps trying to prove his loyalty and explain himself, while other regime figures attack him over the nuclear file. That says a great deal about where he stands.

The presidency and parliament still exist, but they no longer appear to be where decisive choices are made

The situation around Mojtaba Khamenei remains opaque. The secrecy surrounding him has sparked intense speculation about his health, his channels of contact, and his actual role. If he is alive and politically active, his ability to govern appears severely restricted for security reasons. A leader who cannot speak, meet, or project authority is, in practical terms, a non-existent leader.

This creates a deeper problem for the Islamic Republic. The theory of Velayat-e Faqih, the system’s founding political doctrine, rests on the idea that the Supreme Leader derives legitimacy from the Hidden Imam and governs as his deputy during the Imam’s occultation. But now, even the deputy of the Hidden Imam is hidden.

That places the Islamic Republic in an unprecedented position. In the resulting vacuum, power has shifted toward the hardest elements of the security establishment. Figures such as IRGC commander Ahmad Vahidi, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, and Hossein Taeb, the former head of the IRGC Intelligence Organization and a close confidant of Mojtaba Khamenei, are now calling the shots in Tehran.

They are veterans of the Islamic Republic’s security apparatus: deeply ideological, security-driven, and convinced that compromise with Washington is incompatible with the system’s survival.

They believe they won the war. That belief is not baseless. President Trump may have expected that the killing of Ali Khamenei and the damage to Iran’s military structure would push the regime toward compromise. But the abrupt ceasefire allowed the remaining leadership to present survival as victory.

There are many possible explanations for Washington’s current course. President Trump clearly had his reasons for announcing the ceasefire. But those reasons do not change the consequences of the war, the regime’s survival, or Tehran’s interpretation of the outcome. What matters now is not why it happened, but what it produced.

That leaves Trump with three choices: continue the blockade, make a deal with the current regime, or restart the war. None offers an easy exit. Each carries significant consequences for the United States, the region, the world, and the Iranian people.

The Blockade

He can continue the blockade and pressure campaign. That will hurt Iran, but it will also hurt the global economy, because the Strait of Hormuz is also blocked by Iran. That is not a durable position. Tehran is already saying the Strait will not return to its previous regime of free passage. Even if the United States lifts the blockade, Iran will impose a new reality, allowing ships to pass only on its terms, including tolls. Iran is adamant about this, and there is no reason to assume it is bluffing.

The Strait of Hormuz will not return to the previous arrangement through talks and negotiations. That is a hard reality the United States and the world will soon have to face.

The Deal

Trump can make a deal with the current regime. That may look like the easiest diplomatic exit, but it would carry a high strategic cost for the region and for America’s standing in the world. Any agreement acceptable to Tehran would certainly require sanctions relief, the release of frozen assets, and acceptance of new rules in the Strait of Hormuz. In practice, Washington would be giving resources to a regime that believes it has just won a war with the United States and Israel. Tehran’s conclusion would be clear: expanding the war regionally worked, escalation worked, and the infrastructure that made both possible must be rebuilt.

The lesson would not stop in Tehran. China is watching these developments closely. For Beijing, the Iran war has become a live test of American power, endurance, and resolve. If Washington is forced to settle on terms that look like capitulation to Tehran, the implications will reach far beyond the Middle East. How can the United States credibly pivot to Asia and contain China if it cannot impose its will on Iran?

The region will also pay a high price. Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait must kiss goodbye to their dreams of becoming prosperous, attractive hubs for the world. No serious global company will invest with confidence in a region where the Strait of Hormuz can be taxed or blocked by the IRGC, and where the same IRGC emerges more assertive and emboldened after such a deal. As long as the Islamic Republic and the IRGC remain in place, these countries should think twice before investing even their own money in major infrastructure, let alone expecting global investors to do so.

Expanding the war regionally worked, escalation worked, and the infrastructure that made both possible must be rebuilt.

For Iranians, the deal would be devastating. The country has been without normal internet access for nearly two months, and that will most likely remain the case. Elected institutions have become even less relevant. The IRGC had the upper hand before the war; now it is the only functioning hand. Executions and repression continue. Cash flowing into this structure would not moderate it. It would strengthen it. Such a deal would leave the Iranian population facing a regime that killed thousands of them in a major countrywide protest in early January. The message would be sober and brutal: the regime can kill thousands of its own people and still force a deal on the United States.

It would also create serious problems for Israel. A diplomatic agreement would not only reopen financial channels for Tehran; it would make future Israeli strikes harder to justify and harder to carry out. Negotiations and deals have often served as a political shield around Iran’s nuclear program. During the Biden years, while Washington was still trying to restore an agreement, Iran dramatically expanded its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. Earlier, after Obama’s Iran deal, Israel faced greater pressure to restrain operations that could have threatened the agreement, including sabotage and intelligence activity related to Iran’s missile and drone programs.

If a new deal is struck now, restricting further Israeli strikes would almost certainly be part of the bargain, either formally or informally. Such an outcome would also shape the calculations of future American presidents. After a failed or inconclusive military operation, future administrations would be even more hesitant to use force against Iran.

No mistake in war is free of cost. The United States was winning the war until March 17, but then it suddenly shifted from pressure to courtship and negotiation. In doing so, it inadvertently empowered and hardened the very leadership it had weakened.

Washington now faces the price of that misreading. Any deal under the current balance of power that falls short of its initial demands will be seen as a defeat for the United States. Fighting and flirting with a fundamentalist regime do not mix. The United States appears to be learning that again, this time the hard way.

This leaves the third option: restarting the war.

The Harder War

That would not be easy now. In many ways, a second round would be harder for Washington. Two months ago, Tehran was hesitant to engage in a direct confrontation with the United States. Today, parts of the Iranian establishment appear far more confident in their ability to absorb military pressure and survive it.

Any renewed campaign would have to be much harder from the start. It would need to show immediately that this is not a repeat of the previous confrontation, but a more intense conflict aimed at changing the regime’s strategic calculus. Limited strikes on infrastructure alone are unlikely to do that. The Islamic Republic’s core security establishment is deeply ideological and has historically shown a high tolerance for economic and infrastructural damage.

From Tehran’s perspective, the survival of the regime matters more than the economic survival of the country itself.

That creates a central dilemma for Washington. If military pressure is intended to change the system’s behavior rather than merely punish it, then the pressure would have to focus on the power structure that sustains the system, not merely on physical infrastructure.

Iran’s ruling establishment is unusually concentrated. For decades, a relatively small circle of revolutionary-era figures has rotated through the highest political, military, and security positions, shaping the state’s direction and preserving the ideological foundations of the system. As long as that old guard remains dominant, meaningful strategic change is unlikely.

From Tehran’s perspective, the survival of the regime matters more than the economic survival of the country itself.

Yet this concentration of power has also created a structural weakness. The Islamic Republic built an authoritarian system designed to prevent the emergence of alternative centers of authority. That helped the revolutionary elite preserve control, but it also prevented the rise of a broadly legitimate next generation of leadership. Beneath the aging core of the regime, there is no equally authoritative successor class waiting to take its place.

Iran would also likely escalate the war horizontally if another round begins. It would target countries across the region, especially the Arab states. But those states are now caught between a rock and a hard place. They must either accept the long-term consequences of living with an emboldened Islamic Republic or accept the shorter-term costs of changing its behavior.

That is not an easy decision. War costs. But sometimes peace costs more.

A brief note: The Frame is entering a new phase. Going forward, it will be built jointly by Mehdi Parpanchi, Bozorgmehr Sharafedin, and Omid Memarian. The focus remains the same, but the ambition is larger.

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The Islamic Republic is causing significant pain in the regional and global economy through the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Even Iranian officials seem surprised by the scale of leverage this chokepoint provides.

“The Strait of Hormuz is Iran’s atomic bomb,” said Ali Nikzad, deputy speaker of Iran’s parliament, on May 1. “The Strait will never return to its pre-war state.”

There are signs that Iran is looking at control of the Strait of Hormuz as a long-term plan. Some officials see it as a potential source of income, with ideas of turning it into something like the Suez Canal through transit fees. They are also looking at it as a strong deterrent, linking their future security to it.

Closing the Strait is a weapon Iran can only use once.

However, that strategy is both reckless and short-sighted. Closing the Strait of Hormuz is a blunt tool, effective only in the short term. The global supply chain will eventually adapt, and Iran will end up empty-handed in the long term.

Closing the Strait is a weapon Iran can only use once. In the long term, consumers will find more stable supply routes, cargo will be rerouted, and energy consumers will shift toward other sources - at a cost borne across the entire Middle East, including Iran.

As Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), said, the Strait of Hormuz is now like a broken vase. “The damage is done. It will be very difficult to put the pieces back together. This will have permanent consequences for global energy markets for years to come.”

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Alternative Routes

The first consequence will be an immediate and heavy investment in alternative routes.

Iraq, the most severely affected regional country from the closure, has started work on a pipeline linking Basra to Haditha, with a capacity of 2.5 million barrels per day (bpd). Around $1.5 billion has been allocated to the 700-kilometer pipeline connecting Iraq to Syria, Turkey, and Jordan.

Investment in alternative routes was not seen as economically feasible only a few years ago, but now it appears to be a strategic priority for many nations, and the IEA is strongly endorsing such projects.

Exports through alternative pipelines in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iraq, and Türkiye have increased from 4 million bpd to 7.2 million bpd since the start of the war, according to the IEA.

What was once economically impractical is now becoming a strategic priority.

Alongside pipelines, cargo can be rerouted over land or through alternative corridors. MSC Mediterranean Shipping has already unveiled a new multimodal service linking Europe with Persian Gulf ports while bypassing the Strait of Hormuz.

The route will call at European ports, transiting the Suez Canal into the Red Sea, then stopping at Jeddah or King Abdullah Port in Saudi Arabia. From there, cargo will be transported overland by truck across the kingdom to Dammam on the Persian Gulf coast.

At Dammam, containers will be transferred onto smaller feeder vessels for onward delivery to regional hubs, including Abu Dhabi and Dubai’s Jebel Ali.

Alternative Sources of Energy

But more painful for the region is the shift by global refiners away from Middle Eastern Gulf crude grades, and more profoundly, the accelerating move away from fossil fuels toward solar and nuclear energy.

Some consumers have now shifted to the US as a supplier. Trump said in April that “large, empty oil tankers are sailing to the U.S.” to take American crude, which he called the “sweetest” oil. The US export figures support that.

Pakistan’s oil minister said the country has begun diversifying its energy sources, importing crude from the United States and Nigeria despite higher freight rates, and is looking into purchases from Libya.

India is suffering from an acute nationwide shortage of cooking gas (LPG), with many restaurants shut down and public discontent growing. India has realized that it has been too reliant on Middle Eastern output - roughly two-thirds of India’s 2025 LPG use was supplied from the Gulf. It will certainly diversify its imports in the coming years to hedge against risk.

The same dynamic played out in Europe when many countries realized after the war in Ukraine that they had been too reliant on Russian gas. Since then, they have invested heavily in alternative energy sources, including US LNG.

China has been reducing its reliance on the Strait of Hormuz over the years. It has diversified supply toward Russia, Africa, and Latin America, and has recently invested trillions of dollars in green and nuclear energy. The closure of Hormuz will only accelerate this trend.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has changed the fossil fuel industry forever, according to IEA’s Birol. “Governments will review their energy strategies. There will be a significant boost to renewables and nuclear power and a further shift towards a more electrified future,” he told the Guardian in April. “And this will cut into the main markets for oil.”

Iran’s control over the Strait, its generation of revenues from it, and linking its long-term security to it are naive dreams. Iran’s use of this weapon will have the most severe consequences for the region and Tehran.

The Islamic Republic has made this mistake repeatedly. It creates leverage, but overuses it, turning an asset into a threat. In doing so, it often produces the opposite of its intended effect, leaving the world with no option but to see that leverage as a threat that cannot be ignored.

“Iran’s usage of this weapon will have the most severe consequences for the region and Tehran.”

Iran’s insistence on continuing the war with Iraq in the 1980s, despite early victories, helped form a strong alliance around Saddam Hussein. Iran’s long pursuit of a nuclear program has lost its value as a bargaining tool and has instead turned into a liability. Iran’s other deterrents, including the proxy groups it cultivated across the region, not only failed to protect the Islamic Republic, but also became one of the main reasons for the US and Israel attacks against it.

The global economy thrives on predictability and stability, and it will not succumb to uncertainty or to restrictions that Iran might randomly impose on tankers based on their type, flag, charter, upstream producer, or destination.

By closing Hormuz, Iran has not discovered a deterrent as strong as a nuclear bomb. It has opened a poisonous well that will soon pollute its own livelihood and that of the whole region.

A brief note: The Frame is entering a new phase. Going forward, it will be built jointly by Mehdi Parpanchi and Bozorgmehr Sharafedin. The focus remains the same, but the ambition is larger.

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The real story behind Tehran’s sudden “unity” campaign did not begin with Donald Trump’s accusation. It began with a secret letter.

In recent days, word has circulated in Iranian political circles about a highly confidential letter reportedly written by a group of senior officials to Mojtaba Khamenei. According to those familiar with the matter, the letter warned that Iran’s economic situation is grave, that the country cannot continue on its current path, and that the leadership has no practical choice but to negotiate seriously with the United States over the nuclear file.

The historical echo is hard to miss. In the final days of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988, senior Iranian officials and commanders warned Ruhollah Khomeini that the war could no longer be sustained. Only days earlier, Khomeini had still been insisting on continuing the war. But under the weight of those warnings, he accepted UN Security Council Resolution 598 and ended the conflict, a decision he famously likened to drinking from a poisoned chalice.

That is why the current letter matters: it suggests that some senior figures now see the nuclear standoff as another moment when ideological insistence is colliding with the limits of the state.

The reported signatories included senior figures such as Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Masoud Pezeshkian, Abbas Araghchi, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, and others. Some officials apparently refused to sign it. One name now circulating is Ali Bagheri Kani, Iran’s former chief nuclear negotiator under Ebrahim Raisi.

The letter was supposed to remain top secret. It was addressed to Mojtaba Khamenei, not to the public, Parliament, or the ordinary political class. But according to accounts now circulating, Bagheri Kani showed the letter to other hardliners outside the high-level circle and emphasized that he had not signed it. From there, the matter leaked into political circles in Tehran.

Two public reactions suggest how sensitive the leak has become. The first came from Jalil Mohebbi, a figure close to Ghalibaf. In a pointed legal warning, he wrote that if a confidential letter is given to a member of a meeting, and that person shows it to outsiders while saying, “I did not sign this letter,” then under Article 3 of the law on publishing and disclosing confidential and secret government documents, that person can face up to ten years in prison. Mohebbi added: “This offense is unforgivable.”

The second came from a Telegram channel that referred to an “important confidential letter” written by some senior officials and left unsigned by others. The post asked why, at such a sensitive moment after the war, some officials had begun writing letters to “senior figures of the system,” and why others were so angry about its disclosure. In Iranian political language, that phrase is often used to refer to the Supreme Leader without naming him directly.

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Trump’s Claim Meets Tehran’s Denial

This was the atmosphere in which Trump’s claim landed. He said Iranian officials were “fighting like cats and dogs” because they could not agree about negotiations with the United States. Tehran immediately claimed otherwise. On Thursday, senior officials moved in near-unison to insist there was no split.

Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament, wrote: “In Iran there are no hardliners or moderates. We are all Iranian and revolutionary.” He added that with the “iron unity of the nation and the state” and full obedience to the Supreme Leader, Iran would make the “criminal aggressor” regret its actions.

President Pezeshkian posted almost the same message: “In Iran, there are no ‘hardliners’ or ‘moderates.’ We are all Iranians and revolutionaries.” He too invoked unity between nation and state, obedience to the Leader, and victory for Iran.

Mohseni Ejei, the head of the Judiciary, went further. He said the “foolish president of America” should know that “hardliner” and “moderate” are absurd and baseless terms from Western political literature. In Islamic Iran, he said, all groups and factions ultimately stand united under the orders of the Supreme Leader.

Mojtaba’s Red Line

Before the first round of negotiations, Mojtaba Khamenei had reportedly drawn a red line: Iranian officials were not to discuss the nuclear issue with the United States. But the Iranian delegation had to talk about the nuclear file, because any serious negotiation with Washington necessarily revolves around it. So they did.

That decision triggered the hardline backlash.

Mahmoud Nabavian, deputy chairman of Parliament’s National Security Commission, was present in the Pakistan negotiations. He has since said that the outcome of those talks was not satisfactory and that the negotiating team made a “strategic mistake.” His accusation was specific: the team acted “contrary to the explicit red line of the Leader of the Revolution” by discussing the nuclear issue with America.

Nabavian also said the delegation should have discussed the ten points set out by the Supreme Leader, not the nuclear file. He criticized the idea that the “Resistance Front” could be reduced only to Lebanon, saying Gaza, Yemen, and Iraq are also part of it. Most importantly, he said that based on new information he had received, from now on, “even if the naval blockade is lifted, any negotiation with America is forbidden.”

Amir Hossein Sabeti, a hardline MP, made the same charge more directly. “I am saying this for the first time, and I stand by what I say,” he said. “If what I say is false, the officials should take action against me.” He added that one of the Leader’s red lines was that “in the negotiations, the nuclear issue must absolutely not be discussed.” Then he challenged Ghalibaf and Araghchi by name: if they did not negotiate over the nuclear issue, they should explicitly deny it. If it becomes clear that they did, he warned, “we will frankly speak out to the people of Iran in a different way.”

The Backlash Moves Into the Open

This helps explain why the Iranian delegation did not travel to Pakistan for the second round. The dispute was no longer merely about diplomatic tactics. It had become a fight over whether senior officials had crossed a red line set by Mojtaba Khamenei.

The backlash then moved into the media. Nour News, affiliated with Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, published a video warning that a “dangerous current” was trying to portray Ghalibaf and Araghchi as figures who, instead of following the line of resistance, were seeking “surrender and compromise.” Nour News said this current was trying to place them against the Leader and other senior pillars of the system.

That formulation is revealing. Ghalibaf and Araghchi were not only answering Trump. They were under pressure from within the regime, where hardliners accused them of abandoning the resistance, pushing compromise, and trying to pressure the Leader.

The secret letter appears to be the center of this crisis. One camp believes Iran’s economic situation has become so severe that the country must negotiate over the nuclear issue and try to reach a deal. Another camp believes that even discussing the nuclear file with America violates Mojtaba Khamenei’s order and amounts to surrender.

