Peace talks between Iran and the U.S. are proceeding neither quickly nor smoothly this week, in part because Iran’s government “has not yet decided” if it will participate in a second round of peace negotiations on how to end the war. One factor that explains the sluggishness is that Iran’s government is reportedly unable to settle on a clear counteroffer to the U.S.’ latest position on ending the war.
That may sound like a problem of Iranian dysfunction, but it’s also one for which President Donald Trump bears enormous responsibility — since he has killed so many of Iran’s leaders. Trump has sown the seeds for a drawn-out conclusion to a war he desperately wants to end.
One cannot pursue “regime change” and lighter-touch coercive diplomacy at the same time.
Iran’s power structure has become more decentralized, more factionalized and more reactionary in the wake of many of Iran’s political and military leaders being assassinated in U.S. and Israeli bombings.
Axios, citing three U.S. officials, reported that Iran’s government is riven by “warring factions” that cannot settle on a “coherent” position for the next round of talks with the U.S. “Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is barely communicating. The [Iran Revolutionary Guard] generals now in control of the country, and Iran’s civilian negotiators are openly at odds over strategy,” Axios reported.
With different centers of power that don’t appear to be communicating well, Iran’s ability to negotiate and hew to clear policy positions is compromised. We saw this play out last week. Hours after Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the Strait of Hormuz was fully open following a ceasefire in Lebanon, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps made a conflicting announcement, saying, “Passage is only possible with the permission of the IRGC Navy.” The IRGC-affiliated news agency Tasnim then blasted Araghchi for “a complete lack of tact in information dissemination.”
Axios attributed the fracture within Iran’s government to Israel’s assassination of Ali Larijani, the previous secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, who “had the authority and political weight to hold Iran’s decision-making together.”
That tracks with what geostrategic analyst Imran Khalid observed in a recent column for MS NOW:
Larijani and other slain high-ranking officials represented the ‘deep state’ in its traditional sense; they were men who understood the nuances of diplomacy and the necessity of maintaining certain backchannels, even during periods of intense hostility. Larijani in particular, a former Revolutionary Guards commander who was once speaker of Iran’s Parliament and Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator in the early 2000s, embodied the dual military-political roles.
The man who replaced Larijani, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, is considered more hard line and less able than his predecessor to navigate different parts of the Iranian bureaucracy. In other words, the U.S. has lost the exact kind of player it would have wanted to engage with in order to advance credible and politically sophisticated U.S.-Iranian negotiations.
Meanwhile, Iran watchers such as Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli defense intelligence officer with expertise on Iran, have cast doubt on the authority of Iran’s lead negotiator during talks in Islamabad, Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. “He is neither empowered nor inclined to compromise on core strategic issues,” Citrinowicz recently observed on X.
Before this war, the Iranians were already known for being exceptionally slow negotiators. But that problem is likely far more acute now, with Iran’s government in a state of constant flux and internal power struggle spurred by the U.S.’ and Israel’s “decapitation strategy” of targeting high-level leaders. What’s left in Tehran now is less unified, more nationalistic and more suspicious of compromise with the U.S. — for understandable reasons.
This is yet another reason that Trump’s lack of strategic clarity when beginning this reprehensible war of choice was such a problem. One cannot pursue “regime change” and lighter-touch coercive diplomacy at the same time. If he wanted to ensure reliable off-ramps from the conflict, then the U.S. and Israel should not have killed the people who might facilitate a (relatively) speedy exit from the war, to the extent that one was possible.
Trump acknowledged this outcome during a speech in mid-March, before the ceasefire. After listing how the U.S. and Israel had killed off numerous Iranian leaders, he said, “We’re having a hard time. We want to talk to them, and there’s nobody to talk to. We have nobody to talk to.” But he finished his lament with a statement that contradicted the preceding sentences: “And you know what? We like it that way.” In reality, Trump has no idea what he wants — or what he’s doing.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.