It is done—or rather, has begun. After an April cease-fire and nearly 70 days of indirect talks brokered by Pakistan and Qatar, Iran and the United States have signed a memorandum of understanding ending their war.
This month in Switzerland, the two sides held their first round of talks under the MOU, emerging with a road map to a final agreement within 60 days; working groups on nuclear enrichment, sanctions, and implementation; and new channels to keep the Strait of Hormuz open and the Lebanon cease-fire intact. The hardest questions—the fate of Iran’s enrichment program, the scale of sanctions relief, the shape of any settlement—were deferred to that window, with Tehran insisting that implementation comes first. The blockade is lifted, and Hormuz has reopened; in the days following the news, the Iranian rial gained more than 15 percent against the dollar.
To Iran’s adversaries and many pundits, the way the deal came together confirms a verdict advanced recently, including in these pages: that the war has produced an Iranian regime more united than at any point in recent memory. Iranian commentary across the political spectrum, too, has described a real closing of ranks: Former lawmaker Mansour Arami spoke in April of a rare alignment across political, military, and social spheres, all operating within the regime’s framework.
There are a number of data points to support this argument. The entire establishment more or less lined up behind the agreement; the foreign ministry says every organ of the state acted “with one voice”; hard-line newspapers insist the talks proceeded under the personal oversight of the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei; and Esmail Qaani, the commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force, has gone so far as to call the country’s negotiators and its soldiers alike men cut from the same cloth of “armed resistance.”
Clearly, Iran’s diplomats carry a mandate from the top of the system. That deserves to be stated plainly because it should retire an assumption common in Western capitals that the negotiating team is an exposed civilian faction that the regime’s hard-liners could disown at will. It is not. But the consensus on display is a consensus to stop a war no one could win and on terms Tehran can present as a victory. It says almost nothing about the question the war reopened rather than resolved: how Iran should position itself to the outside world. On that, the Islamic Republic is not united at all.
In late May, the Paydari Front and the network around Saeed Jalili, the hard-line former nuclear negotiator who lost the 2024 presidential runoff to Masoud Pezeshkian, mounted a coordinated effort to strip Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf of the parliamentary speakership. They pressed aggressively for a public floor vote in what one account called round-the-clock political blackmail. The timing was the point: The challenge coincided with the most delicate phase of the diplomacy, and the reporting framed it plainly as an attempt to weaken the negotiating track by removing one of its institutional anchors. But Ghalibaf survived, securing the speakership for a seventh year—evidence, as the same account put it, that the hard-liners remain loud and at times influential but are nonetheless vastly outnumbered by the regime body politic.
Ghalibaf was not the hard-liners’ only target. By early June, reformist commentators were casting the persistent calls for Pezeshkian to resign as a deliberate strategy of attrition—media campaigns, parliamentary obstruction, recurring resignation rumors, all meant to drain a relatively pragmatic government’s capital precisely because its interest in diplomacy and economic normalization threatens factions whose legitimacy rests on permanent confrontation.
In May, a hard-line parliamentary deputy posted a Quranic verse about the unworthy son of Noah under the heading “Who Is Qualified for Leadership?” which critics read as an indirect shot at the new supreme leader’s legitimacy. The attack came from inside the tent: not a reformist or an exile but a regime hard-liner, questioning the very succession he is supposed to defend.
These are not the gestures of a system speaking with one voice. Indeed, analyst Ahmad Zeidabadi warned in mid-June that a small group of ideological hard-liners appeared willing to manufacture instability, placing their own interests above the state’s.
A widely shared Fararu analysis in early June claimed that many Iranians who loathed the ruling Islamist regime nonetheless rejected foreign military pressure and even experienced the war through a nationalist rather than an anti-regime ideological lens. But that same analysis carried a warning: that the cohesion was a product of wartime conditions and that, as the immediate U.S. and Israeli military threat recedes, the underlying disputes between citizens and state are likely to return.
In fact, strip away the wartime vocabulary, and the divide is the same one that has run through the Islamic Republic since 1979: between those who regard any durable accommodation with the United States as a trap or defeat and those who treat some form of coexistence with the West as a national interest.
The so-called resistance or endurance camp has a coherent case and serious voices. Kayhan, a hard-line outlet, argues that Iran’s earlier restraint toward the West yielded nothing and that attrition now favors Tehran. The editor of Tasnim, another hard-line outlet, insisted that no agreement with Washington would be better than a bad one and that the central lesson of the 2015 nuclear deal was that the Americans cannot be trusted. A senior cleric framed the talks in a recent sermon as a project to force Iran’s surrender. At its outer edge, an analyst advocated in Fararu for Iran pursuing a nuclear weapon and predicted renewed war by the fall. Behind much of such commentary sits the institutional muscle of the Paydari-Jalili bloc.