The Unity Tweets as Damage Control

That is why Thursday’s tweets sounded so coordinated. They were not just patriotic slogans. They were loyalty statements. Ghalibaf, Pezeshkian, Mohseni Ejei, and others were signaling that they stood with the Leader, not against him, and that the leaked letter should not be read as an act of rebellion.

So when Tehran says there is no division, the evidence points the other way.

There was a secret letter to the leader. Some officials signed it; others refused. The letter leaked. A figure close to Ghalibaf threatened legal consequences for the disclosure. Hardline MPs accused the negotiating team of violating the Leader’s red line. Nour News warned that Ghalibaf and Araghchi were being portrayed as men of “surrender and compromise.” Then, suddenly, senior officials issued synchronized tweets declaring unity and obedience.

Trump said Iranian officials were “fighting like cats and dogs” over negotiations with the United States. Tehran rejected the claim, but the sequence of events points to a real internal fight. The dispute is not cosmetic. It goes to the core of the regime’s strategy: whether Iran can survive its economic crisis without a nuclear deal, and whether pursuing such a deal now means defying Mojtaba Khamenei.

The unity tweets were not proof that Tehran is united. They were the public cover for a split that had already become visible.

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A pair of short social media posts sparked a political storm in Iran. Donald Trump presented the Strait of Hormuz arrangement as part of a much broader deal that he said was close to completion. Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, described something narrower and more conditional. Trump said “the Strait of Hormuz is completely open and ready for business and full passage”, while the naval blockade against Iran would remain in force until the US “transaction with Iran” was “100% complete”, adding that “most of the points are already negotiated”. Araghchi said that, “in line with the ceasefire in Lebanon”, passage for “all commercial vessels” through the Strait of Hormuz was open only for the remaining period of the ceasefire, and only on the route already announced by Iran’s Ports and Maritime Organization. Trump later went much further. In a phone interview with CBS News, he said Iran had “agreed to everything” and would work with Washington to recover its buried stockpile of highly enriched uranium, which he said would then be taken to the United States.

That confusion deepened when Iranian outlets close to the IRGC began offering their own explanations. Tasnim, citing an unnamed source close to the Supreme National Security Council, said the arrangement was part of a two-week ceasefire framework between Iran and the United States, mediated by Pakistan. According to that account, Iran had initially agreed to allow a limited number of ships to pass each day, but then suspended the arrangement after the ceasefire was not implemented in Lebanon and was not extended to Hezbollah and Israel. Tasnim’s source said Iran had set three conditions: the vessels had to be commercial, not military; neither the ships nor their cargo could be linked to hostile states; they had to use the route designated by Iran; and transit had to be coordinated with Iranian forces. The source added that if the naval blockade continued, Iran would treat that as a violation of the ceasefire and close the route again.

Tasnim then turned its criticism on Araghchi himself. It called his tweet “bad and incomplete” and said it had created unnecessary ambiguity because it did not explain the conditions, the mechanism of passage, or the role of Iran’s armed forces. Fars made the same complaint in even plainer language. Its argument was not that officials should publish every detail of the talks. It was that if they believed the details could not be disclosed, they should at least explain why they were staying silent. As Fars put it, even “not explaining” now needed an explanation.

Another source of confusion was the changing Iranian account of the arrangement itself. Seyed Mahmoud Nabavian, a Tehran MP who had traveled to Pakistan with the negotiating team, said that after the United States had retreated and accepted a ceasefire in Lebanon, “some commercial ships” would be allowed through the Strait of Hormuz, and that charges would be taken from them.

But that detail disappeared from the later IRGC line. The IRGC’s message was stricter: a “new order” now governed the Strait; non-military vessels could pass only on Iran’s designated route; military vessels remained banned; all passage required permission from the IRGC Navy; and the arrangement was tied to a “period of silence on the battlefield” and to the implementation of the Lebanon ceasefire.

Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson later tried to draw a firmer official line in a live interview on state TV. He said ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz would take place only on the route set by Iran and in coordination with the relevant Iranian authorities. He told the media and the public not to pay attention to the other side’s media narrative. He also said Iran was the guardian of the Strait of Hormuz and would show no leniency in carrying out measures that protect the interests and rights of the Iranian people. In the same appearance, he said Iran had held no talks about extending the ceasefire and that, in cooperation with Pakistan, its full focus was on creating the conditions for a complete end to the war in a way that protected Iran’s interests and rights.

The criticism did not come only from Tasnim and Fars. It also spread across pro-system and conservative accounts on X. Seyed Nezamoddin Mousavi, former editor-in-chief of Fars News Agency, wrote that while Trump and his media were shaping the narrative in real time, the Iranian side was offering almost no clear or credible account of its own. He added that trusting the negotiators did not mean ignoring public opinion, and ended with a direct appeal: “Gentlemen, say something. Images of defeat and victory are made by these very narratives.”

From the other side of the political spectrum, Ali Asghar Shafieian, an adviser to the Iranian president, made a similar point. He wrote that in any agreement both sides would present their own gains: Iran has victories, America also has victories, and no side should be expected to make the other’s case for it. But he said what mattered for Iran was to tell the story of its own gains clearly.

Hardline voices focused directly on Araghchi’s wording. Seyed Morteza Mahmoudi, a Tehran MP, wrote that if there had not been a war, Araghchi would certainly have been impeached over his tweet. He accused the foreign minister of once again making ill-timed remarks at a highly sensitive moment and, in effect, helping to calm global oil and energy markets.

A page presenting itself as a Saeed Jalili fan account wrote that if these really were the Supreme Leader’s instructions, he should announce them himself in a recorded audio or video message so people would know what was going on and follow them. It said that if no such direct message appeared, then the whole thing was clearly being driven by officials, and that the public statements were being written by what it called a “coup plotter.”

Jalili, a former nuclear negotiator and former secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, is one of the Islamic Republic’s best-known hardline figures and is widely associated with opposition to compromise with the West. The page was widely seen as close to Jalili’s political camp. After the post appeared, the account was taken down.

At the same time, some loyalist voices tried to restore message discipline. Seyed Abbas Mousavi, Chief of Protocol in the Iranian President’s Office, wrote that despite Trump’s bluster and misleading claims, the reality was different: the ceasefire in Lebanon had been imposed on the enemy under heavy pressure, and the Strait of Hormuz remained under Iran’s control and would continue to be managed on Iran’s terms.

Taken together, these statements explain why the confusion spread so quickly. Trump spoke as if a broad deal was close. Araghchi described a narrower, conditional arrangement. Tasnim said it was limited and reversible. The IRGC stressed that all movement remained under Iranian military control. The foreign ministry spokesperson said there had been no talks on extending the ceasefire. Even pro-system commentators began asking why the Iranian side was not giving a clear account of what had actually been agreed. The issue, in the end, was not only secrecy. It was the failure to present a coherent Iranian narrative before Trump defined the story himself.

In a single post on his own platform, Trump triggered a political storm inside Iran.

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This war, if it ends here, will be remembered not for what it destroyed, but for what it failed to change. The Islamic Republic is weaker, but it remains the same regime. At the decisive moment, the campaign changed course. An opening had begun to emerge for the Iranian people. Then it was closed. That may prove to be the war’s central mistake.

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Islamabad talks, at least in their first round, failed. It is still unclear whether there will be another. Iran’s IRGC-affiliated Fars News Agency says Tehran has no plans for a new round of negotiations.

That may be a bluff. We will know soon enough. But even if talks resume, the chances of success remain low. The main reason is simple: the Islamic Republic believes it won the war. As long as that belief holds, serious negotiations will be difficult. A breakthrough would require the United States to lower its demands, and that seems unlikely.

“This war, if it ends here, will be remembered not for what it destroyed, but for what it failed to change.”

That is the outcome. But it was not always the picture.

Less than a month ago, the regime did not look like a power that believed it had won. Until about March 15, it was frightened. It felt exposed. It was under pressure not only militarily, but politically.

Then Trump began speaking about negotiations. At that moment, the administration did more than open the door to talks. It changed the meaning of the war.

That was the central mistake.

A Regime Under Pressure

Until then, the war had seemed to carry a political logic. It was not only a campaign against missile sites and command structures. It also appeared to be creating an opening inside Iran. The pressure on the regime was weakening not just its military capacity, but its grip on society. For a brief period, the war seemed to create conditions in which the Iranian people could act.

Then that opening was closed.

What had looked like a moment of danger for the Islamic Republic became a moment of recovery. What had looked like weakness became survival. And survival, in the regime’s own political language, became victory.

That is why the regime is now celebrating. For the Islamic Republic, survival is enough. It does not need a clear triumph. It only needs to remain standing. Many outside observers seem to accept that same measure. They treat the regime’s continued existence as proof that the United States and Israel failed.

But that outcome was not inevitable. It was the result of a political choice. Halfway through the war, Washington changed course. At the decisive moment, agency was taken away from the Iranian people and handed back to the regime that had created the crisis.

“What had looked like weakness became survival. And survival, in the regime’s own political language, became victory.”

To understand why that matters, it helps to go back to the beginning of the year.

On January 8 and 9, the Islamic Republic faced the largest protest in its history. Millions took to the streets in response to a call from Reza Pahlavi. The regime responded with a massacre. According to some reports, between 30,000 and 40,000 people were killed in the deadliest massacre in modern Iranian history.

That massacre shook Iran. It also helped prepare the ground for the joint U.S.-Israeli military operation that followed.

The Opening

From the start, the operation carried a strong political message. Trump told Iranians that the help he had promised during the protests had arrived. Netanyahu said the campaign would create the conditions for Iranians to take their destiny into their own hands. The idea was not that bombing alone would change Iran. It was that military pressure could create the conditions for the Iranian people to rise up against the regime.

In its early phase, the war followed that logic in practice. The campaign did not focus only on missile sites. It also heavily targeted the IRGC and Basij repression apparatus, the machinery the regime uses to keep society fearful, divided, and under control. Strikes on Tharallah headquarters, police stations, and neighborhood Basij bases hit the very structures that had crushed a nationwide uprising two months earlier.

After many police stations and local IRGC and Basij bases were destroyed or abandoned for fear of attack, regime forces were pushed into the streets and forced to operate from tents. By March 11, strikes had shifted to patrol stations in Tehran and other cities. The public signal seemed clear: the streets were being opened.

Many Iranians had been waiting for that moment.

Throughout the first half of the war, people were repeatedly told to stay home and wait. Many believed the moment would come on Chaharshanbe Suri, the Festival of Fire, a few days before Nowruz. They expected a joint call from Trump and Netanyahu, and many also expected Reza Pahlavi to call for a nationwide protest on March 17, the day of Chaharshanbe Suri.

Sources close to decision-makers in Tel Aviv and Washington told me the plan was shelved because President Trump opposed it.

“The public signal seemed clear: the streets were being opened.”

The same period also saw another idea being dropped: the possible use of Iranian Kurdish armed groups based in Iraqi Kurdistan. At the time, multiple media reports suggested that Washington had sent arms to these groups and was considering using them as the coalition’s ground force inside Iran. That idea was revealing. It showed that the war was being considered not only as a campaign of punishment, but also as one that might produce political change on the ground.

In practice, however, the Kurdish option was always limited. At most, it could plausibly have affected only Iran’s Kurdish regions. It was also certain to trigger immediate controversy among many Iranians, who would have seen it as an effort to facilitate Kurdish secession in western Iran, regardless of its true intentions. Washington and Israel may have wanted Kurdish forces to serve as their ground force towards Tehran. Kurdish actors, however, wanted the United States and Israel as their air force for consolidating control over Kurdish-populated areas in western Iran. Kurdish groups made clear that they would not move beyond those areas. Washington and Israel understood the implications and dropped the idea.

One can argue about how practical this Kurdish option ever was. That does not change the larger point. Its emergence and disappearance coincided with the broader moment when other regime-change options were being explored and then dropped.

“Washington and Israel wanted a ground force for Tehran. Kurdish actors wanted an air force for western Iran.”

But shelving those options was not the only problem. Ambiguity was another. Before the war, Trump’s contradictory messaging may have helped keep the Islamic Republic off balance. Once the war began, however, that same ambiguity became a liability. No one knew what outcome Trump actually wanted, what he would accept, or where he intended to stop.

That uncertainty may have had some external advantages. It may have helped calm markets, limit oil shocks, and preserve room for de-escalation. But inside Iran, it encouraged hesitation. As long as regime insiders believed the campaign might still stop short of a decisive outcome, defections were less likely. Political figures, military actors, and ordinary citizens could not be sure that American pressure would last long enough, or go far enough, to make the risks of taking a side worthwhile.

“Before the war, Trump’s contradictory messaging may have helped keep the Islamic Republic off balance. Once the war began, however, that same ambiguity became a liability.”

Then Trump began speaking about negotiations with what he called the “new regime”. We do not know whether the Islamic Republic offered talks or whether the United States proposed them. Either way, the effect was the same. The regime, already alert to the possibility of political change, drew a simple conclusion: Washington had decided it could not win the war and was looking for a way out.

The Reversal

That reading changed the atmosphere at once.

Until then, Iran’s state television had been broadcasting direct threats. Night after night, it warned that anyone who came into the streets would be killed. Parents were told that if they let their children join protests, they would have to search for their bodies in morgues. After Trump began entertaining negotiations, those broadcasts stopped.

Soon after, Israeli strikes on neighborhood Basij bases and patrol stations also stopped. I understand that this, too, happened at the request of the White House.

This was the turning point. The war ceased to be about opening political space and became, instead, an effort to preserve enough of the regime to manage the endgame.

The change was visible in the treatment of the political elite as well. After the killing of Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, on March 17, no other political figure was targeted. Instead, names such as Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament, began to circulate as possible counterparts for negotiation.

That is why talk of a “new regime,” as if regime change had already happened, is misleading. More than 50 senior IRGC commanders were killed during the war, but the regime’s political heart survived. Only two figures from the top political tier were gone: the Supreme Leader and Ali Larijani.

The Islamic Republic is not merely a set of military assets. It is a political order held together by an ideological core of men, networks, and institutions. Damage that leaves that core intact is not transformation. It is attrition. In the end, Washington gave the regime what it needed most: the chance to survive, and therefore to claim victory.

Attrition, Not Transformation

I have argued before that this war was part of a coercive sequence: terms, then pressure, then a pause before renewed demands. That may still be the case. The ceasefire may yet prove to be only one step in that sequence. But it is also increasingly possible that the war ends here. If it does, the campaign cannot be called a success.

“The Islamic Republic is not merely a set of military assets. It is a political order held together by an ideological core of men, networks, and institutions.”

The reason is simple. The regime’s apparent resilience was not an accident. It was the survival strategy it had prepared all along. The Islamic Republic never believed it could defeat the United States in war. Its aim was to endure long enough for the United States to stop. If the war ends here, the regime will conclude that this strategy worked. It will study that lesson and build on it.

The regime’s broader deterrence strategy did fail. Its proxies and its nuclear and missile programs did not prevent war. But if the war ends here, it will still conclude that escalation worked as leverage, especially through the threat centered on the Strait of Hormuz. As long as the Islamic Republic survives, and as long as oil moving through the Strait remains vital to the global economy, it will continue to use that pressure point.

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For the same reason, ideas such as an oil blockade of Iran should be treated with caution. If Iran’s oil exports are fully blocked, the Islamic Republic is unlikely to allow others to move oil freely through the Strait of Hormuz. It will not easily abandon a strategy it believes has worked.

What Comes Next

None of this means the regime has emerged strong. It has not. Even if the war ends now, the Islamic Republic will still face deep problems. The economy will remain under severe pressure. Succession in wartime, combined with social unrest, political unrest, and a deeply hostile population, will add to the strain. So the regime may survive the war and still fail to survive the consequences of its own survival.

But that is also the point. If the United States and Israel stop here, they will have given up a rare chance to produce meaningful change in Iran. Many Iranians supported this war because they believed it might open a path for action. Instead, Washington chose to engage elements of the regime rather than activate Iranian society.

The result is a regime that is weaker, but not transformed. It will try to rebuild, reassert control, and secure a stronger shield. Deal or no deal, whatever its terms, once politics shift in Washington after Trump leaves office, the Islamic Republic will return to its familiar strategy and revive its nuclear and missile programs.

For the Iranian people, who briefly believed that history might reopen, the conclusion is bitter: once again, their role has been suspended, and the fate of their country has been handed back to the very structure that brought it to ruin.

One final possibility should also be considered. Washington may not simply have chosen to stop. It may have been constrained. If that is true, the implications are even more serious. The lesson of this war would then be not only that a political opening in Iran was closed. It would also be that the United States may no longer be able to deal kinetically with regimes like the Islamic Republic in the way it once could.

“For the Iranian people, who briefly believed that history might reopen, the conclusion is bitter: once again, their role has been suspended, and the fate of their country has been handed back to the very structure that brought it to ruin.”

Beijing and Moscow would read that lesson carefully. They would see not only American caution, but possible limits on American power. The consequences would reach far beyond Iran. It would not only embolden the Islamic Republic. It would embolden China and Russia as well.

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It is not a secret. Listen to IRGC-affiliated analysts over the past year, and you hear the same names again and again. JD Vance. Tucker Carlson. Marjorie Taylor Greene. In their world, these are not just American politicians or media figures. They are signs. They are clues to the internal struggle in Washington. They are proof, or what passes for proof in Tehran, that not everyone in America wanted war with Iran.

Take Mehdi Kharratian. He presents himself as an independent analyst and the founder of the “Institute for Revival of Politics.” He also happens to be the son of Rear Admiral Ali Akbar Kharratian, deputy commander for joint operations of the IRGC Navy. He is obsessed with JD Vance. So are many others like him.

Much of what they say is conspiracy theory and not worth quoting. But one point matters. They believe that if the Islamic Republic had negotiated with JD Vance instead of Steve Witkoff, the war might not have happened. That belief is important, whether or not it is true. It tells us how they read Washington. They think this administration is divided on Iran. They think one camp pushed the United States into war and won. They think another camp wanted restraint and lost. In their minds, Vance belongs to that second camp.

Whether Tehran chose who should speak to it, or whether the administration made that choice on its own, is beside the point. What matters is that Tehran thinks Vance is the better channel.

To be honest, I think it is a good thing that he will be in the room in Islamabad. Let him see it for himself. Let him hear the tone. Let him watch the method. The Islamic Republic is one of those subjects on which Western politicians arrive with theories and leave with experience.

“What matters is that Tehran thinks Vance is the better channel.”

