When Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi posted on X that the Strait of Hormuz had reopened to international shipping, Donald Trump confirmed the news within the hour. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had countermanded its own foreign minister, declared the strait closed again, and opened fire on at least one Indian-flagged tanker off the coast of Oman. A captain's audio recording, passed between shipowners over the weekend, captured a Revolutionary Guard officer warning in clear English that any vessel attempting passage without IRGC permission would be "destroyed."
The episode was not a bait-and-switch. The foreign minister was taking orders from people who could no longer enforce them. Whatever Araghchi had been told in Tehran on Thursday, by Friday a different faction was making the calls. Tasnim, the news agency closest to the Revolutionary Guards, ran a series of posts savaging him by name, calling his tweet "a complete lack of tact in communication" and effectively demanding the Supreme National Security Council step in to put the foreign ministry back in its place. A senior hardline lawmaker, Morteza Mahmoudi, went further and called for Araghchi's removal, accusing him of handing Washington a gift by briefly knocking down oil prices.
This is the Islamic Republic the United States is now trying to negotiate with. The question Vice President JD Vance and his team faced in Islamabad two weekends ago, and which they will face again if a second round of talks materializes before the ceasefire expires, is not what concessions Tehran will accept. It is which Tehran can deliver on anything at all.
A regime without an arbitrator
Seven weeks after a US-Israeli decapitation strike killed Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war, the Islamic Republic still has not buried him. His son Mojtaba, formally installed by the Assembly of Experts on 9 March after a bombed-out vote held partially online, has not appeared in public since. A diplomatic memo circulated to Gulf allies and reported by The Times in early April assesses that Mojtaba is unconscious in Qom, severely wounded in the same airstrike that killed his father, his mother, his wife, and one of his sons. Two statements have been read in his name on state television. An AI-generated video of him studying a map of Israel's Dimona nuclear facility was released earlier this month. That is the sum total of his public presence.
The Iranian system was built around a referee. Ali Khamenei, lacking Khomeini's clerical authority and personal charisma, spent thirty-six years constructing the office of the supreme leader into a machine that could mediate between the Revolutionary Guards, the clerical establishment, the bonyad foundations that control much of the economy, and the elected institutions. When two factions disagreed, he ruled. When the IRGC pushed too hard against the foreign ministry, he pulled them back. That arbitration function is gone, and there is nobody with the authority to replace it. President Masoud Pezeshkian, a moderate who barely survived the war himself, sits on a three-person transitional council with the head of the judiciary and a senior cleric, but the council was designed for an interregnum measured in days, not months.
Into that vacuum has stepped Major General Ahmad Vahidi. The Institute for the Study of War, which has been tracking the internal Iranian shake-out almost daily, now identifies Vahidi as the de facto top of the regime. He is a long-serving IRGC officer, the first commander of the Quds Force from 1988 to 1997, and one of the senior generals who pressured the Assembly of Experts in March to install Mojtaba Khamenei rather than a more independent cleric. He was named in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires; Interpol still has a red notice out for him. He is now, by most credible accounts, running the country.
Vahidi's people tried to insert one of his deputies, the IRGC veteran Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, directly into the Iranian negotiating delegation that flew to Islamabad on 11 April. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who led the delegation, and Araghchi as his deputy both objected on the grounds that Zolghadr had no diplomatic experience. Zolghadr came anyway, and during the 21-hour marathon session at the Serena Hotel, he sent a complaint back to Tehran accusing Araghchi of exceeding his mandate by signaling flexibility on Iranian support for the Axis of Resistance. The complaint reached Hossein Taeb, the former IRGC intelligence chief and Mojtaba Khamenei loyalist, who promptly recalled the delegation to Tehran. The talks collapsed before any framework could be agreed upon.
This was not the muscular, disciplined Iranian diplomacy of the JCPOA era. The 2015 nuclear deal was negotiated by a small team that flew between Geneva, Lausanne, and Vienna for eighteen months under the personal patronage of Khamenei himself. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif could deliver what he signed because the supreme leader had told the IRGC to stand down. The 2026 delegation arriving in Islamabad reportedly numbered around eighty people, of whom perhaps thirty had any decision-making role. Pakistani mediators told reporters afterwards that they spent large chunks of the weekend not bridging the gap between Iran and the United States but defusing arguments inside the Iranian camp. Among the delegates were Majid Takht-Ravanchi, who helped draft the JCPOA, and Mahmoud Nabavian, an anti-Western hardliner who rejects the very premise of compromise. They were sent into the same hotel suite to negotiate the survival of the regime.