The pro-diplomacy camp is no less assertive. Pezeshkian has repeatedly argued that war inevitably carries severe economic costs, acknowledging that inflation, shortages, and disruptions to oil exports are unavoidable during conflict. His message has implicitly challenged those in the administration who advocate confrontation while expecting economic stability.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has worked to defer the hardest nuclear questions and convert coercion into managed leverage, including a prospective Iran-Oman arrangement for the Strait of Hormuz. Ghalibaf, an ex-Revolutionary Guard, embodies the pragmatic conservative current that wants to end the war without normalizing relations with the United States. Around them are familiar reformist and centrist figures and a sharper strain of realism: Analyst Kourosh Ahmadi directly attacked the comforting belief that time was on Iran’s side, pointing out that a prolonged Hormuz squeeze would hurt Iran’s own battered economy more than its advocates admitted.
This divide—between civilian doves and hard-liners in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—has been complicated, even scrambled, by the war.
For years, the IRGC was the main institutional home of the rejectionist position. But the war has pushed the security establishment to the center of decision-making as the balance of power has shifted toward the Guards following Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s killing in February. Now that the IRGC-security establishment dominates the negotiating process, rather than outside it as a veto, it cannot straightforwardly lead a revolt against the very track it is supervising.
The hard-line pressure described above did not come from the Guards as an institution; it came from a political-clerical bloc. And one of its targets, Ghalibaf, came up through the IRGC himself. The meaningful fault line today runs through Iran’s institutions, not neatly between them. The IRGC itself is no longer an ideological bloc.
The stakes of which camp in Tehran prevails are not abstract because Iran retains the capacity to escalate across several domains at once and has shown the willingness to use it.
The most immediate lever is the Strait of Hormuz, which Tehran has converted from a passive corridor into an instrument. At the height of the conflict, Iran collected transit tolls in rials through its central bank, some insurers began requiring ships to follow Iran-approved routes, and Tehran has floated a “controlled access” regime managed with Oman rather than under an U.S. umbrella.
Beyond the waterway lies Gulf energy infrastructure: The war has already touched Qatar’s Ras Laffan, Iran’s own South Pars, and a petrochemical complex at Mahshahr. Tehran’s arsenal has proved more resilient than advertised. Intelligence assessments in mid-June concluded that Iran had rebuilt to roughly three-quarters of its prewar missile force, possibly with newly delivered Russian systems, after firing some 1,850 missiles during the fighting. And an emerging doctrine, articulated by the Expediency Council’s Sadegh Larijani, treats attacks on Iran’s regional militant partners, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, as attacks on Iran itself, blurring the line between proxy conflict and direct war from the Mediterranean to the Bab el-Mandeb.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the United Arab Emirates, which shows most starkly how Tehran has learned to maneuver against its Gulf neighbors—turning economic and security interdependence into a pressure point. Tehran’s recent information campaign against Abu Dhabi and the thousands of missiles and drones Iran fired at it during the war were not random; they are a dial the endurance camp in Tehran wants to turn up. Going forward, watch the pressure on the Gulf, and you can read the internal argument in real time and the direction of Iranian regional policy.
For now, the pragmatic current has the better of the argument. Ghalibaf survived; the new supreme leader is building the domestic cover a sustainable deal would require; and Washington has reportedly softened on its maximal demands, including zero enrichment and the transfer of Iran’s uranium abroad. The structure taking shape is modest by design, a two-stage framework that ends the fighting and reopens Hormuz now, with the nuclear file pushed to a 60-day second round. Iran’s deep economic distress, from fuel rationing to looming stagflation and a crude oil export squeeze, is pushing hard in the same direction.
But the pragmatists’ advantage is contingent, and the spoilers retain what they need to raise the cost of compromise: media platforms, parliamentary leverage, and a security bureaucracy. The danger is that hard-liners make any deal so politically expensive at home that it fractures before it can show results. The threat to this agreement, as Zeidabadi warned, now lives inside the Iranian system.
If the United States wants the cease-fire to last, it needs to take Tehran’s internal politics seriously and give the pro-deal camp something tangible to point to: perhaps front-loaded, visible benefits that hard-liners cannot easily dismiss as surrender. The reported mechanism for Iranian access to some tens of billions in frozen assets via Qatar is the kind of step that registers; a deal that delivers pragmatists nothing concrete will be killed from within, and the alternative is the escalation ladder described above, with global consequences that the World Bank has already begun pricing in. In exchange, Washington should expect the reciprocal concessions it actually wants: an enrichment ceiling, the normalization of Hormuz traffic, restraint on missiles and proxies, all sequenced into the second phase.
The war did not end the Iranian regime’s oldest foreign-policy debate; it reopened it, under fire and under a new supreme leader. Whether the regime manages its confrontations is being decided in Tehran, and any deal with Washington will stand or fall on the answer.