The belief that “I know how to deal with Iran” has haunted the White House for decades. Every administration comes in thinking the last one failed because it did not understand the regime. Every new team thinks it has finally found the right language, the right balance, the right people, the right opening. Every one of them learns the same lesson the hard way. The problem is never just the method. The problem is the nature of the Islamic Republic itself.

Iran may never again find an American negotiator more sympathetic to “understanding” it than Rob Malley. We all saw how successful that turned out to be. Now Tehran thinks it has found another favorable figure in Vance. We do not know every internal detail of the administration, but it is no secret that Vance, if not opposed to war altogether, has at least seemed less eager for it than others in Trump’s circle.

Perhaps Trump has now decided to send him to speak face-to-face with the Islamic Republic and learn the reality firsthand. If so, that may prove useful for Trump as much as for Vance.

I myself hope he speaks with Mahmoud Nabavian. Nabavian was one of the harshest critics of the JCPOA in parliament. Any conversation between Vance and Nabavian, to borrow Trump’s language, would be beautiful. It would be clarifying. It would be one of those meetings in which illusions die quickly. And that may be exactly what Trump needs. Sending Vance to these talks may be one of the few ways to bring his own administration to a more unified understanding of Iran.

These talks should not be underestimated. They are unusual by the standards of the past twenty years of nuclear diplomacy.

“The Islamic Republic is one of those subjects on which Western politicians often arrive with theories and leave with experience.”

Iran has never sent a delegation quite like this one. In earlier rounds, the Americans sat across from men such as Javad Zarif, Majid Takht Ravanchi, Abbas Araghchi, and others like them. They were regime men, of course. But they spoke the language of diplomacy. They knew how to flatter Western assumptions. They knew how to sound reasonable, technical, patient, and misunderstood. They knew how to let outsiders imagine that the problem was mistrust or tone.

This delegation is different.

Now you see men like Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Mahmoud Panahian, and Ali Akbar Ahmadian. This team was not assembled to charm Washington. It was assembled to project ideological and political toughness. It is a delegation shaped by war.

Tehran is signaling that it believes it holds the upper hand.

By first publicly denying participation, then delaying its arrival, and attaching conditions such as Lebanon’s inclusion and the unfreezing of assets, Tehran has sought to cast doubt on any impression of urgency. It does not want to look like the side that needs a deal. The message is simple: you may have struck us, but you still came looking for talks. In Tehran’s view, diplomacy is worth pursuing, but only from a position of strength.

So let us think through the possible outcomes.

If a deal is reached

If a deal is reached, it should certainly include meaningful sanctions relief. That would create an immediate political problem for Trump. He spent years attacking Obama for giving the Islamic Republic pallets of cash. A deal that delivers major financial relief to Tehran will revive the same criticism, and not only from Democrats or from hawks outside his coalition. It will revive it inside his own political world.

There is also the domestic balance inside Iran. Ali Khamenei is dead. Mojtaba Khamenei has succeeded him, but he has not yet fully consolidated power. After a fierce war, the IRGC dominates the political field. If a deal is reached and sanctions relief follows, the balance inside the system will shift even further toward the hard security state.

The regional effect would be just as serious. The Islamic Republic would not read a deal as the end of confrontation. It would read it as proof that confrontation worked. Countries such as the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain would face a regime that had survived war, secured sanctions relief, and emerged claiming vindication. That will make the Islamic Republic more assertive and more confident in projecting power.

That is the central point. If the final result of the war is a deal with major sanctions relief, then the war will have given Iran what it could hardly have achieved in peacetime. It will have turned military punishment into political recovery. That is not the legacy Trump is likely to want.

Israel, needless to say, would oppose such an outcome fiercely.

If no deal is reached

The war did not topple the regime, but it did produce massive destruction. The true scale of the damage will take time to measure, but it is easily above one hundred billion dollars.

The Islamic Republic will suffer badly under those conditions. Its economy was already under crushing sanctions. Without a deal, it will keep bleeding from both the sanctions and the legacy of a war that destroyed, in forty days, what it had built over forty years. It will also face a hostile population, poorer than before, and more prone to unrest and uprisings.

This outcome could still look more favorable for the United States and Israel than a deal that the regime would accept. The war has sharply reduced Iran’s missile stockpile. Its nuclear program is in no condition to resume at speed. Its proxies are badly degraded. Its infrastructure is damaged enough to slow any serious rebuilding of military capacity. And without air defense, Iran remains exposed to future Israeli strikes.

The one major problem is still the Strait of Hormuz. Without a deal, Iran is unlikely to reopen it fully. That is why “no deal” is not a stable resting point. It may look more attractive in Washington in the short run, but it carries strategic costs that will not remain local for long.

If no deal is reached and bombing starts again

The Islamic Republic is unlikely to break if the second war is simply a continuation of the first. If the United States returns, it will have to return with overwhelming force. At that point, the question is no longer military in the narrow sense. It becomes political. Is the aim to topple the regime, or is it to alter the internal balance of power within the regime?

Those are not the same thing.

Toppling the regime would require a far greater effort than this administration is likely willing to undertake, including the deployment of at least 100,000 ground troops. That is the hard truth beneath much of the loose talk about regime change. It is easy to say the words. It is much harder to define the means, the cost, the duration, and the political order that would follow.

The other option is to stop thinking about bombing infrastructure, as Trump keeps emphasizing, and start thinking about the political structure itself.

The Islamic Republic is not a mass movement. It is not held together by the consent of its population. It is held together by a relatively narrow circle of men, perhaps a hundred, perhaps fewer, who have rotated through offices, ministries, and commands since 1979. They have never truly shared power. They have only passed it among themselves. A younger generation of Iranian elites exists, but this older core has systematically blocked any real transfer of authority outward or downward.

Since February 28, Ali Khamenei and Ali Larijani are gone. But the removal of two figures, however significant, has not changed the behavior of the system. The men who remain still share the same ideological convictions and the same revolutionary goals. As long as that cohort lives, pressure on infrastructure will bring destruction and misery to the country, but not political transformation.

The honest conclusion, then, is uncomfortable: meaningful strategic change requires dismantling this core, not symbolically but completely.

Only once that work is done can negotiation become meaningfully productive. Perhaps then Vance will find something real on the other side of the table. Until then, the talks, whatever form they take, are likely to remain what they have always been: a process that buys time for a regime that has always known how to use it better than its adversaries.

Conclusion

We do not know how these negotiations will end. But one outcome is already clear: let Vance sit across from this delegation. Let him hear them. Let him watch how they negotiate, delay, and frame strength. Let him see how they use diplomacy as an extension of conflict rather than an escape from it. No briefing paper will teach that lesson better.

And if that lesson is learned, even failed talks may still produce one useful result: clarity.

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More than a month into the war that began on February 28, the Islamic Republic has moved from failed deterrence to a strategy that now threatens Iran’s survival as a state.

President Trump’s threat to strike Iran’s power plants and bridges if the Strait of Hormuz is not reopened shows how badly the Islamic Republic’s deterrence strategy has failed. It was supposed to prevent war. Instead, it is now putting Iran at risk of state failure.

From Failed Deterrence to State Failure

For more than two decades, the Islamic Republic spent huge national resources on three pillars of deterrence: the nuclear program, the missile program, and a network of regional proxies. The goal was simple. It wanted to make the cost of attacking Iran so high that no major military campaign would be launched against it.

The economic cost of this strategy was enormous. It is hard to measure it exactly. One study estimates that sanctions alone cost Iran about $1.2 trillion between 2011 and 2022. Other public estimates have put the broader long-term cost of Iran’s nuclear path at around $2 trillion or more. For a country like Iran, that is a huge price to pay.

The 12-day war of June 2025 showed the weakness of that strategy. Missiles, proxies, and Iran’s nuclear threshold status did not stop the attack. They did not protect Iran once the fighting began either. Most importantly, the nuclear program, which the regime had long presented as its ultimate shield, became a reason for attack rather than a source of protection.

After the 12-day war, the regime turned to a second form of deterrence. This one relied on geography and economics. Tehran made clear that if another war began, it would widen the conflict. It would target infrastructure in the Persian Gulf region and threaten the waterways, energy routes, and trade on which both the region and the wider world depend. The Islamic Republic followed through on that promise after the current war started. The message was clear: if Iran could not stop pressure directly, it would spread the cost across the Persian Gulf and beyond.

That strategy is also backfiring. Once infrastructure becomes a tool of pressure, it also becomes a target. The same power plants that serve civilian homes also supply military sites, underground facilities, and what the regime calls its missile cities. By attacking the infrastructure of others, the Islamic Republic is putting Iran’s own infrastructure in the line of fire. Trump’s threat shows where this logic can lead.

This is the state eating itself. By weaponizing the Strait of Hormuz and the economic life of the Persian Gulf, the regime is not only endangering others. It is also damaging its own oil income and burning the goodwill of the few states that might still prefer a diplomatic way out. A strategy presented as deterrence is consuming the conditions of Iran’s own survival.

Nezam Against Vatan

For years, the Persian Gulf countries helped Iran’s sanctions-busting system work. They provided the financial, commercial, and logistical channels that enabled Tehran to survive sanctions, pressure, and isolation. But when the current war began, the Islamic Republic was willing to put that same system at risk. The number of missiles and drones launched at Persian Gulf countries, compared with those launched at Israel, made that clear. This was not just spillover from the war. It was part of the regime’s logic of violence. The channels that helped the Islamic Republic survive sanctions also helped sustain the missile and drone production it now uses to threaten the region. The countries that enabled that system are now exposed to its consequences.

Now the wider region is experiencing what the Iranian people have endured for nearly half a century. At home, the regime kills at scale. Abroad, it spreads fear and destruction at scale. In both cases, the aim is the same: to preserve the system through violence. In January 2026, the regime killed thousands of its own citizens in a nationwide crackdown. Now, by widening the war and normalizing attacks on infrastructure, it is exposing those same citizens to the risk of retaliation from outside. A system that wages one war against external enemies and another against its own people cannot credibly claim to protect the nation.

That is why the distinction between Iran and the Islamic Republic matters. Iran needs stability, trade, investment, and a workable regional environment. The Islamic Republic has chosen something narrower: regime survival through coercion. The deterrent was built to save the Nezam. It is now helping destroy the Vatan.

The survival of the system has been decoupled from the survival of Iran as a country.

That is the real measure of failure. The regime spent national wealth on a first deterrence strategy that failed and backfired. It then turned to geography and economics as a second deterrence strategy, and that too is backfiring. The result is not security. It is a regime trying to save itself in ways that could destroy Iran as a state.

Javad Zarif’s recent article in Foreign Affairs matters. But not for the reason he intends.

Zarif presents himself as the man offering a way out of the war. He argues that Iran should accept limits on its nuclear program, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, restore oil sales, rebuild economic ties, and sign a permanent nonaggression pact with the US. On paper, this looks like a diplomatic opening. In reality, it looks like a late signal from a system under pressure that still does not understand how much the strategic ground has changed.

In a leaked message he sent just days after the war began, Zarif made clear that he was not speaking from the center of power. He said nobody from the foreign ministry had even called him. He said any proposal from him was pointless. He said he was ready to take what he called a suicide mission by putting a deal on the table anyway, knowing the attacks it would bring him at home. He also argued that symbolic gestures could defuse the crisis and that Trump wanted an honorable exit and had no patience for lengthy, detailed plans.

Anyone who knows Zarif and knows the structure of the Islamic Republic would understand that a piece like this does not appear in Foreign Affairs without at least some blessing from inside the system. So the article should not be read as the private fantasy of a retired diplomat. It is better read as a signal that, despite all the hard talk, parts of the regime now want to talk. But it is also a signal that those same people still do not understand the moment they are in.

The negotiations timeline makes the problem plain. Nearly a year ago, Trump opened talks with the Islamic Republic. We now know what he wanted: full dismantling of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, real limits on its missile program, the effective end of its proxy network, and an end to its hostility toward Israel. The regime refused. Then came the 12-day war. Trump stopped it and gave them another chance. A few months later, negotiations resumed. The demands had not changed. Nor had Tehran’s answer. So the US and Israel attacked again. Now Zarif returns with what is, in substance, the old Iranian formula: the Islamic Republic keeps its core capabilities, offers partial nuclear limits, and asks for relief in return.

From the Trump and Netanyahu point of view, this is not a serious bargain. It is a bad deal. Tehran would gain relief, time, and legitimacy while the deeper structure of the conflict remained in place.

Zarif writes from another age. His article reflects the old habits of the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy. But the region after October 7 is not the region of the JCPOA years. And the people now facing Tehran are not Obama and Kerry. They are Trump and Rubio. Israel’s view of the Iranian threat has changed in a basic way. Washington’s tolerance for Tehran’s nuclear and missile programs and its regional model has narrowed sharply. The old language of face-saving diplomacy no longer fits the battlefield or the politics around it.

That same failure appears in Zarif’s reading of Trump. In the leaked message, he says Trump needs an honorable exit and lacks patience for complex and detailed plans. This is a familiar mistake in Washington and in the U.S. media. I hear that a university professor in Washington contributed heavily to Zarif’s article. That matters because Zarif’s reading of Trump does not come from him alone. It reflects the same short-sighted view that has shaped much of the American media and political ecosystem for years. They portrayed Trump as vain, impatient, and easy to flatter. They said he opposed Obama’s Iran deal only because Obama made it. They said he would accept an even weaker deal if Iran only gave him a photo opportunity. That argument was repeated again and again. It was always shallow. Trump’s focus on the Islamic Republic has been far more consistent than they understood. The same is true of the people around him. Anyone who followed Marco Rubio’s past remarks on the Islamic Republic should have known that this administration was not looking for symbolism. It was looking for rollback.

Zarif wanted his article to sound like strategy. It reads instead like an outdated response from a political class that still has not understood how much the ground has moved beneath it. Those praising it or taking it seriously are making the same mistake.

If you have read Javad Zarif’s recent Foreign Affairs article, you may be interested in this leaked message, which he sent to an insider circle of Iranian analysts in the early days of the war, just a few days after it began. The message is revealing not only because it is more candid than his later public writing, but also because it shows how he seems to have understood Trump.

Zarif appears to believe that Trump could still be managed through symbolic gestures and a face-saving offer. He writes that war could have been avoided if Trump had been given a proposal he “could not reject,” and says Trump should be offered an “honorable exit.”

Read in that light, the message is striking not only for its harder line, including calls to hit American and Israeli targets and his claim that the UAE is essentially Israel, but also for its stranger passages. Zarif refers to a Chinese prediction of Trump’s defeat, speaks of the “quantum” effects of divine help, recommends repeated recitation of the call to prayer, and repeats a bizarre claim about Trump and Netanyahu sacrificing 200 girls in an Epstein-like manner.

The full text of Javad Zarif’s leaked message follows, along with screenshots of the original Persian message.

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Hi. You and the other friends in this group are all people of judgment and considered opinion. In order to prevent war, I submitted a proposal for several symbolic measures that could give Trump a sense of victory, along with a text that was highly dignified for Iran. But it was not even reviewed, nor did anyone ask for any explanation. In one sentence, before the war, we simply had to accept one proposition: “War is certain unless a proposal is given to Trump that he cannot reject.”

I even said that I was ready, in what would have been a suicidal move, to publish it together with people such as Davutoğlu, Richard Falk, and Amorim (the former foreign minister of Brazil). They had agreed. But until after the announcement of the martyrdom of the Leader, they gave no response.

You may not believe it, but from the day the war began until today, not even a single call has come from my former colleagues in the Foreign Ministry. Therefore, any proposal from me is pointless.

But if you still have influence somewhere, then this is what should be done:

1. For now, we should focus on striking American and Israeli targets. Causing damage to American naval vessels and to the vital interests and wicked leaders of Israel is necessary. Seriously, we should pray for the realization of the prediction of Trump’s defeat (by a Chinese prognosticator). I believe that divine assistance has situational (“quantum”) effects. At the suggestion of one of the awtad, the call to prayer should be recited repeatedly so that the satanic games of Trump and Netanyahu, which, according to what he said, they began by sacrificing 200 little girls (in the Epstein manner) in order to achieve their vile aims, may be nullified.

2. As far as possible, we should refrain from striking the region itself.

We should focus on destroying the bridge between Saudi Arabia and Bahrain (in order to create real deterrence against actual wrongdoing in the islands) and on striking the UAE (despite all the losses this would entail for Iran). The UAE means Israel.

3. We should not reject proposals for mediation.

4. We should provide Trump with an honorable exit.

5. After two catastrophic experiences, let us finally accept that even before the 12-day war, no plan focused solely on the nuclear issue was feasible, and none will be.

6. We should pay attention to symbolic measures.

7. Trump has no patience for long and technical plans.

8. Although after the martyrdom of Hazrete Agha (the Supreme Leader), even saying these words is agonizing for me, the only thing that can calm Trump is a formal announcement of the end of the 47-year hostility between Iran, America, and its allies.

9. And finally, more important than any other measure is attention to the people. We should avoid actions that anger any segment of the people. We should win the people’s hearts.

Much of the commentary on Iran today is driven by battlefield metrics: missiles and drones launched, US bases attacked, and parts of the so-called Axis of Resistance still operating. These indicators matter, but they capture only the visible movement of the war. To borrow a term from the markets, they amount to a kind of technical analysis. What is missing is a more fundamental analysis of the setting in which this war is unfolding: the setbacks the Islamic Republic has suffered, the political ground it has lost, and the conditions under which it is now fighting. No serious investor would judge a company by price movements alone while ignoring the balance sheet.

This war did not strike the Islamic Republic in a vacuum. It struck a regime already burdened by a series of major setbacks over the past three years. The joint US-Israeli attack became possible only after those earlier setbacks changed the landscape.

The Islamic Republic is known for its resilience. From its earliest years, it has survived assassinations, coup attempts, eight years of war with Iraq, crippling sanctions, and repeated nationwide uprisings. Over the decades, analysts and opposition figures have often said that the regime was nearing collapse. Yet nearly half a century later, it is still in power.

Now it is in direct confrontation with the world’s most formidable military power, the United States, and the region’s strongest army, Israel. After a month of intense bombing, after the loss of the Supreme Leader and more than three dozen senior political and military commanders, it is still able to fire missiles at Israel, at US bases in the region, and at infrastructure across more than a dozen countries.

So why should this time be different? This bombing campaign may be one of the largest in modern history. But why should the regime not survive it, as it has survived so many earlier shocks? The Islamic Republic says it is winning the war. What if it is right?

