Iranian Elites Are Not in Agreement About Negotiations

The Iran-U.S. cease-fire is holding. A memorandum of understanding has been signed. The first round of talks in Switzerland produced a road map with a 60-day window for a final agreement. Working groups on nuclear enrichment, sanctions, and implementation have been formed. The Strait of Hormuz is open again, and the Iranian rial has gained over 15 percent against the dollar since the deal was announced.

From the outside, it looks like unity. Iran's 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. IRGC Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani has called Iran's negotiators and soldiers alike men cut from the same cloth of "armed resistance."

But look closer, and the consensus is far narrower than it appears. What Iran's establishment agrees on is stopping a war that was costing more than anyone could sustain. On the far harder question — how Iran should position itself toward the outside world going forward — the Islamic Republic is as divided as it has ever been.

## The Hard-Liners Are Not Silent

Within days of the Swiss talks, the Paydari Front and the network around Saeed Jalili — the hard-line former nuclear negotiator who lost the 2024 presidential runoff to Masoud Pezeshkian — launched a coordinated attempt to strip parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf of his position. They pushed for a public floor vote in what one account described as "round-the-clock political blackmail." The timing was deliberate: the challenge came during the most delicate phase of diplomacy, aimed at weakening the negotiating track by removing one of its key institutional anchors.

Ghalibaf survived, securing the speakership for a seventh year — evidence that the hard-liners, while loud and occasionally influential, remain vastly outnumbered by the regime's pragmatic center. But he wasn't their only target. By early June, reformist commentators were describing the persistent calls for President Pezeshkian's resignation as a deliberate strategy of attrition — media campaigns, parliamentary obstruction, and recurring resignation rumors designed to drain a pragmatic government's political capital.

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?" — widely read as an indirect attack on the new supreme leader's legitimacy. The attack came from inside the system, not from reformists or exiles, but from a regime loyalist questioning the very succession he is supposed to defend.

## Two Camps, One System

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 "resistance" or "endurance" camp makes a coherent case. Hard-line outlet Kayhan argues that Iran's earlier restraint toward the West yielded nothing and that attrition now favors Tehran. The editor of Tasnim insists that no agreement with Washington would be better than a bad one, and that the central lesson of the 2015 nuclear deal was that Americans cannot be trusted. A senior cleric has framed the talks as a project to force Iran's surrender. At the extreme, one analyst advocated for Iran pursuing a nuclear weapon and predicted renewed war by fall.

The pro-diplomacy camp is no less assertive. President Pezeshkian has repeatedly argued that war inevitably carries severe economic costs — inflation, shortages, disruptions to oil exports — and that those costs fall hardest on ordinary Iranians. 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.

Analyst Kourosh Ahmadi has directly attacked the comforting belief that time is on Iran's side, pointing out that a prolonged Hormuz squeeze would hurt Iran's own battered economy more than its advocates admit.

## The IRGC Is Not a Monolith

The old narrative — civilian doves versus IRGC hard-liners — no longer captures the reality. The war has pushed the security establishment to the center of decision-making, and the IRGC now dominates the negotiating process rather than sitting outside it as a veto player. That means it cannot straightforwardly lead a revolt against the very track it is supervising.

The hard-line pressure on Ghalibaf came not from the Guards as an institution but from a political-clerical bloc. And one of its targets — Ghalibaf himself — came up through the IRGC. The meaningful fault line today runs through Iran's institutions, not neatly between them.

This matters because the stakes are not abstract. Iran retains the capacity to escalate across several domains simultaneously. Intelligence assessments from mid-June concluded that Iran has rebuilt to roughly three-quarters of its prewar missile force, possibly augmented by newly delivered Russian systems, after firing approximately 1,850 missiles during the fighting. An emerging doctrine articulated by the Expediency Council's Sadegh Larijani treats attacks on Iran's regional 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.

## The Strait of Hormuz as a Dial

Iran's 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. Tehran has floated a "controlled access" regime managed with Oman rather than under a U.S. umbrella.

The pressure on the UAE illustrates how this works. Tehran's information campaign against Abu Dhabi and the thousands of missiles and drones fired at the Emirates during the war were not random — they are a dial the endurance camp wants to turn up or down depending on internal dynamics. Watch the pressure on Gulf states, and you can read the internal argument in Tehran in real time.

## Why This Matters Beyond Tehran

For now, the pragmatists have the upper hand. Ghalibaf survived. The new supreme leader is building the domestic cover a sustainable deal would require. Washington has reportedly softened on its maximal demands, including zero enrichment and the transfer of Iran's uranium abroad. The structure taking shape is deliberately modest: a two-stage framework that ends the fighting and reopens Hormuz now, with the nuclear file pushed to a 60-day second round.

But the pragmatists' advantage is contingent. The spoilers retain what they need to raise the cost of compromise: media platforms, parliamentary leverage, and a security bureaucracy. Analyst Ahmad Zeidabadi warned in mid-June that a small group of ideological hard-liners appears willing to manufacture instability, placing their own interests above the state's.

The danger is not that hard-liners will reject the deal outright. It is that they will make any deal so politically expensive at home that it fractures before it can deliver results. As Zeidabadi put it: the threat to this agreement now lives inside the Iranian system.

## What This Means For You

- **Oil and gas prices remain volatile.** Iran's internal divisions mean that any deal is fragile. Hard-liner provocations — a missile test, a Hormuz disruption, a proxy escalation — could reverse market relief in hours. If you track energy costs or invest in energy stocks, assume continued volatility through the 60-day negotiation window.

- **The cease-fire could still collapse — but probably won't.** The pragmatists have momentum, and Iran's economy needs relief. The most likely scenario is a bumpy but ultimately successful second-phase negotiation, with periodic escalations that rattle markets but don't derail the process. Plan for noise, not catastrophe.

- **Watch the Gulf states as a barometer.** Pressure on the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar from Iran is the best real-time indicator of which camp in Tehran is gaining ground. When the dial turns up, it signals hard-liner influence. When it turns down, it signals pragmatic momentum.

- **Sanctions relief, if it comes, will reshape regional markets.** Iran's economy is in deep distress — fuel rationing, looming stagflation, and a crude oil export squeeze. Even partial sanctions relief would unlock significant capital flows into the region, creating both opportunities and competitive disruptions for businesses operating in the Gulf.

- **U.S. policy choices matter more than rhetoric.** If Washington wants the cease-fire to last, it needs to give the pro-deal camp something tangible to point to — front-loaded, visible benefits that hard-liners cannot easily dismiss as surrender. A deal that delivers pragmatists nothing concrete will be killed from within.