Maybe it is. Maybe it is not. History will deliver its answer soon enough. This is not an attempt to prove that the Islamic Republic must collapse under heavy bombing. Regimes do not always fall because the force used against them is overwhelming. Some survive extreme pressure for far longer than expected. But sometimes the force that breaks a system needs to arrive only after the structure has already been weakened. Even a feather can break a camel’s back.

That is the argument here.

Over the past three years, the Islamic Republic has suffered at least five major defeats. Each of them, on its own, would have deeply damaged any political system. That does not necessarily mean immediate collapse. It means the accelerating erosion of the regime’s authority. More precisely, it means the weakening of several powerful narratives through which the regime explains and justifies itself, projects strength, produces obedience, organizes fear, and makes its rule seem durable and inevitable.

Together, these narratives form the metanarrative that has kept the Islamic Republic alive. Each of these defeats marked the fall of one of the narratives on which its rule depends.

1) The Fall of Compulsory Hijab

On 16 September 2022, a 22-year-old woman died in custody in Tehran after being arrested by the morality police, allegedly for violating the Islamic dress code.

For decades, the Guidance Patrol was a routine presence on Iranian streets. At major junctions, Basij members and morality police officers stopped passers-by and detained women judged to be improperly veiled. A few visible strands of hair could bring a warning. Bright colors could attract scrutiny. Defiance could lead to arrest. For millions of Iranians, this was not an abstract law. It was a daily system of humiliation and coercion.

Official figures are rarely published, so even scattered numbers are revealing. In the first three months of 2007 alone, the Guidance Patrol reported issuing formal warnings to more than 430,000 women. A 2022 survey by Iran Open Data found that 71 percent of female respondents and 62 percent of male respondents said that at least one member of their family had been confronted by the morality police or other authorities over hijab.

Mahsa Amini’s death triggered nationwide outrage. The uprising that followed, under the slogan “Women, Life, Freedom”, shook the regime at its ideological core. At least 551 protesters were confirmed killed by state security forces during the 2022–2023 uprising. Yet for all the violence, the state was forced onto the defensive. “Women, Life, Freedom” became the first popular uprising in the Islamic Republic’s history to force the regime into retreat. One retreat was enough. When a regime builds its identity around a visible social order, and the public abandons that order without the state being able to restore it, the result is more than a policy failure. It amounts to a form of soft collapse.

That was a major victory for Iranian women and a major defeat for the regime. After 2023, Ali Khamenei, who was killed in a US-Israeli air strike on 28 February, publicly criticized the authorities more than once for failing to restore compulsory hijab. But the barrier had already been broken, and the regime never managed to restore the old order. Today, compulsory hijab remains on the books, but it no longer exists in the form it once did. What was once a state mandate has become a daily act of civil disobedience.

For the Islamic Republic, hijab was never just a law. It was an ideological Berlin Wall: a visible social order through which the regime controlled women and asserted its authority over everyday life. When that wall fell, the regime’s ability to impose itself in the street and across society was weakened, and its credibility was diminished. The Islamic Republic used to declare that “hijab is the legacy of hundreds of thousands of martyrs”. Its narrative was that Iranian society was devoutly Muslim and stood behind the Islamic order. That narrative cracked in the most visible place possible: the daily lives of ordinary people. Every unveiled woman became living evidence against one of the regime’s most powerful claims.

2) The Fall of the Axis of Resistance

The loss of Syria, the killing of Hassan Nasrallah in 2024, and the severe weakening of Hezbollah and other proxy forces shook one of the central pillars of the regime’s regional narrative.

For years, the Islamic Republic spoke of control over four Arab capitals, of a Shia crescent, and of strategic depth. It presented itself as a power on the march. The regional project was not simply military. It was also psychological and political. It was meant to show that the regime was expanding, advancing, and shaping the region around itself.

When Iranians protested against dire economic conditions caused in large part by sanctions linked to the regime’s nuclear policy and broader foreign policy, the answer was simple: this was the price of independence. Ali Khamenei repeatedly said that Iran was close to the summit, that the hardships were merely part of the climb, and that victory was near. Iran’s regional presence was presented as proof. The message was constant: if we do not fight in Beirut, Homs, and Hama, we will have to fight in Tehran.

When Assad fell, when Syria was lost, and when the proxies took crippling blows, that image began to collapse. What had been presented as strategic depth looked increasingly like an expensive illusion. What had been sold as a durable architecture of power looked far more fragile than it had claimed.

What happened in Syria brings to mind the Soviet Union’s defeat in Afghanistan. It was a costly external project meant to symbolize power, but instead exposed deep structural weakness. The damage did not remain on the battlefield. It traveled back into the system itself. Some historians trace the roots of the Soviet Union’s collapse to its defeat in Afghanistan. Syria was the Islamic Republic’s Afghanistan moment. In moments like this, defeat is not just an event. It is a message to society, to elites, and to the regime’s own rank and file that the ceiling is lower than they had been told it was.

3) The Fall of Invincibility

Israel’s attack in June 2025 exposed the gap between propaganda and reality. So did the collapse of the air-defense myth, the damage to the missile program, and the bombing of nuclear facilities meant to underpin the regime’s sense of strategic security and deterrence.

For years, Ali Khamenei and his IRGC commanders boasted about indigenous air-defense systems such as Khordad-15, Bavar-373, and Sevom Khordad. They told Iranians that even the most sophisticated US and Israeli aircraft could not operate over Iran. Billions were spent developing these systems and building an image of invulnerability. That myth collapsed on first contact with reality when the 12-day war began. A large number of Iran’s senior military commanders did not even realize the war had started. They were killed in their beds in the opening moments of the attack.

The 12-day war shattered the regime’s image of competence, control, and strength for millions of Iranians. Much of the population that opposed the regime saw it humiliated. For many Iranians, Iran and the Islamic Republic are not the same thing. The regime’s humiliation was therefore not experienced as a national humiliation. Many were openly pleased to see it struck so hard. At the same time, parts of its own support base were stunned to see Israeli bombers operate over Iran with such ease.

The Islamic Republic had always presented itself as the guardian of national security, so the defeat did not remain confined to the military sphere. It spilled into the political system. After the 12-day war, the Islamic Republic lost credibility on a significant scale, including among parts of its own support base. Months later came an unprecedented uprising, followed by an unprecedented massacre.

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4) The Rise of a Visible Alternative

For 47 years, one of the Islamic Republic’s central political and security objectives has been to prevent any serious alternative from taking shape. The aim was to fix one idea in the public mind: that there is no future outside the Islamic Republic. This was not simply a political claim. It was one of the central narratives through which the regime sustained its rule.

To protect that narrative, the regime assassinated dissidents inside and outside the country. It prosecuted, imprisoned, and in many cases executed activists, journalists, students, and lawyers. It never allowed meaningful competition within the electoral system and tolerated no political activity beyond its own loyalists. It also ran sustained campaigns to discredit dissidents and destroy their public standing through propaganda and falsehoods. Arguably, the largest such campaign in post-revolutionary Iran has been directed at Reza Pahlavi. Over the past 47 years, the regime has deployed a vast propaganda apparatus to shape public memory of the Pahlavi era. Through books, documentaries, television series, textbooks, and curricula from primary school to university, it has portrayed that period as corrupt, repressive, incompetent, and subservient to the West.

Despite this, his name has continued to be heard in protests over the years. That trend reached a new peak when he called for demonstrations on 8 and 9 January, and large numbers answered. The rise of Reza Pahlavi as a visible political alternative, with a strong social base inside the country, strikes directly at the narrative of no alternative. Whether one sees him as the answer is not the main point here. The point is that the regime’s monopoly over the future has been broken. The idea that there is no credible political horizon outside the Islamic Republic no longer carries the same force.

Regimes do not survive only by controlling the present. They also survive by shaping the future. Once that narrative weakens, something profound begins to shift.

5) The largest mass killing in contemporary history

The events of 8 and 9 January 2026 marked a decisive shift in Iran’s political landscape. They followed a nationwide call for protest by Reza Pahlavi in a video message that reached tens of millions. In Tehran, an estimated 1.5 million people took to the streets, while major strikes paralyzed the Grand Bazaar and other commercial centers. Similar scenes were repeated in more than 400 cities, with total participation reaching around 5 million.

The state responded with what has been described as the deadliest crackdown in the history of the Islamic Republic. Reports by Iran International said security forces, including the IRGC and regional proxy forces, used lethal force that killed around 36,500 people in forty-eight hours. What followed became known as the January Massacre.

The scale of the violence shattered another narrative on which the regime had long depended: the narrative, sold both at home and abroad, that the Islamic Republic still ruled with some measure of public consent. A state that still commands genuine consent does not need to kill on such a scale to clear the streets. And crowds do not reach this level of sacrifice if fear is still doing its work. Mass killing on this scale means that tens of thousands were prepared to remain in the streets despite tear gas, gunfire, and death. It means fear had begun to break.

That was the deeper political meaning of the January Massacre. The regime managed to end the protests, but only at the cost of exposing itself more nakedly than ever before. For many Iranians, it no longer appeared as a state that governed, but as a machine of survival operating through brute terror. Economic and social grievances hardened into something more existential: a growing conviction that the Islamic Republic’s survival was incompatible with their own future. For the first time, a wide cross-section of society rallied openly behind the exiled monarchy.

The regime, for its part, described the protests as a foreign-backed coup. That claim, together with the scale of the killings and the visible weakening of the state’s internal machinery, helped create the conditions for external intervention. The coordinated military campaign by the United States and Israel was presented by the opposition as a humanitarian necessity aimed at dismantling the apparatus of terror. In that sense, the events of early January did not simply deepen the regime’s internal crisis. They helped destroy the narrative that the Islamic Republic still ruled by consent, and showed that even fear itself was beginning to fail.

The Last Feather

It was against this backdrop that the Israeli-US military operation began on 28 February. The scale of the damage is now impossible to ignore. The bombing campaign has degraded the Islamic Republic across multiple levels: from its nuclear and missile programs to the core of its coercive apparatus, down to the local Basij and police stations. The Supreme Leader is dead. More than fifty senior IRGC commanders have been killed, along with influential figures such as Ali Larijani.

If the war ends without the immediate fall of the regime, many will label it a defeat for the United States and Israel. But battlefield metrics are a poor measure of political reality. Mojtaba Khamenei would be a weak successor inheriting the ruins of the system his father led for thirty-seven years. The economy is in dire condition. Sanctions will not disappear.

Political systems do not always collapse during war. Often, they collapse in the aftermath, when military failure gives way to succession crises, elite fracture, and a society no longer willing to live as before.

The question is no longer whether the Islamic Republic survives this war. It is whether it can survive its own survival.

The structure has been hollowed out; now it is only a matter of which feather finally breaks the back.

The Misreading of the War

In recent weeks, much of the media commentary on the Iran war has followed the same line. Trump, we are told, entered the conflict without a strategy. His goals are unclear. The Islamic Republic is still functioning. It is still firing missiles. Its leaders are still speaking in the language of defiance. Therefore, the argument goes, the United States must be failing. Much of the commentary has described the war as lacking a plan, marked by confusion over its aims, and driven by shifting goals. Some have gone further, arguing that even an American victory over Iran would be bad for the United States and for the wider world.

This reading is wrong. The war is not the absence of strategy. It is coercive diplomacy: terms first, pressure second, pause third, then renewed pressure from a stronger position.

To judge the war only by missile launches, angry speeches, and the continued movement of a battered regime is to miss the larger picture. What critics call a war without a strategy is, in fact, an attempt to end twenty years of failed policy.

The Logic of Coercion

For two decades, Washington tried different ways to stop the Islamic Republic’s nuclear advance. Some administrations leaned more on sanctions. Others leaned more on diplomacy. Some tried both. Yet through all of it, the Islamic Republic moved from zero enrichment to 60 percent. By June 2025, the IAEA said Iran had 440.9 kilograms of uranium enriched to that level, enough for multiple nuclear bombs if enriched further. At the same time, the IRGC’s missile stockpile grew, its range and destructive power increased, and those capabilities spread to proxies from Lebanon to Iraq and Yemen. That was the result of the old approach.

The war has costs for the United States, politically and financially. But inaction was costlier. Washington began negotiating with Iran when enrichment was at 3 to 5 percent. It was still negotiating two decades later, after that level had reached 60 percent. By then, from a technical point of view, reaching weapons-grade material was no longer a scientific hurdle. It was a political decision. For years, diplomacy was politically and financially preferable to war. But there was no longer another twenty-year window. Iran was a nuclear-threshold state, shielded by a large missile arsenal and aligned with China and Russia. And Iran is not North Korea. It sits in the middle of the world’s most strategic region, close to major energy routes, trade corridors, and American allies. Its weaponisation would have carried far wider consequences. The price the United States is paying now is heavy. But it is still far less than the political, economic, and geopolitical price it would have paid for allowing the Islamic Republic to harden into an entrenched nuclear-threshold power.

The war has costs for the United States. But inaction was costlier.

Trump’s answer was different. He was no longer trying to manage the problem or secure another temporary arrangement. After returning to office in January 2025, he demanded rollback: an end to enrichment, limits on the missile programme, and the dismantling of the proxy network through which the Islamic Republic had built regional power. Tehran refused, as it had through two decades of diplomacy and negotiation. The result was a shift from bargaining to attrition. The regime began to lose, by force, the very instruments through which it had built deterrence and projected power. In that sense, coercion was producing the rollback that diplomacy had failed to secure.

The 12-day war began in June 2025, after diplomacy failed and Israel struck the Islamic Republic’s nuclear and military infrastructure. The attack came at the end of a two-month negotiating window set by Trump. It marked the shift from coercive diplomacy to open war.

Trump stopped the war after twelve days. That pause, too, was part of the strategy. The June war did not target the political leadership. It was meant to shock the regime and force a choice, while giving its political leaders time to assess the damage and decide whether saving the system now required giving up some of its strategic assets.

That did not happen. A few months later, negotiations resumed, but within the same coercive framework. They were not a fresh search for compromise. They were another attempt to force acceptance of the same core demands.

Ali Khamenei rejected those terms again and was killed in the opening moments of the second war. This followed the same logic. If Khamenei himself was the main barrier to surrender, then removing him could create space for others inside the system to accept what the Islamic Republic had long refused.

But the regime remained defiant. Seventeen days after Khamenei’s death, Ali Larijani, another senior political figure, was also killed. Now, Ghalibaf’s name is being floated as the man who could be pushed to accept those demands. But the deeper reality is that Ghalibaf is not the man calling the shots in Iran today. Nor was Larijani. After Khamenei, no one is fully in command. This, too, is a sign of a system struck at the centre and beginning to unravel.

The administration’s refusal to recognise Mojtaba Khamenei, along with Trump’s dismissal of him as “a lightweight” who would be “unacceptable” as Iran’s leader, is part of the same coercive sequence. By denying him legitimacy from the outset, Washington is floating names, testing possibilities, and searching for someone within the regime willing to sign. At the same time, the regime’s nuclear, missile, naval, and proxy assets, together with the wider military machinery on which its regional power depended, are being steadily degraded. The Islamic Republic still has a choice: relinquish what remains by agreement, or lose it by force.

Negotiation and war are not opposites. They are successive phases of the same campaign.

This is the point many critics miss. In Trump’s approach, negotiation and war are not opposites. They are successive phases of the same campaign. Negotiation presented the terms. Force raised the cost of refusal. The pause tested whether the strikes had altered the regime’s calculations. Negotiation then resumed from a position of greater pressure. That is not incoherence. It is strategy.

The End of the Old Status Quo

Whatever happens next, Trump has already changed the strategic picture. If this war ends with the fall of the Islamic Republic, he will have secured a historic victory. If the regime survives, it will survive in a diminished form. In less than a month, Washington has already achieved what twenty years of negotiations did not: an Islamic Republic with its nuclear and missile programmes sharply pushed back and its regional reach greatly reduced. Either way, the old status quo is gone.

Two analytical mistakes have made this harder to see.

The first is to mistake visible continuity for strength. In an earlier essay on the Islamic Republic’s collapse plan, I argued that a system can still fire missiles, repress, broadcast, and project fragments of normality after its centre has been hit. None of that proves it is strategically healthy.

The second is to act surprised by escalation. Before the war, I described the Islamic Republic’s logic as deterrence through escalation. Anyone who thought the regime would collapse through decapitation alone misunderstood it. The administration clearly did not make that mistake. That is why it deployed hundreds of tons of ammunition to the region before the war began. Continued missile fire does not prove that Trump has no strategy. It shows that the Islamic Republic has one too: absorb punishment, escalate where possible, and hope that fear, market shock, and regional pressure weaken American resolve before the regime is forced into real surrender.

The very states Iran hoped to intimidate are moving in the opposite direction.

But that strategy has limits. The more the regime threatens shipping, attacks infrastructure, and uses missiles, drones, and proxies as tools of pressure, the more it convinces its neighbours that their own trade, investment, and long-term stability cannot safely coexist with the Islamic Republic as it is. Tehran’s calculation was that regional havoc would frighten neighbouring Arab states into pressing Washington to stop the war. Instead, the logic has begun to reverse. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have declared Iranian diplomatic personnel persona non grata, while the UAE has closed its embassy in Tehran and withdrawn its diplomatic mission. The very states Iran hoped to intimidate are moving in the opposite direction, concluding that its capacity for disruption must be reduced, not accommodated.

So the central argument is simple. Much of the prevailing media reading is wrong because it mistakes visible continuity for strategic success and escalation for surprise. It sees a regime still speaking, still firing, still standing in some form, and concludes that Washington must have no plan. But the plan is visible. Trump appears to have concluded that sanctions, diplomacy, delay, and partial restriction did not stop the Islamic Republic’s nuclear advance. They only slowed it while the programme moved closer to threshold status. His answer was not to manage the problem more carefully, but to try to end it.

One may say this strategy is dangerous. One may say it is too blunt, too risky, or too ambitious. But it is not absent. The question is no longer whether Trump has a strategy. The question is whether the Islamic Republic, under the greatest pressure it has faced in decades, will accept strategic retreat before the cost of refusal becomes existential.

With or without another war, the regime’s days are numbered

The war may continue until the regime falls. It may also pause again, to give Tehran one more chance to accept the terms. But if the regime persists on the same path and tries to rebuild what it has lost, a third war will be hard to avoid. In the meantime, it will face crippling sanctions and a far more hostile region after firing hundreds of missiles and drones at neighbouring states. They will not forget this episode. For two decades, those same states were Tehran’s economic lifeline, tolerating the Islamic Republic’s elaborate sanctions-busting networks and the thousands of front companies through which it kept trade alive. That lifeline is now fraying. The old status quo is gone. With or without another war, the regime’s days are numbered. That is the strategic shift many analysts still fail to see.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf may soon be called a pragmatist.
That would be a mistake.

The Rebrand Begins

The pattern is familiar. When Ali Larijani was killed in an Israeli strike last week, some Western coverage quickly reached for the usual labels: practical, moderate, easier to work with than the other men around him. Ghalibaf may now be next. He is now the most senior surviving figure in the Islamic Republic with deep IRGC roots. That puts him in a dangerous and important position. He could become the next major assassination target. He could also be sold as a channel to the West in a system that increasingly looks like an IRGC republic.

At the very moment that reports are emerging of further U.S. military steps around Iran, there are also reports that JD Vance may soon meet senior regime figures. Ghalibaf may be one of them. We do not know whether those reports are true, whether any such contact will take place, or who exactly would be involved. No name has been officially confirmed. But if such a meeting does happen, it may prove clarifying. Vance belongs to the isolationist wing of the Trump administration. A meeting with Ghalibaf or another senior regime figure would give Vance a direct look at who actually holds power in Iran and the kind of men the administration would be dealing with. That could matter if the war deepens and the isolationist wing has to judge the regime more directly.

As I argued in an earlier piece, ambiguity about potential contacts is already doing political work, unsettling senior officials in Iran as they wonder who may be talking to Washington. This piece makes a different point. The same ambiguity can also create openings for the wrong kind of figure to be misread as a moderate or a usable channel.

But Ghalibaf is not a moderate. He is not a hidden reformer. He is not a practical man trapped inside an ideological state. He is a hardliner, corrupt to the bone, who has spent years trying to look like something else.

Ghalibaf has always been ambitious. He once cast himself as the Islamic Republic’s modernising strongman. He wanted the presidency and, for years, carried himself as Iran’s next president. He ran in four presidential elections after 2005. Over time, that ambition hardened into a political project: to present Ghalibaf not as just another insider, but as the man who could impose order after Khamenei.

That image was built not only for domestic politics. It was built for foreign eyes too.

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How the Image Was Built

Inside the system, Ghalibaf is a hardliner and a loyal product of the regime. Outside that circle, especially in private meetings and foreign-facing conversations, he has long tried to present himself as more modern, more practical, more disciplined, and less ideological than the Islamic Republic’s usual faces. He has tried to market himself as the man who could keep the system in place while making it easier for the outside world to deal with.

By mid-2024, that effort was already visible. On June 10, IranWire reported that people presenting themselves as Ghalibaf’s advisers had spent the previous two weeks approaching European and American diplomats with a clear message: Iran would need a strongman after Khamenei, and that strongman should be Ghalibaf. A European diplomat quoted in the report said they were presenting him as the only figure with the authority and connections to contain factional conflict, restore order, improve Iran’s foreign relations, and “cleanse” the regime of radical elements. The diplomat added that academics and think tank figures in Europe and the United States were also involved, suggesting a broader effort to persuade Western officials that Ghalibaf was not merely a candidate, but a future leader they should start accepting now.

My own sources point in the same direction. One source who was in the room told me that, in a meeting with European politicians in a European capital a few years before the IranWire report, Ghalibaf was plainly marketing himself as the kind of Islamic Republic figure the West could do business with after Khamenei. He was not presenting himself as an opponent of the regime. He was presenting himself as a more polished custodian of it: strong enough to control the system at home, but measured enough to speak to foreign capitals abroad.

There was another reason this belief took root. People familiar with the matter say Ghalibaf saw his absence from U.S. sanctions lists as a form of distinction, as if Washington treated him differently from other senior figures in the Islamic Republic. According to those familiar with the issue, the explanation was technical and legal rather than political, particularly because of his role as speaker of parliament. Even so, the coincidence seems to have had a real political effect. It fed his belief that he was seen abroad as a more acceptable and more usable figure than others in the system.

According to sources inside Iran, this also made parts of the regime suspicious of him. Some in the intelligence apparatus viewed his unsanctioned status with distrust and asked why a man of his seniority had escaped measures imposed on others. His ability to travel to the West only added to that unease. Ghalibaf is a pilot and, according to these sources, has at times flown aircraft himself, including on trips to London to keep his pilot credentials current. That too strengthened the sense among some insiders that he occupied an unusual place in the regime’s external profile.

The Record Behind the Image

But the image collapses the moment one looks at the record.

Ghalibaf is not a reformer held back by the system. He is one of its purest products. He rose through the Revolutionary Guards, the police, the municipality, and the institutions that sustain power in the Islamic Republic. His name is tied not only to hardline politics but also to repression, corruption, and elite hypocrisy.

For many Iranians, his role in repression has made him one of the most hated faces of the Islamic Republic. He is linked not only to the student crackdowns but also to the coercive institutions that kept the system alive through fear and force.

His corruption record is just as important. His years as mayor of Tehran are tied to some of the best-known scandals of that period, including the “astronomical properties” affair and the wider Yas Holding and Isa Sharifi case. These were not minor accusations at the edge of his career. They became part of the political meaning of his name.

The family scandals tell the same story. “Sismoni-gate” was politically damaging not because it was the gravest case against him, but because it exposed the hypocrisy of the ruling class. While the regime preached sacrifice and resistance, members of Ghalibaf’s family were seen shopping in Turkey for baby goods. Later came the embarrassment over his son’s attempt to secure permanent residence in Canada. These episodes confirmed a familiar pattern: the men who speak in the language of endurance often arrange private exits for their own families.

Why the West Should Resist the Script

In moments of crisis, some in the West begin looking again for a hard man they can call practical. Faced with chaos in Tehran, they search for someone tough enough to control the machine but polished enough to sound like a statesman. Ghalibaf has spent years preparing for that role. He has tried to look like the man who could preserve the system while making it more manageable for outsiders.

But he is not a post-Khamenei solution. He is a distilled product of the Khamenei system.

Before anyone in the West starts calling him a pragmatist, it is worth remembering what he really is.

He is one of the clearest expressions of the Islamic Republic, and one of the most hated figures in the eyes of the Iranian public. That public is not a bystander here. Less than three months ago, Iranians gave more than 30,000 lives in resistance to the same oppressive system that Ghalibaf stands at the heart of. Anyone thinking of dealing with him should remember that.

And that is the point to make now, before the rebranding begins.

President Trump said on Monday that Iran had reached out to Washington for talks after the US threatened to strike Iranian energy infrastructure. He said, “They called, I didn’t call. They want to make a deal, and we are very willing to make a deal.” He also claimed that the United States had been speaking to “a top person” in Iran, though not to the new supreme leader, and added that “we don’t know whether he is living.” At the same time, Trump said the threatened strike on Iran’s major power plants had been paused for five days. Oil prices fell after his remarks, while Iran’s foreign ministry denied that any such talks had taken place.

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But the importance of Trump’s remarks is not only in the news itself. It is also in what the statement is designed to do.

Trump is trying to achieve two things at once.

First, he is using ambiguity as a political and psychological weapon inside the Islamic Republic. By saying he has been talking to a very senior Iranian figure without naming that person, he is planting doubt and suspicion among what remains of the leadership. In current conditions, that matters. Iran’s leaders are living in hiding. Command centres are disrupted. Communications are limited out of fear of interception and assassination. Meetings are difficult, if not impossible. In that setting, a statement like this will be deeply unsettling. Each senior figure will now be asking: Who is talking to Washington? Who is looking for an off-ramp? What is being hidden from the others?

By naming no one, Trump makes everyone in Tehran wonder who is talking to Washington.

This does not affect only the top. Lower-ranking officials also hear the same message. If they begin to believe that some of their leaders are quietly searching for a way out, they will become more uncertain, more demoralised, and more open to defection. At the same time, hardliners will turn even more aggressively against figures they see as less rigid and begin looking for the supposed traitor within the system, especially after Trump suggested that even Mojtaba Khamenei is unaware of these contacts.

Some reports pointed to Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf as the possible figure involved. Ghalibaf himself denied that and called the reports fake news aimed at influencing financial and oil markets. But in an atmosphere like this, denial does not cancel out the effect. It creates new questions instead of closing them down. Some will ask: What if Ghalibaf is lying? Others will ask: what if someone else is involved? The foreign ministry’s denial will have the same effect. In a system already shaped by fear and mistrust, public denials can deepen suspicion rather than contain it.

In a leadership living in hiding, ambiguity is not just rhetoric. It is a weapon.

Some hardline members of parliament, including Hamid Rasaei, have already gone public and started asking questions. That is exactly what Trump wants to achieve.

Second, Trump is also sending a message to the markets. By talking about a possible deal and pausing strikes on critical Iranian infrastructure, he signalled that the conflict will not move immediately into a more dangerous phase. The effect was immediate: oil prices fell. This also gave Trump an off-ramp of his own. It allowed him to step back, for now, from a strike on Iran’s power plants while still claiming momentum and leverage. So even if these contacts are real, limited, exaggerated, or deliberately ambiguous, the statement is already producing an outcome Trump wants: psychological pressure inside Tehran and calmer energy markets outside it.

That is the core point. This is not a normal diplomatic process. We do not know whether these talks are real, serious, or meaningful in any conventional sense. But that is no longer the only question. The statement itself is already doing political and economic work. It is widening mistrust inside the Islamic Republic and helping calm panic in global oil markets.

But there is a deeper question. Even if the reports are true, even if someone inside the system is involved in real contacts, can he actually deliver anything that matters? Will IRGC commanders listen? Will the men sitting behind the missile launchers take their cue from a political figure seeking an off-ramp? Or will they see whoever is talking to Washington not as a decision-maker, but as a traitor who deserves punishment or death?

That is the real uncertainty. The problem is not only whether there is a channel. It is whether anyone on the Iranian side still has the authority to make that channel meaningful.

The current U.S.-Israeli war against the Islamic Republic is more than a military campaign. It marks a fundamental reclassification of the regime by its adversaries. For decades, Tehran projected power through a transnational militia network, using armed groups across the region for deterrence, pressure, and aggression while still relying on sovereignty to shield its own leadership. Now it is paying the price. By blurring the line between sovereign state and militant enterprise, the Islamic Republic weakened its own Westphalian shield. It is no longer being treated as a state that sponsors terrorism. It is being treated as terrorism with a state.

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Not Treated Like a Normal State

The Islamic Republic is being treated in a way that very few states have been treated in modern war. In the past hundred years, the deliberate targeting of a sitting head of state in an interstate conflict has been rare enough to stand out. Hafizullah Amin, killed by Soviet forces in Afghanistan in 1979, is one of the clearest examples. There have been other attempts, but the pattern remains extremely rare. That is what makes Israel’s decision to target Ali Khamenei, and to kill other senior political and security figures of the Islamic Republic, including Ali Larijani, so striking.

The legal debate belongs to lawyers. The analytical question is different: why are the United States, and especially Israel, treating the Islamic Republic this way?

The answer is that Israel is not treating the Islamic Republic as a normal sovereign state. It is treating it as a regime that weakened its own claim to that status by the way it chose to project power. For decades, the Islamic Republic did not act mainly through the ordinary tools of diplomacy, deterrence, and conventional alliance. It acted as the centre of a transnational militant system.

Iran’s Militia NATO

States have long armed proxies. That is nothing new. Across continents and across decades, governments have funded insurgents, trained guerrillas, and supplied militant groups with light weapons, vehicles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and portable anti-aircraft systems. But the Islamic Republic went much further. It supplied Hezbollah with a vast missile and rocket arsenal and helped turn it into the most heavily armed non-state military actor in the world. It armed Ansarallah in Yemen with missiles and drones capable of striking targets more than 1,000 miles away. It built, funded, trained, and coordinated militias across Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. It recruited, armed, and deployed foreign Shiite formations from Afghanistan and Pakistan for a long war in Syria. It sought to build the same model elsewhere. This went far beyond traditional proxy warfare. Arming proxies with Kalashnikovs and RPGs is one thing. Arming them with long-range missiles and drones is another.

This was not just sponsorship. It was doctrine. The Islamic Republic described the region as a set of linked fronts, what its allies and partners called the “unity of fronts,” or Vahdat-e Sahat. The meaning was simple: if one front entered a fight, the others would join. In effect, the regime built its own militia NATO, a version of collective force without states, borders, treaties, or accountability. It assembled a military alliance out of armed factions, ideological clients, and designated terrorist organisations.

The Creed Behind the Network

This system was not only military. It was ideological from the start. These groups were not just armed by Tehran. They are tied together by a shared political vision in which hostility to Israel is central and, in many cases, eliminationist. From the beginning, the Islamic Republic defined itself against both the United States and Israel. Ruhollah Khomeini cast the United States as the “Great Satan” and Israel as the “Little Satan.” He treated hostility to Israel not as a temporary position but as part of the regime’s founding identity. Khomeini said that Israel must be wiped off the map, a phrase that later gained global fame when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeated it. He also said that if each Muslim poured a bucket of water, Israel would be washed away in the flood. The point was unmistakable: opposition to Israel was not just policy. The revolutionary creed also called on Muslims to unite against it and form a common front.

Some of the people who helped build the new order in Iran after the 1979 revolution already had deep ties to Palestinian armed movements. Before the revolution, some Iranian anti-Shah activists trained in Palestinian camps, and some of the founding members of the IRGC came out of that world. These were not marginal connections. They were part of the wider political and militant network from which the Islamic Republic emerged. Its hostility to Israel, and its later reliance on armed non-state allies, did not start from scratch in 1979. Some of the networks, habits, and loyalties were already in place.

That orientation was visible from the first days of the new state. Yasser Arafat was the first foreign leader to travel to Tehran after the revolution. He was received not simply as a visitor, but as a partner. The former Israeli embassy was handed over to the PLO and turned into the Palestinian embassy. The message was unmistakable: the Islamic Republic was aligning itself with the struggle against Israel as a central pillar of its foreign policy.

Over time, that alignment became institutional. Hezbollah emerged in Lebanon with close Iranian backing and became one of the clearest expressions of that model: an armed movement, trained and supported by Tehran, whose confrontation with Israel was central to its identity. The pattern later spread across the region. What began as ideology and early personal ties hardened into a regional structure of armed allies.

How the Regime Lost the Protections of Statehood

That is what made the Islamic Republic exceptional. It did not merely use proxies as a supplement to state power. It organised much of its regional strategy around them. It chose some of its closest allies from among militant groups, created others itself, and invested in turning them into extensions of its own reach. In doing so, it blurred the line between state and non-state actor until that distinction began to erode. It even sacrificed Iran’s national interests for the sake of those proxies to such a degree that it became hard to tell who was serving whom. Was Hezbollah a proxy of the Islamic Republic, or was the Islamic Republic, in some respects, acting for Hezbollah?

That erosion matters. A system that works through militias, arms transnational armed groups with long-range strike capability, and treats proxy warfare and terrorism as central tools of statecraft should not be surprised if others stop treating it like a normal state. Many of the groups backed by the Islamic Republic, including Hezbollah and Hamas, are designated as terrorist organisations by the United States, and in Europe, Hamas and Hezbollah’s military wing are also designated. The regime aligned itself with such groups, armed them, relied on them, and increasingly came to resemble the kind of actor it claimed merely to sponsor.

The Islamic Republic befriended terrorist groups, supported terrorist groups, armed terrorist groups, and in important ways came to behave like one. It should not be surprised that others increasingly treat it accordingly.

That is the real significance of what is happening now. Israel is not only fighting the Islamic Republic. It is classifying it. By choosing its targets, it is signalling that it does not see the regime as a normal Westphalian state entitled to the restraints that status usually brings. It sees it as the command centre of a regional militant enterprise.

One can debate whether that judgment is lawful. It is much harder to deny that the Islamic Republic spent decades inviting it.

The Islamic Republic’s continued fire, street repression, broadcasting, leadership succession, muted elites, and projections of normality are not signs of strategic coherence or durability. They are the visible mechanics of a regime in its collapse phase, executing the plans built for the moment its center was hit, functioning through fragmentation, and betting that Washington will not stay in the war long enough to finish the job.

The Misleading Signs

Eighteen days after the United States and Israel launched their military campaign against Iran on February 28, 2026, many of the usual signs of state continuity are still visible. The Islamic Republic is still firing missiles and drones at Israel and other targets across the region, including advanced systems such as the Sejjil ballistic missile. State television is still broadcasting. Basij and IRGC units are still present on the streets. Mojtaba Khamenei has been installed as successor. No major elite split has yet surfaced. Parts of the regime’s regional network still exist. Shops still carry basic goods. And the nationwide uprising many expected has yet to materialize.

For many observers, these signs point to one conclusion: the regime has taken a severe blow, but it is still holding.

That reading may be fundamentally wrong.

These indicators are not false; they are simply being read through the wrong framework. They are taken as evidence that the system has absorbed the shock and remains solid. In reality, they indicate the opposite. The Islamic Republic prepared for the moment when its center would be hit, and its command structure would fracture. In that scenario, regional units keep firing, security forces keep repressing, and the state projects fragments of normality even as central control collapses. The activation of these mechanisms is evidence that the system has entered its collapse phase, not escaped it. What we are seeing is not resilience, but a regime preserving violence and surface function long enough to outlast the political patience of its adversaries.

That is the essence of Tehran’s calculation. It does not believe it can defeat the United States and Israel in a long conventional war. It believes Washington will not fight such a war for long. Its strategy, then, is not victory but endurance: keep shooting, keep coercing, keep signaling continued function, and keep imposing costs until the Americans decide the game is no longer worth the price.

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The System Was Built for Decapitation

To understand why the usual indicators can mislead, it is necessary to go back to the mid-2000s. Under IRGC commander Aziz Jafari, the Revolutionary Guards reorganized around the logic of asymmetric warfare. Iranian planners understood that they could not match the United States in classic naval, air, and armored war. So they built a structure meant to survive decapitation, fragmentation, and prolonged disruption.

One key part of that design was the network of ten regional IRGC headquarters. Each sits above parts of the country’s thirty-two Guard corps and their attached Basij units. These commands were built to control local brigades, battalions, security formations, and regional military assets with substantial autonomy. Their purpose was explicit: if the command structure in Tehran were badly damaged or destroyed, the regime would still retain armed regional organs able to suppress unrest, confront internal threats, and continue fighting external enemies without waiting for the center to tell them what to do.

This was the logic of “mosaic defense”. If the chain of command broke, the system would not freeze. It would fragment into semi-independent pieces and keep operating. Regional formations would continue firing and repressing even if central coordination became weak, intermittent, or impossible.

That is why continued missile launches should be handled carefully as evidence. They do not show strategic coherence. They show that the regime has entered the phase it prepared for its worst day: preserving violence after coherent command has begun to fail. Abbas Araghchi all but admitted this when he was asked about Iranian strikes on Oman, one of Tehran’s closest regional partners. “What happened in Oman was not our choice,” he said, adding that military units were “independent and somehow isolated” and were “acting based on instructions … given to them in advance.” In other words, the missiles are still flying not because the political center is fully in control, but because the system was built to keep firing after the center’s grip had already started to fray.

That is also why the deaths of top IRGC commanders such as Salami, Rashid, Pakpour, and many others do not automatically produce silence. The machine keeps firing because it was built to outlive them. What looks like resilience is in fact the functioning legacy of a doomsday design.

The Repression Machine Is Still Lethal, but It Is Not Intact

The same logic applies to the streets.

The regime’s urban repression system did not depend simply on armed men standing at street corners. It relied on an elaborate structure of surveillance, monitoring, command centers, drones, neighborhood bases, police stations, and rapid-response deployment. During the January 7 and 8 uprising, that system operated on multiple levels. Personnel sat in command centers such as Tharallah Headquarters in Tehran before walls of monitors linked to cameras across the city. Mobile units deployed camera-equipped drones over neighborhoods and streets. Helicopters monitored urban movement from above. Security forces were stationed in hundreds of neighborhood-level Basij compounds, IRGC facilities, and police posts, ready to be dispatched wherever needed. It was a meticulously designed and repeatedly rehearsed system for suppressing dissent with speed and precision.

That infrastructure is now badly damaged. Tharallah Headquarters has been struck. Numerous neighborhood-level bases in Tehran have been bombed, destroyed, or evacuated because they can be hit at any time. The same pattern is not limited to Tehran. Bases in towns and even villages have also been targeted.

The result is not the disappearance of repression, but its degradation. Basij and IRGC units can still appear, still shoot, and still kill. But they no longer operate with the same surveillance depth, the same aerial visibility, the same command-and-control confidence, or the same dense local infrastructure that made repression so effective in the past. A system that can still shoot is not necessarily a system that can still control.

That distinction matters because January remains central to the political mood. In roughly one hundred cities, protesters effectively seized urban space before the regime reasserted control after nightfall and in the following hours. It regained control because it still possessed the integrated machinery to observe, track, dispatch, surround, and overwhelm. This time, the conditions are different. If protesters return and seize the space again, the regime will be far less able to retake it quickly. And this time the skies are not empty. American and Israeli aircraft and drones are already overhead.

Quiet Streets Do Not Mean Public Submission

The most common question, “Why are Iranians not protesting?”, is also one of the most misleading. The answer is not necessarily that the regime has restored control, that society has rallied around the flag, or that people have accepted the system. A simpler explanation is that many are doing exactly what they have been told to do: stay home, for now.

Since the war began, the message from key anti-regime voices has not been to flood the streets immediately. It has been caution. Pahlavi has urged people to stay indoors for safety, stock essentials, continue strikes, maintain nighttime chants, and wait for the decisive moment. Quiet streets, then, do not prove regime control. They reflect tactical restraint by a society that remembers exactly what happens when people move too early.

The Succession Is a Sign of Exposure, Not Confidence

The same interpretive error appears in the succession question.

Mojtaba Khamenei’s elevation has been cited as a sign of continuity. But continuity in name is not the same as continuity in power. In a system built on the theology of Velayat-e Faqih, the leader’s physical presence is one of the primary instruments of authority. Yet nearly three weeks into the war, the new supreme leader remains a ghost.

His first and only statement was read by news anchors over a handful of still photographs, and even those have been rare. Several looked so artificial that many Iranians mockingly called him “the first AI-generated leader in the world.” There has been no live speech, no public appearance, no visible projection of sovereign authority. Whether he is in a Tehran bunker or somewhere else under heavy protection, his total invisibility sends the same message to the elite: the center is hiding rather than holding. He looks less like a sovereign projecting command than the head of an underground cell struggling to stay alive. This is not a transition of confidence. It is a transition of survival, with a leader constrained by decapitation risk and the remnants of a badly damaged, fragmented IRGC calling the shots around him.

Silence Inside the Elite Does Not Mean Cohesion

The absence of visible defections is also easy to misread.

Silence does not necessarily mean loyalty. It can mean fear, uncertainty, and waiting. If influential figures inside the system are unsure whether the United States intends to sustain pressure to the point of decisive breakdown, or whether Washington will eventually accept an off-ramp, they have every reason to hesitate. The same is true for anti-regime actors. No one wants to gamble everything on a final move if they suspect American pressure may soon ease.

What looks like cohesion may simply be paralysis under uncertainty.

The Axis Still Exists, but as a Damaged Remnant

Iran’s regional network is also weaker than surface readings suggest.

For years, Tehran’s so-called Axis of Resistance provided strategic depth, deterrent reach, and the ability to fight through partners rather than through conventional force alone. Today, that network looks badly diminished. Hezbollah and Hamas have been severely degraded. Iraqi militias appear weaker and more hesitant. The Houthis remain the least damaged component, yet even they have largely limited themselves to threats rather than serious intervention.

The axis has not disappeared; what remains is no longer what it once was. It survives not as the robust regional architecture Tehran once commanded, but as a reduced, ineffective remnant.

Surface Normality Can Hide Economic Breakdown

A similar mistake is made in reading the economy.

The fact that bread is still on shelves proves very little. The real question is whether the systems underneath daily life are starting to break down. Iran is now in the final days before Nowruz, the most sensitive financial period of the year, when the state is expected to pay salaries and bonuses to millions of employees, including the security forces.

Banks have largely shut. Cyberattacks continue. Internet restrictions have disrupted online payments. Markets are closed. End-of-year shopping has stalled. Government offices are only partly functioning. Oil exports are under heavy pressure. Salaries for state employees, including security personnel, are reportedly delayed or unpaid. Losses are already running into the billions.

For a regime that relies on patronage and paid coercion, this is not a secondary problem. It strikes at the material basis of loyalty.

State Television Is No Longer the Test It Once Was

Even state broadcasting, one of the oldest symbols of regime continuity, no longer means what it once did.

In classic coups and revolutions, the fall of a regime was marked by the seizure of the radio and television station or by the sudden silence of the national broadcaster. That image still shapes political instinct. But broadcasting no longer depends on one building in the old way. Thanks to digital technology, a regime can keep transmitting from dispersed or improvised locations as long as parts of the network remain alive. The IRIB building has been struck, yet broadcasting continues. The fact that television is still on the air therefore tells us far less than older political habits suggest. These days, a few people with an internet connection can stream a discussion from a basement. That is essentially what state television is now doing.

The Regime Does Not Need to Win. It Needs to Last

Taken one by one, these signs can reassure those looking for evidence of endurance. Taken together, they create a powerful illusion of resilience. But that is precisely what contingency architecture is meant to do. A system built for its worst-case scenario can go on firing, repressing, broadcasting, appointing successors, and projecting fragments of order long after it has lost the central coherence, strategic confidence, and institutional depth it once had.

That is why the Islamic Republic’s present behavior should be read differently. It does not need to look healthy. It does not need to rebuild the world it had before February 28. It does not need to prove that its command structure is intact. It only needs to prevent the appearance of final collapse, keep enough force in motion to impose costs, and hold out until the United States loses the will to continue.

What we are watching, then, is not a regime demonstrating strength. It is a regime in its collapse phase, still able to produce violence and surface function, but no longer able to hide the fact that this is the stage it prepared for when the center began to break.

Four days after the Islamic Republic announced Mojtaba Khamenei as its new supreme leader, the Iranian public still has not seen him. He has entered office without appearing on camera, and many Iranians have never even heard his voice. His first message to the country came not as a speech, but as a written text.

That is striking. In the Islamic Republic, power is usually shown, not just declared. A new leader is expected to appear, speak, and project control. The choice to release a text instead of a video suggests a regime deeply worried about its new leader’s safety. If the system believed Mojtaba could appear without serious risk, it would almost certainly have shown him. Instead, it kept him off screen.

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A Script of Defiance

The message itself offers no sign of de-escalation. It does not try to calm the country or lower tensions. It is a message of clear continuity. Mojtaba calls for “effective and punishing defence.” He says “the lever of closing the Strait of Hormuz must be used.” He also says plans have been prepared for opening “other fronts” where the enemy is weak and exposed. This is an open threat to widen the conflict if the war continues.

His language on Iran’s regional allies is just as direct. He presents the “resistance front” as part of the core values of the revolution, not as a side issue or a temporary policy. The message does not sound like that of a leader looking for a way out. It sounds like the language of continuation.

That matters because the path taken by Ali Khamenei brought a devastating war to Iran. Mojtaba’s first message suggests he is not trying to change course. He is embracing the same line: escalation, proxy warfare and regional confrontation.

The Clerical Face of the IRGC

The most important question raised by the text is whether Mojtaba is leading the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or whether the IRGC is leading him. On revenge, Hormuz, regional pressure, and pressure on neighbouring states, his language is almost identical to the line the security state has been pushing.

That suggests the succession has not created a new centre of power. It may simply have confirmed that real power already sits with the security apparatus, and that Mojtaba is now its clerical face.

By taking such a hard line so early, Mojtaba is making himself more exposed. He is presenting himself as the next leader of the war, not as a cautious successor. That makes it easier for Israel to see him as part of the same chain of command, and therefore as a possible target.

Fear and Denial

The text also shows clear fear at home. One of its most important passages says that if the people’s power does not “appear in the scene”, neither the leadership nor state institutions will work properly. It then calls for “effective presence in the scene” in social, political, cultural, and even security fields.

This is a strong sign that the leadership fears a mass uprising. The regime wants to fill public space with its own supporters, leaving no room for dissent. He does not openly threaten protesters in this passage, but the message is clear enough.

Mojtaba also makes an unconvincing attempt to distance himself from the succession process. He says he learned of his appointment through the state broadcaster at the same time as the public. The point of this line is obvious. He is trying to suggest that he did not seek the role and was not part of the process. But the claim only draws more attention to the long-running reports that he had been prepared for this position for years.

His mention of seeing his father’s body also matters. It appears designed to show that he is present, functioning, and close to the centre of power. At a moment when the public still has not seen him, even small details like that do political work.

The Style of the Writing

The style of the text is revealing too. It does not read like modern Persian political writing. It reads like old clerical prose: heavy, formal, full of religious language and often awkward in structure. The opening is packed with invocations, mourning formulas, and Quranic language before it gets to the political point.

Even when the message is simple, the writing tries hard to sound grand. It uses heavy phrases and tired formulas that belong more to seminary and official-state writing than to modern public language.

That matters because the content itself is simple. The message is: keep fighting, stay loyal, punish the enemy, and hold the street. But the language makes even these basic points sound stiff and old. Many ordinary readers would find the prose harder than the ideas.

This is one reason some people believe the text may really be his, or at least close to his own style. It does not read like the work of a polished modern speechwriter trying to reach a wide public. It reads like clerical writing: overblown, old-fashioned, and shaped by seminary language.

No New Path

The message ends as aggressively as it begins. On neighbouring states that host US bases, Mojtaba warns that Iran will continue strikes if needed and says those countries should shut down those bases as soon as possible. On compensation, he says Iran will take compensation from its enemies, and adds that if payment is refused, it will take from their assets or destroy their property.

In the end, the importance of this message lies in the contrast between its form and its content. The form, a written text instead of a speech, shows a regime acting out of fear. The content shows a leader offering no new path.

Mojtaba appears not as a leader trying to redefine a system in crisis, but as the clerical face of a security state that has already pushed Iran to the edge.

A Supreme Leader has been killed. A son has been chosen. And the Revolutionary Guards are driving the process.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed on Saturday morning in US and Israeli air strikes. On Tuesday, according to exclusive information obtained by Iran International, Iran’s Assembly of Experts, under pressure from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), chose his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, as the next Supreme Leader. The decision has not been made public and is expected to be announced after Ali Khamenei is buried.

This is not a routine succession. It is a wartime decision shaped by the security state, and it raises serious questions about constitutional procedure. The priority appears to be speed and control, as the Islamic Republic faces attacks from outside and a leadership vacuum at the top.

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Why the IRGC pushed Mojtaba

The IRGC needed two things at the same time: control and legitimacy.

Control means keeping the chain of command intact, preventing splits at the top, keeping the security forces coordinated, and stopping a scramble for power. In this crisis, the IRGC’s first priority is internal stability.

Legitimacy matters too, but not in a broad national sense. It means legitimacy inside the regime’s core base: hard-line politicians, the security institutions, and the loyal networks that still see the Islamic Republic as “their” state. In that narrow world, Mojtaba has something others do not. He can claim direct continuity with Khamenei, and the core base can accept him without feeling the system has broken.

That combination is why the IRGC chose him.

Mojtaba also has long-standing ties to the IRGC, going back decades, and deep relationships across its command networks. For years, he has been a key channel between his father and the Guard’s leadership. That gives him a rare position. He is close to the security core, but also linked to the civilian and clerical leadership that depends on it.

He has also effectively run the Supreme Leader’s office, the Beit, for at least the past two decades, and is widely seen as Ali Khamenei’s closest confidant. The Beit is not just a state within the state. It is the core of the state itself. In practice, Iran’s elected government and president are often a façade, with little real power. Real authority has long sat in the Beit, which controls key security, political, and financial levers. That is why this apparatus is now protecting itself, and why it does not want an outsider coming in and taking control.

The Islamic Republic at a fork in the road

The Islamic Republic now faces two broad directions.

One is to keep fighting, stay defiant, absorb more damage, and try to outlast the attacks. That would likely mean tighter internal control, the dispersal of forces and assets, and heavier reliance on asymmetric pressure, including missiles, drones, proxies, and covert operations, while signalling that the state will not negotiate under fire.

The other is to step back and accept major concessions to stop the war and reduce pressure. That would mean giving up key pillars of Iran’s regional and military posture in return for a halt to attacks and some easing of pressure.

Mojtaba is well placed to pursue either path.

If the system chooses a bitter deal, it needs someone who can own it and stop the hardcore from turning on the leadership. If it chooses to fight on, it needs someone who can keep the IRGC united and keep the security state functioning under sustained attack. That is the political function of this succession.

The main question now is whether Israel and the US will target him immediately or give him time to make that choice. If they strike him straight away, it will be hard to avoid one conclusion: the campaign is no longer about pressure or deterrence. It is about regime change. If they hold back, the focus shifts to Mojtaba’s next move and whether he chooses escalation or a climbdown.

The problem of blood and revenge

Any agreement with Donald Trump was always difficult for Ali Khamenei. In Tehran’s narrative, Trump sought Iran’s “surrender” and had the blood of Qasem Soleimani on his hands. Khamenei repeatedly ruled out reconciliation and called for qisas, a concept in Islamic law meaning retribution, often understood as “life for life.”

For his successor, the burden is heavier. Trump now carries not only Soleimani’s blood, but also Ali Khamenei’s. That makes any compromise far harder to sell, and it also raises the domestic stakes for any decision to escalate.

Mojtaba has one advantage inside the system. He can present himself as the person entitled to decide what comes next. If the leadership chooses to fight on, he can frame it as continuity, duty, and retaliation. If it chooses to pause revenge and prioritise survival, he can frame it as a decision made by the heir and the family, not as a humiliation forced from the outside.

Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder and first Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, set the guiding rule in a line that has the force of a fatwa in Shia political doctrine: “Preserving the system is the highest duty.” In plain terms, it means the survival of the Islamic Republic comes before almost everything else. As vali-e dam, the next of kin with the right to demand retribution, Mojtaba can argue that he also has the right to set it aside if the state’s survival requires it. That is how he can ask the regime’s core base to accept restraint, and present it not as retreat, but as obedience to a higher obligation.

What stepping back would mean in practice

If Mojtaba chooses regime survival over confrontation, the price will be high. A serious de-escalation would likely mean accepting Trump’s demands, including:

• Ending enrichment as a national project, not just pausing it

• Accepting long-term, enforceable limits on missile range

• Reducing or abandoning the proxy network, not just rebranding it

• Ending the policy of confrontation with Israel

For Mojtaba, accepting these would not just be a policy shift. It would mean dismantling his father’s 37-year legacy in a single afternoon.

Without real and verifiable change in these areas, the US and Israel would have little reason to stop.

Even then, a deal would not solve the regime’s deeper problem at home. Legitimacy inside Iranian society is badly damaged, especially after the January massacre, and the state is widely seen as corrupt, incompetent, and violent. A ceasefire might stop the bombs, but it would not stop the political decay.

Where this leaves the Islamic Republic

If Mojtaba keeps the hard line while the world’s most powerful military is striking alongside the region’s most capable one, the window for a new leader to consolidate may be measured in days, not months.

If he chooses a climbdown, the war may stop, but the inheritance remains bleak. He would be taking ownership of painful concessions that undo much of his father’s legacy, while inheriting a state that is badly broken. The Islamic Republic is facing something close to a failed-state reality: an economy in severe distress, hollowed-out institutions, and public hostility so high that normal governance becomes hard to sustain. A halt in attacks would not restore capacity, trust, or authority.

Either way, Mojtaba Khamenei begins in the ruins of his father’s world. The Islamic Republic’s options are all expensive, its survival is no longer guaranteed, and for the first time in forty years, time is the one thing Tehran cannot buy.

This article is also available on the Iran International website.

The argument about Iran’s opposition usually starts with a familiar complaint: it is too fragmented to win. The prescription follows automatically: unite first, then act. But that diagnosis is colliding with what the streets have shown in the past year. Millions have moved in synchronised waves without a committee, a charter, or an organisational chart. The problem is not a lack of unity. It is that Iran’s opposition is divided by incompatible end-states, while the street is already converging on a focal point.

On 8–9 January 2026, Iran saw mass demonstrations in more than 400 cities, according to official Iranian figures. The regime responded with an unprecedented massacre. Iranian authorities have said more than 3,000 were killed. Other estimates are far higher, putting the death toll as high as 40,000.

Afterwards, Iranians abroad mobilised in major cities around the world. This included large rallies on 14 February in Munich, Toronto, and Los Angeles. Local police estimated the combined turnout across the three cities at close to one million.

What matters here is not only the scale, but how it happened. The call to action did not come from a committee room in Europe or from a “Unity Charter” signed by exiles in a hotel ballroom. It came from a single source. And when it arrived, the response looked less like a political debate and more like a physical force: a rhythmic thud of feet on pavement, from the religious heartlands of Qom and Mashhad to Tehran and hundreds of other cities inside Iran, and then across borders to hundreds of cities around the world.

As the streets filled again, the slogans became sharply clear. People were not asking for a “grand coalition” or an “ideal republic”. They were chanting a name that, for 40 years, was meant to stay in the past: Prince Reza Pahlavi.

Against this backdrop, a familiar claim keeps appearing in Western publications and think-tank circles: the Iranian opposition is too fragmented, and so it must first form a unified movement before it can win. This is often presented as common sense. But what is happening on the ground points to a paradox. The same people described as “fragmented” have repeatedly moved in frighteningly efficient unison. What may be missing is not unity itself, but a specific, bureaucratic kind of unity; one that looks like a committee, a charter, and a neat organisational chart.

When you force a revolution into a committee-shaped template, you risk slowing the only thing that is moving.

This mismatch is not just about words. It shapes strategy. It shapes expectations. And it can slow momentum if it forces a revolution into a committee-shaped template, while the street is creating alignment through a different logic.

The effort to “unite” the opposition is not new. It has been tried for two decades with little to show for it. Bringing it back now, when millions are moving, is not a revolutionary idea. It can become a counter-revolutionary force, because it pressures the movement to slow down to conform to an outside image of what revolutions are “supposed” to look like.

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The Three Arenas: A Map of Incompatibility

To understand why the “unified movement” mantra so often fails, it helps to map the landscape as it is, not as people may wish it was. This is not a flat field of people who simply need to “get along”. It is three arenas, each with its own logic.

The opposition to the system: the core of the struggle, dominated by two main constitutional end-states, a Republic and a Monarchy, and surrounded by ethnic and regional parties and Federalist projects whose local grievances do not map neatly onto the national debate.

The opposition inside the system: those who still believe change can happen by reforming the existing order from within.

The sub-factions: splinters of left and right, secular and religious, liberal and nationalist, and individuals who may belong to one of the currents above but also carry personal weight because they are Nobel laureates, prominent intellectuals, or well-known celebrities; singers, actors, athletes, and others.

This is often described as “fragmentation”. But fragmentation is not the core problem. Incompatibility is.

Trying to fuse republic and monarchy into a single “project” is not a mature compromise. It is a logical and historical absurdity. One system was destroyed in 1979 to create the other. These are not two versions of the same destination. They are opposite answers to a basic question of sovereignty: who embodies the state, and how is authority legitimised?

“The problem is not fragmentation. The problem is incompatibility.”

A third current, federalism, is popular among some ethnic minorities. It can be strong in regional politics, but is unlikely to become a dominant national end-state. Federalism is widely unacceptable to both republicans and monarchists. That means it cannot serve as a bridge between the two main poles.

This is why unity initiatives repeatedly collapse when they meet reality. A charter can list shared values such as human rights, territorial integrity, democracy, and dignity. But it cannot solve monarchy versus republic versus federalism without either avoiding the issue or collapsing into word games.

This is where the usual workaround appears: “Unite first to remove the regime; decide later.” But in Iran, “later” is not neutral. The transition will be shaped by who the public sees as the face of the movement during the struggle. Visibility becomes leverage. And there is another reality today: the Pahlavi current is far ahead in commanding the streets.

Crucially, Reza Pahlavi is not a free agent. He must answer to a large, passionate base, and he cannot simply take a step his supporters reject. That base, especially Gen Z, brings its own version of “cancel culture” into politics. It strongly rejects any sign of co-operation with people it sees as complicit in the country’s ruin under the Islamic Republic. His supporters dislike many of the figures that analysts want him to work with. They have a name for that political lineage: the “57-ers”. Bringing those figures into one room effectively asks the monarchist camp to share its street momentum with partners who do not have it, at least for now.

At the same time, for other factions — republicans and federalists who currently have the weaker hand, sitting with him would look like an endorsement. That is why a “unity table” becomes politically toxic for everyone who sits at it.

The Knot of 1979: The Original Sin and Why “Unity” Triggers Alarm

Conflicting end-states are only part of the story. A second force shapes opposition politics even more deeply: the unresolved legacy of the 1979 revolution (1357 in Iran’s calendar). Gen Z has a name for that political lineage: the “57-ers” (panjah-o-hafti).

In a landscape sharpened by Woman, Life, Freedom, and protest cycles extending into 2026, “57-er” has become more than a demographic label. It is a moral and political judgement on those seen as complicit in launching the revolution and in the catastrophe that followed. The term has broken free from chronology. It does not simply mean people who were adults in 1979. It targets a mindset and a lineage: people linked to bringing the Islamic Republic into being, and those who later helped keep it socially and intellectually survivable.

In 1979, many of the currents that today call themselves republican or reformist lined up behind Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. They did not form a formal coalition, but they did create an unofficial united front against the Shah, rallying under Khomeini’s hegemonic leadership and street power. For many Iranians today, that is the original “unity” that ended in disaster. That is why “57-er” has become a broad label of blame. It is also why calls for inclusive unity can trigger contempt, because they can look like a return to the same kind of unity that helped deliver the country into the Islamic Republic.

It usually points to two overlapping groups:

The original enablers: the Islamists who followed Khomeini, the leftists who imagined an anti-imperialist breakthrough, and the nationalists who believed the clerics would fade back into the mosques.

The sustainers and polishers: post-revolution figures, including some ageing reformists and some diaspora intellectuals, who claim opposition credentials but defend the 1357 legacy through appeals to gradualism, “dialogue”, or the regime’s own constitution.

“In 1979, many currents rallied under Khomeini in an unofficial united front. For many today, that is the unity that ended in disaster.”

For today’s activists, calls for “inclusive fronts” with figures tied to that lineage smell like the start of another hijacking. This is the root of the street’s “cancel culture”, a defensive mechanism against a repeat of 1357.

In this view, the “57-er” mindset puts ideology ahead of national interest and what many young people call a “normal life”. It explains Iran’s crisis mainly as an external struggle, shaped by anti-imperialism, pro-Palestinian politics, anti-Western positioning, or an Islam-centred worldview. For many young people, this is a failed model. Legitimacy now comes from visible rupture and visible cost, and from rejecting everything linked to the 1979 revolution. In that atmosphere, “unity” does not sound like pragmatism. It sounds like contamination.

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The Lethality Gap: Why the Moral Maths Has Changed

This helps explain a question that puzzles outside observers: how can a generation that never lived under monarchy chant for its return? Part of the answer is not nostalgia. It is comparison.

The story of the “repressive monarchy” was the moral fuel of 1357. But today’s youth grew up with a state that treats dissent as treason. This is where numbers matter. Emad al-Din Baghi, an Iranian researcher and human rights writer, drawing on records of those counted as “martyrs” of the anti-Shah movement, put the total killed between 1963 and 1979 at 3,164.

“Today’s baseline is a state that kills on a scale that rewrites the moral comparison with the past.”

Against that baseline, the belief that the Islamic Republic can kill, in a single day, on a scale the previous era never reached, such as the 3,000-plus killed in early January 2026, becomes politically decisive. Many young protesters draw a blunt conclusion: whatever the Shah was, this is worse. Pahlavi returns not only as a name but also as shorthand for the total rejection of the 1357 inheritance and a return to national normalcy.

The Reverse-Engineering Trap

While the street is moving towards a focal point, policy circles keep trying to reverse-engineer a revolution using the Gene Sharp template. Sharp’s theories of non-violent struggle, which have influenced a generation of Western diplomats, argue that a “unified centre of gravity” is required for success.

Analysts treat this committee-shaped unity as the goal. But in Iran, it can act as a brake. It asks the only vehicle currently moving to slow down so others can catch up, not mainly to strengthen the revolution, but to produce an administrative object that foreign capitals can recognise. For the rising pole, unity begins to look like dilution. For lower currents, it appears to be absorption. This does not help a revolution. It is a kind of reverse-engineering that weakens the strongest force for mobilisation.

Conclusion: The Goal Is Victory, Not Harmony

Iran’s streets have already spoken. The call for a “unified movement” belongs to an earlier phase, when no pole had momentum. Now that momentum exists, demanding unity-as-merger is not neutral. In Iran today, it is a call to pause.

The focus should shift from identity to process: Will there be a referendum? What rules will govern the transition? If outsiders want to help, they should stop trying to build umbrellas for people who are already standing in the sun. The goal is not to make Iran’s opposition “one”. That is neither possible, necessary, nor useful. The goal is to make the transition safe, and to stop using committee-shaped fantasies to misread a revolution being built in real time, under fire.

Trump’s “Peace Through Strength” meets Khamenei’s doctrine of “Deterrence Through Escalation.” Iran can offer a deal that sounds historic without accepting irreversible constraint. The process manages tempo, not trajectory.

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The Offer

After meeting President Donald Trump on Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters that “the president believes the Iranians already understand who they are dealing with.” He added that Trump “thinks the conditions he is setting, combined with their understanding that they made a mistake last time by not reaching an agreement, could lead them to accept terms that would make it possible to achieve a good deal.”

That could prove true, depending on what “terms” mean. If Washington expects Iran to abandon its nuclear program altogether, it will not. Tehran treats the program as strategic insurance and a marker of sovereignty. But Tehran can offer something crafted to sound historic: a nuclear “freeze,” a missile “halt,” a proxy “rollback.” The point would not be compliance. The point would be time: stabilizing the regime through Trump’s term, then rebuilding once he leaves office.

An agreement of that kind would send a domestic signal inside Iran that matters more than any official statement. After the recent massacre, the regime would be signaling that it can kill at scale and still secure a diplomatic reset to survive. And after Trump’s “locked and loaded” and “if you shoot, I shoot,” simply avoiding war becomes a victory narrative. In that story, a deal is not a concession. It is recovery.

The Mismatch

Diplomacy with Tehran has produced agreements, including the 2015 Iran deal, but it has not contained Iran’s trajectory. The problem was not a lack of patience or imagination. It was a mismatch of purpose. Western capitals treated negotiations as “containment”, a way to manage escalation, keep the crisis bounded, and reduce the risk of war. Tehran treated negotiations as operational cover, a way to reduce pressure, fragment coalitions, and buy time while expanding capability.

The outcome is measurable: even as the crisis was “managed,” Iran advanced from zero enrichment to high-level enrichment, expanded missile reach and stockpiles, and deepened a proxy network designed to project power and raise the cost of confrontation. The regime was not “contained.” The urgency was, even as the danger grew.

Tehran’s willingness to “deal,” in other words, is conditional. A pause is acceptable if it is reversible and can be sold internally as resilience rather than capitulation. Terms that appear irreversible are read not as policy adjustments but as regime exposure. When the choice is between a reversible pause and a binding rollback, the Islamic Republic has repeatedly preferred risk.

Khamenei’s lesson from this history is not de-escalation. If Trump’s doctrine is “Peace Through Strength,” Khamenei’s is “Deterrence Through Escalation.”

In the current context, that calculation rests on Tehran’s reading of American limits. The regime assumes Washington has little appetite for a prolonged war and even less political will for a ground campaign in Iran. In Tehran’s view, the worst-case scenario is airstrikes and a limited bombardment campaign, painful but not necessarily regime-ending. That assumption, whether accurate or not, raises Tehran’s tolerance for risk and helps explain how diplomacy can run in parallel with escalation.

The Escalation Argument

Inside Iran, a debate has sharpened in highly influential circles since the 12-day war. Analysts close to the system advanced a harsher conclusion. In their telling, a series of defeats, including Hezbollah’s degradation, the IRGC being forced out of Syria, the toppling of Bashar al-Assad, and the loss of Syria as a critical strategic theater, were the result of Iranian “restraint.” They trace the chain back to the killing of Seyed Razi Mousavi, a senior IRGC commander, in an Israeli airstrike near Damascus in December 2023. They argue Iran should have responded immediately, using Hezbollah and coordinated attacks from Syria to impose unbearable costs, and that restraint emboldened Israel to escalate step by step.

This school of thought extends the logic further. It argues Iran should have forced the region to “co-pay” after regional states helped avert Iran’s first missile attack on Israel, “True Promise 1.” It argues Iran should have used its most destructive supersonic missiles in its first attack instead of older models that were easier to intercept. In their telling, the later use of more powerful supersonic missiles around day 10 of the 12-day war helped compel Israel to seek a ceasefire through Washington.

From this perspective, the operational lesson for the next round is blunt. If strikes begin against Iran again, Tehran should immediately widen the war into the Persian Gulf. It should disrupt shipping lanes and energy routes and target U.S. bases across the region, and perhaps economic zones as well. The goal is to transfer pressure: spike oil prices, crater markets, and force outside actors to restrain Washington. A Farsi saying captures the mentality: die once and mourn once. Their variation is: fight once, make everyone suffer once, and force the military option off the table for good.

The same circles also argue that the U.S. administration is not coherent on war and that Tehran should exploit anti-war forces inside and outside the administration. The idea of President Pezeshkian interviewing with Tucker Carlson emerged in these hardliner circles: speak directly to “America First” public opinion and build domestic political pressure against escalation. The interview went ahead.

The Test at Home

The January massacre fits this broader doctrine of “Deterrence Through Escalation”. It was not an accident or a breakdown. It was policy. A society already crushed by economic pressure rose in protest and met lethal repression at scale. The regime chose killing not only as punishment but as precedent. The intended rule is simple: if you take to the streets, we will kill. The purpose is forward-looking, to make protest psychologically unrepeatable before the next external shock arrives, so that when war risk rises again, society remembers the price.

That choice also clarifies where authority sits in the Islamic Republic. Decisions of that magnitude are not the product of bureaucratic drift. They reflect a system built to concentrate risk, violence, and final judgment in one place. In Iran, that place is the office of the supreme leader. Khamenei functions as the lock. He locks foreign policy into an endless process in which capability can rise while the diplomatic calendar absorbs pressure. He locks domestic politics into paralysis, where fear substitutes for legitimacy and violence substitutes for bargaining. This is not merely temperament. It is a system optimized for regime survival rather than national performance.

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Khamenei chose escalation at home, massacring his own people when he sensed an existential threat from within. He will try to deter war by striking a deal that pauses pressure without surrendering the regime’s capabilities. If that proves impossible, he will apply the same logic when he perceives a regime-ending threat from abroad.

This is where the old Khomeini analogy misleads. Ruhollah Khomeini described accepting the 1988 ceasefire with Iraq as drinking a “chalice of poison” to keep the system alive. Many assume Khamenei will do the same: swallow humiliation to preserve the Islamic Republic. But Khamenei believes that a truly humiliating capitulation would not save the system. It would fracture it by proving it can be forced to bend. In that logic, compromise is not adaptation. It is absorption, the start of the regime being digested by external pressure and by a society it has tried to crush. Once coercion is seen to work, coercion becomes the template.

The Lock

Khamenei’s choices are rooted in a theological legitimacy model, not a performance-based one. He has built the Islamic Republic as a theological project rather than a standard Westphalian state. He survived a near-fatal assassination attempt early in his rise and has long treated that survival as proof that God preserved him for a mission. In recent years, he has spoken in explicitly providential terms, including claiming that in a meeting with IRGC commanders, it was “God’s words, spoken through my mouth.”

Jamkaran points to the same mentality. When he faces critical decisions, Khamenei turns to the Jamkaran Mosque near Qom, a shrine closely linked in Shiite belief to the Imam of the Age, and to practices such as estekhareh. He reportedly visited Jamkaran two weeks ago. The point is not the rituals themselves. It is what they reveal about how he decides. He treats the Islamic Republic as a trust held for the Hidden Imam’s return, not as a state judged by welfare, growth, or public consent. In that frame, welfare is not a binding constraint, and human cost is not a limit. He has described his mission in those terms, including preserving the Islamic Republic so it can hand its flag to the Hidden Imam when he returns.

This is one doctrine in two arenas. At home, Khamenei killed at scale to make protest unrepeatable. Abroad, he will spread pain at scale to make war unrepeatable. The arena changes. The logic does not.

A leadership operating within that mentality does not bargain like a normal state. It does not trade ideology for relief. It trades time for control. The economy becomes secondary, lives become instrumentally expendable, and welfare is treated with suspicion, consistent with his argument that “comfort makes people less religious.” This is why diplomatic negotiations can continue for years without changing trajectory. The process manages tempo. It does not change direction.

This is the central risk in assuming a “good deal” will produce strategic change. Tehran can offer a pause that sounds historic without accepting irreversible constraint. As long as Khamenei remains the lock, negotiations will buy the regime time, not transform its behavior.

Iran isn’t misunderstood because it’s mysterious. It’s misunderstood because it’s filtered.

On January 8 and 9, the IRGC and Basij carried out a nationwide killing operation. Security forces opened fire across multiple cities. In roughly forty eight hours, thousands of civilians were dead. Some estimates put the toll between 30,000 and 40,000. Bodies were removed quickly. The country went into an internet blackout. The state moved to control what could be seen, counted, and said.

The scale stunned much of the West. Commentators questioned the numbers and asked how a government could do this to its own people. For many, the massacre did not fit the Iran they thought they understood.

But it fit the Islamic Republic. A system built on ideological absolutism, coercion, and impunity does not moderate when it feels threatened. It escalates into brutality. What should trouble Western institutions is not only what happened, but why it still felt unbelievable.

For decades, a stubborn pattern has run through Western journalism, academia, and think tanks: a drift toward normalizing the Islamic Republic.

Not understanding it. Normalizing it.

Normalization is not a conclusion reached. It is a result produced. It is built through methods that look like seriousness itself: verification standards that become paralysis, balance that becomes false symmetry, caution that becomes euphemism, and access that becomes discipline. The result is rarely fabrication. It is something more durable, an ecosystem in which blunt description is treated as reckless, while the regime’s preferred framing can pass as sober analysis.

“In Western discourse, restraint and balance often blurred into a refusal to name what the Islamic Republic actually is.”

This piece maps how that ecosystem works. Not as a conspiracy, and not as a claim that Western work on Iran is uniformly flawed. Much of it is careful and indispensable. The problem is more specific and more repeatable: the same institutional defaults and interpretive shortcuts keep recurring across outlets and political moments, producing misreadings that are often wrong in the same direction.

What follows is a map of those moves. I call them filters. Each filter can look reasonable on its own. Many exist for real reasons: rigor, skepticism, and a desire to avoid being manipulated. The problem is what happens when they operate asymmetrically, or become professional reflexes that outlive the reality they were meant to describe.

Together, they create an interpretive environment that drifts away from lived reality while still sounding responsible. They shape who gets rewarded, who gets treated as credible, what access is worth, what language is permitted, and which truths get softened into respectable doubt.

“What reads as analysis in the West decides who is believed, who is ignored, which policies get made, and who pays the price in Iran, often with their lives.”

The goal here is not a policy prescription. It is a field guide to how description becomes assumption, and how assumption becomes policy. For analysts, this is a profession. Iran is a subject of study. For Iranians, it is life. And what is written in the West does not stay on paper. It becomes permission, pressure, policy, and consequences.

Here are the filters.

The filters

I’m laying these out in the sequence that makes the pattern make sense.

1. Incentive

2. Credibility

3. Institutional Mirage

4. Access

5. Supervised Reality

6. Mechanical Balance

7. Euphemism

8. The Iraq Shadow

9. Conspiracy

10. Hallucination

Each filter is small on its own. Together, they rewrite reality.

1) The incentive filter: conformity as a career strategy

Conformity exists everywhere. It becomes corrosive when verification is hard, access is controlled, the stakes are high, and the subject is politically radioactive. That is Iran.

In that environment, career reward fit.

If you want a PhD, you learn what supervisors will approve.
If you want to publish, you learn what editors will accept.
If you want invitations and funding, you learn what will not get you labeled “extreme.”
If you want institutional trust, you learn which tone counts as “responsible.”

This is not always censorship. It is sorting.

“In Iran work, career safety can shape what gets written before truth ever gets tested.”

Arguments that describe the Islamic Republic as structurally unreformable rarely die by factual rebuttal. More often, they are trimmed by procedure and tone. “Too strong.” “Too certain.” “Too activist.” The conclusion survives only after being softened into possibility and buried under qualifiers.

Over time, a canon forms. Frameworks that are safe circulate long after they stop matching the country on the ground. Analysis becomes a professional routine. Reality gets forced to fit.

2) The credibility filter: how reassurance becomes authority

The incentive filter shapes what gets produced. The credibility filter shapes what gets heard.

Before policy is debated or headlines are written, credibility does its sorting. Editors, producers, and institutions gravitate toward voices that sound “measured”, “de-escalatory”, and “reassuring”. Not because they are corrupt, but because reassurance reads as responsibility.

“Professional credibility in Iran coverage is often built on tone rather than accuracy.”

Over time, “serious” becomes a tone rather than a standard of accuracy. Messages framed as moderation, internal balance, and gradual change travel further. Diagnoses framed as rupture, exhaustion of reform, or structural dead ends are treated as risky.

This is how narratives align with the regime’s preferred framing without anyone taking orders. A claim delivered in the accent of professionalism passes through gates with less friction. It becomes the baseline of debate.

Safety becomes authority. Authority becomes the lens.

3) The institutional-mirage filter: familiar labels, different system

No serious Western journalist thinks the Islamic Republic is a normal democracy. The problem is subtler. Iran uses familiar institutional labels that quietly import Western assumptions about how power works. President, parliament, judiciary, election, media. The words sound familiar, so outsiders apply familiar logic: separation of powers, real competition, accountability, and consequences.

Knowing that Iran is not the West does not cancel the reflex to project. We understand unfamiliar systems by analogy, and Iran’s borrowed political vocabulary invites exactly that move. The West knows Iran is not a democracy, yet it repeatedly remakes Iran in its own image.

In Iran, the names are familiar. The functions are not. That mismatch produces a predictable error. Managed competition is mistaken for genuine competition, and symbolic politics are read as real leverage.

Coverage then defaults to a comfortable script: moderates versus hardliners, reformists versus conservatives. At first, this looks like a harmless way to describe factional rivalry. Over time, it becomes more than shorthand. It turns into a master key for explaining nearly everything Iran does, even when the decisive choices are made outside the electoral arena.

“The Islamic Republic doesn’t just sell narratives. It sells institutional resemblance.”

Factions are real. Rivalries exist. But the factional frame is asked to explain outcomes that are not factional. In the Islamic Republic, the center of gravity does not move with ballots.

That’s why elections are such a trap for outside observers. Each cycle is treated as a pivot point, as if the vote itself determines strategic direction. At most, elections change tone and tactics. They do not change who holds the levers.

On the issues that define Iran’s trajectory, the president does not control the nuclear file. He, always he, does not control the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He does not control the regional network. He does not control the core security state. He operates inside red lines drawn by the Supreme Leader and enforced by parallel, unelected centers of power.

“Managed politics is treated as real politics.”

It is true that Iran can look different under different presidents. But those differences do not arise simply because one man was “elected.” Often, causality runs the other way: strategic decisions are made at the top, and then the political field is shaped to fit those decisions.

That is why interviews with Iranian presidents and senior officials are so often overrated. In the West, a president can lie and pay for it with voters, investigations, and institutional consequences. In Iran, voters lack that agency, and the institutions that would punish deception are part of the same system. A tough interview may produce viral moments, but it rarely produces accountability. This is what makes the scramble by Western outlets to secure these sit-downs so misplaced. The interview is treated as a journalistic prize, while the regime walks away with the prestige and the platform.

The Islamic Republic does not rely solely on propaganda. It uses institutional resemblance. It borrows familiar words to trigger familiar assumptions. And if you cover Iran through those assumptions, you will keep mistaking the appearance of a state for the reality of a system.

4) The access filter: permission as leverage

Access in Iran is not just a temptation. It is a weapon.

Tehran does not only control what can be said inside the country. It controls who is allowed to see the country in the first place. That permission then travels back to Western newsrooms, universities, and institutions as a form of credibility. Access becomes a stamp of seriousness. And once access becomes status, the regime can shape what is produced without issuing orders, simply by opening and closing the gate.

A longtime British broadcaster once described his outlet’s relationship with Tehran in a single sentence. Asked how they secured such easy access, he paused and replied, “They whistle, and we go.”

“In Iran, access is not evidence. It is a permission slip, and permission is granted for a reason.”

That line captures the inversion. Tehran grants permission, and foreign institutions treat permission as legitimacy. The hunger for proximity does the rest. The regime does not need to script every sentence. It only needs to control the conditions under which knowledge is gathered.

I saw how this works inside a major international broadcaster that kept a resident correspondent in Tehran. When sensitive reporting was being prepared elsewhere in the organization, concerns would surface from Tehran that crossing certain lines could jeopardize the visa required to remain in the country. No explicit order was given. No editor said “kill the story.” The leverage did not need to be spoken. Everyone understood the implication. A regime-controlled visa was shaping decisions far beyond Iran’s borders.

Read that carefully. A visa can discipline journalism outside Iran. Tehran does not need to call editors abroad. It only needs someone inside Iran to fear consequences, and that fear travels outward into editorial decisions. For years, major outlets operated under this logic. Everyone knew there were lines you could not cross if you wanted to stay.

“When a regime controls the door, it does not have to control every sentence. The fear of losing entry will do the editing.”

After the 2009 election crisis, Tehran expelled most resident correspondents. The mechanism did not disappear. It evolved. Instead of permanent access, the regime shifted to selective access: visas granted for elections, staged visits, and major events, on Tehran’s terms, to chosen reporters, when it wanted a narrative reset. Tehran decided which moment would be covered and who would be allowed in.

The discipline did not end. It spread. Journalists learned how to behave if they wanted to get in next time. Their access-conditioned reporting became raw material for analysts and think tank papers, then entered academic work and hardened into the record. What begins as a visa decision can become a policy assumption.

The same structure operates in academia, and it is just as corrosive.

Professors need promotion. They need grants, publications, invitations, and institutional status. In many universities, “serious” Iran work is expected to look sourced, inside, and connected to officials and sanctioned access. So certain scholars travel to Iran. They meet officials. They conduct interviews. They return to their campuses and turn those encounters into peer-reviewed papers, books, and policy-facing research.

In the West, access becomes a credential. Iran does not allow every professor to enter. Tehran controls the gate, and the scholar who gets in can claim something others cannot: I was there. I spoke to people in power. That credential moves him up the hierarchy.

“A visa is not just a travel document. It is a lever that reaches into foreign newsrooms, campuses, and careers.”

But access is never free. Continued access is the currency. The next trip depends on the last paper. Scholars learn, quickly, that their work must remain within lines that allow them to return. No one needs to hand them a written list. The boundaries are enforced through permission and denial.

The ritual repeats. A courteous conversation in a hotel lobby, where everyone understands the limits without needing them stated. A meeting arranged through intermediaries. An interview conducted under conditions no one pretends are neutral. Security officials do not need to issue explicit instructions because the incentives have already done the training. Over time, this becomes routine. It becomes normal. It becomes an accepted route to producing “authoritative” knowledge about Iran.

The result is predictable. A body of reporting and scholarship stays inside a framework the Islamic Republic can tolerate, because status depends on access and access depends on staying tolerable.

What gets produced is not knowledge of Iran as it is. It is an access-conditioned Iran, built to survive the next visit. A paper Iran that can be cited, promoted, and rewarded, yet has little relation to reality on the ground.

5) The supervised-reality filter: “reporting from Tehran” as stagecraft

Access is the gate. Supervision is the price of entry.

The fixer is not simply a translator or logistical aide. In practice, the fixer functions as a minder. They shape where a visitor can go, whom they can meet, what they can film, what they can ask, and what they are expected not to notice. This control is rarely explicit. It operates through constraints.

That is why physical presence in Iran can reveal less than distance reporting. Being there comes with choreography. Movement is guided. Access is staged. What appears to be a firsthand observation is often a preselected experience.

“In Iran, ‘on the ground’ means on a set.”

After major “crackdowns”, the pattern becomes especially clear. Access is denied while evidence is raw and uncontrollable. Then, once the scene is cleaned and the narrative prepared, access is granted for a managed visit. Reporters are guided through rehearsed locations and introduced to handpicked voices ready to deliver the state’s version of events. The reporting looks like eyewitness journalism, but the ground has been prepared in advance.

The state does not need observers to lie. It only needs to decide what they are allowed to see.

That is how stagecraft becomes “on the ground.”

6) The mechanical-balance filter: how the regime’s claims get a free ride

One of the most damaging routines in institutional Iran coverage is mechanical balance. It turns “fairness” into a machine that produces distortion.

Victims’ accounts arrive wrapped in doubt.
“We cannot independently verify.”
“These claims are unconfirmed.”
“It is difficult to authenticate.”

But the regime’s line often goes out clean, is quoted confidently, and is treated as the baseline.

Editors assume the audience “understands.” They don’t. When one side is drenched in disclaimers, and the other is delivered as authoritative, the result is not balance. It is built in advantage.

“When one side gets caveats and the other gets a microphone, ‘balance’ becomes distortion.”

Casualty reporting shows the pattern. Citizen videos, hospital lists, and eyewitness accounts are presented as claims that cannot be verified, and the caveat is placed up front. Then the state’s number is quoted as a clean fact, with skepticism buried later, if at all, even though the state has every incentive to minimize.

The state narrative sounds solid.
The citizen narrative sounds questionable.
The truth is diluted.

That isn’t neutral reporting. It is geometry that favors the state.

7) The euphemism filter: sanitizing brutality

Language does not merely describe violence. It can neutralize it. In Iran coverage, euphemism often replaces clarity.

People are not shot; there are “clashes.”
Hostages are not hostages; they are “detained dual nationals.”
Terror is not terror; it is “pressure.”
Mass killing is not mass killing; it is “a crackdown.”
Torture is not torture; it is “mistreatment” or “allegations of abuse.”

This is not just a vocabulary problem. It is a moral and analytical distortion. Euphemism lowers the temperature of reality. It turns deliberate state violence into an event that simply happened, stripped of agency and intent.

“Euphemism turns brutality into bureaucracy.”

A reader hears “clashes” and imagines symmetry. But the symmetry is false. One side is a state with guns, prisons, and impunity. The other is civilians in the street who get shot. A reader hears “detained” and imagines due process. A reader hears “crackdown” and imagines baton charges, not bodies.

Euphemism does not protect neutrality. It protects the perpetrator.

By smoothing language, coverage shifts moral weight away from action and onto abstraction. Responsibility dissolves into process. Violence becomes bureaucracy, and bureaucracy is easy to tolerate.

This is how brutality is made to sound normal.

8) The Iraq shadow filter: fear masquerading as prudence

After Iraq, a rule settled into Western institutions: do not be wrong in a way that could help start another war.

The fear is understandable. It is also distorting.

In Iran debates, that fear often shifts analysis away from description and toward risk management. The question stops being “is this true?” and becomes “what might this lead to?” Language is policed not for accuracy but for its potential consequences. Moral clarity is treated as escalation. Blunt diagnosis is labeled dangerous.

“Iraq taught institutions to fear being right for the wrong consequences.”

A familiar pattern follows. Describe the Islamic Republic plainly as a system that takes hostages, funds, and directs armed proxies, and jails, tortures, and shoots its own citizens. The response is rarely a factual rebuttal. It is a warning about tone. “This framing escalates.” “This helps hawks.” “This closes diplomatic space.” The argument shifts from whether it is true to whether it is safe to say.

The intention is to prevent catastrophe. The effect is to dull analysis.

Prudence in action can be wise. Prudence in description can become distortion. When fear of repeating Iraq governs how Iran is described, institutions struggle to say plainly what Iran is doing, even when the evidence is overwhelming.

The result is a discourse in which accuracy is treated as a liability and caution is mistaken for rigor. Not because the facts are unclear, but because the imagined consequences of stating them feel too dangerous to risk.

9) The conspiracy filter: deleting Iranian agency

A stubborn reflex lingers from the Cold War. When people rise up in an anti-Western state, the explanation must lie elsewhere. If crowds protest, the CIA must be orchestrating them. If an opposition figure gains traction, he must be “foreign-backed.” If unrest spreads, it must be a plot.

This reflex is analytically lazy and morally corrosive. It strips people of agency and echoes the regime’s own line that dissent is imported. The question stops being why Iranians are risking their lives and becomes who must be pulling the strings.

“In hostile regimes, popular dissent is rarely allowed to be popular. It must belong to someone.”

The vocabulary reveals the move. Protests are “orchestrated.” Strikes are “infiltrated.” Grassroots mobilization is “engineered.” The emphasis shifts from grievances to suspicion, from lived reality to imagined puppeteers.

Iran does not need conspiracies to explain mass dissent. A state that jails, tortures, and shoots its own citizens generates resistance on its own. Treating that resistance as foreign manipulation does not explain Iran. It explains the reluctance to accept that Iranians are acting in their own interests.

By deleting Iranian agency, this filter turns a society into an object. And once people are reduced to objects, their choices, courage, and costs become easy to dismiss.

10) The hallucination filter: self-confirming expertise

Now we reach the core failure, the one that makes misreading durable.

We talk a lot about hallucinations in AI: a system generates a world that appears coherent, cites itself, and sounds confident while drifting further from reality. Professional ecosystems can hallucinate, too.

The body of Western expertise on Iran looks vast. Thousands of reports, papers, books, and briefings circulate under the banner of seriousness every year. But much of this volume compresses into a relatively small canon of shared assumptions, repeated frameworks, and familiar conclusions. The citations multiply. The underlying ideas do not.

We read the existing literature and write within it. We absorb the approved vocabulary, the respectable framing, the safe conclusions. The work looks new, but it often reproduces the same architecture. Heavily footnoted, it feels solid.

“Citation density is mistaken for contact with reality.”

This is how “Iran in the West” gets built. Papers cite papers. Reports cite reports. Panels cite journalists. Journalists cite panels. Everyone looks credentialed. Everyone sounds reasonable. The density of references creates the illusion of verification.

Over time, the ecosystem becomes self-confirming. It stops testing reality and starts protecting its own coherence. Signals from inside Iran that contradict the framework get downgraded as anecdotal, emotional, or unverified, while the consensus narrative is treated as knowledge.

And like an AI hallucination, it is hard to correct from the inside. The incentives reward coherence more than accuracy, repetition more than contradiction, staying inside the frame more than questioning whether the frame still fits the country.

So the same errors survive decade after decade. Not because Iran is unknowable, but because the knowledge machine keeps generating a version of Iran that is stable, citeable, and professionally safe, even when it is wrong.

“The Iran presented as knowledge is a product of the loop, not the country itself.”

The ecosystem doesn’t just misunderstand Iran. It misunderstands its own ignorance. It mistakes citation density for contact with reality. So when Iran behaves like Iran, institutions react the same way every time: confusion, disbelief, and a rush to reject inconvenient evidence and force events back into the framework they already trust. The Iran they know is a product of the loop, not the country.

When filters become policy

These filters do not remain confined to language, framing, or professional debate. Over time, they shape what journalists, researchers, and scholars consider plausible and what policymakers consider realistic. The filtered version of Iran becomes the Iran against which decisions are made.

This is how analysis quietly turns into assumption.

When normalization dominates interpretation, policy inherits its blind spots. Violence is treated as signaling. Escalation is read as bargaining. Ideology is translated into interests. Each move sounds analytical. Together, they produce strategies built on misrecognition.

The Iran deal era showed the cost. Much of the discourse treated the JCPOA as the beginning of transformation: integration, moderation, and a regime that would evolve as incentives accumulated. That story was built on a familiar Western assumption that economic opportunity changes political behavior.

“Bad models don’t just mislead analysis. They shape decisions.”

In Tehran, the calculation is reversed. Openness is not only money. It is exposure, social pressure, and loss of control. So the system accepts relief tactically while insulating the core, and it rejects or hollows out offers that the West assumes are irresistible.

That is what it means to negotiate with a filtered Iran. Pressure eases, resources flow, and outsiders tell themselves they are empowering change, while the system adapts and hardens. Then the same institutions act surprised when the “opening” fails to open.

So what now?

The Islamic Republic maintains itself through systematic killing, imprisonment, deception, and coercion. If the West cannot say that plainly, it becomes part of the problem.

The basic test is simple:

Are we describing Iran as it is, or as it is safe to describe?
Are we loyal to reality, or loyal to the consequences of stating reality in Western politics?
Are we observing Iranian society, or projecting Western debates onto it?
Are we treating Iranians as authors of their history, or as objects moved by others?
Are we using balance and restraint to clarify, or to blur?
Are we updating our framework when reality contradicts it, or protecting the framework?

Iran is not impossible to understand. But understanding requires dropping the filters that make misunderstanding feel responsible.

Until that happens, the cycle will continue. Credentialed narratives, comfortable frameworks, and surprise when Iran refuses to play the role assigned to it.

Drop the filters, or keep being surprised.

If this made sense to you, share it. The filters work best when they’re invisible.