Pragmatists, ideologues, and the people moving the money
The simplest way to map the divide is between pragmatic nationalists and ideological Islamists, and that map is roughly correct. The pragmatists, clustered around Pezeshkian, parts of the foreign ministry, and what survives of the old reformist political class, see the war as a catastrophe that has to be ended on whatever terms can be salvaged. Sanctions relief and reconstruction funding matter more than rhetorical victories. The ideologues, anchored in the IRGC and the Basij and amplified by hardline outlets like Tasnim and Kayhan, view the nuclear program and the Strait of Hormuz as non-negotiable instruments of state power and treat any flexibility as betrayal.
That framing misses the third actor, which is money.
A generation of senior IRGC officers and their commercial fronts have spent the last decade building parallel networks for evading sanctions. They control the shadow oil fleet that moves Iranian crude to China at small discounts. They run the front companies in Dubai that, until the recent Emirati crackdown, processed between sixteen and twenty-eight billion dollars a year of Iranian trade. They own port concessions, telecoms licenses, smuggling routes through Iraqi Kurdistan and Afghanistan, and stakes in the bonyad foundations that escape audit. The IRGC processes roughly half of Iran's oil exports directly. A meaningful sanctions deal would not just bring relief to ordinary Iranians; it would dismantle the rents that have made these officers personally wealthy and institutionally powerful. They have every reason to sabotage any agreement that would normalize Iran's economy. Networks tied to Mojtaba Khamenei and Ghalibaf are reportedly still moving assets abroad even now, jockeying for position in whatever post-war settlement emerges.
This is why the Strait of Hormuz fight is not really about the strait. The IRGC has begun charging up to two million dollars per ship for ad hoc transit permission, requiring vessels to register with the corps and pass close to specific Iranian islands. Roughly 150 ships normally cross daily. Even a fraction of that, monetized, generates serious money for the people running the gunboats. Reopening the strait under American terms means giving up that revenue stream and admitting the IRGC no longer controls the chokepoint. Closing it preserves both the cash and the bargaining position.
Iran's central bank told Pezeshkian in private last week that rebuilding the country could take twelve years. Government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani has already conceded that the state lacks the resources to compensate civilians whose homes were destroyed. The official damage estimate sits at $270 billion, roughly $3,000 per Iranian, and the US-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies puts it as high as $300 billion. The American naval blockade that began on 14 April is wiping out an estimated $435 million in daily economic activity. More than 90% of Iran's $109.7 billion in annual trade passes through the Strait of Hormuz, and almost all of it is now stopped. Sixty civilian aircraft are out of commission, twenty of them destroyed outright. Inflation on bread and cereals over the last twelve months: 140%. On red meat and poultry: 135%. On cooking oils: 219%. The Central Bank had to print a 10-million-rial note, the largest in Iranian history, just to keep payroll moving.
These numbers should, in a rational regime, push hard towards a deal. They are not pushing the IRGC in that direction at all. For the corps, economic collapse strengthens the patronage system that depends on rationing access to scarce hard currency and smuggled goods. A normal Iranian economy would be the IRGC's worst nightmare. A broken one, with the Guards as the gatekeeper of survival, is exactly what suits them.
The shifts inside Iranian society reflect the militarization. At a pro-government rally in Tehran two weeks ago, a woman without a headscarf led the chants, breaking a taboo that protesters in 2022 had been jailed and killed for challenging. Military communiqués are crowding out clerical sermons in state media. The municipal elections scheduled for later this year are reportedly being pushed back, with the IRGC arguing that wartime conditions make voting impractical. National police chief Ahmad-Reza Radan has stated openly that the regime now views all internal matters through the prism of war and that anyone protesting will be treated as an enemy combatant rather than a citizen. The state is becoming, by its own admission, a security apparatus first and a theocracy second.
What this means for Vance, Witkoff, and the Trump administration is that the people across the table in Islamabad cannot deliver. Ghalibaf is publicly mirroring the IRGC line on the Strait of Hormuz because he has no choice. Araghchi can sign whatever he likes; the Revolutionary Guard navy will keep firing on tankers regardless. American negotiators reportedly asked for a twenty-year suspension of uranium enrichment and were offered three to five years. The gap was not really between American and Iranian positions. The gap was between what the foreign ministry was authorized to discuss in the room and what the IRGC was prepared to accept in Tehran. Witkoff told Trump after the failed talks that it would be "difficult, if not impossible" to reach a deal. He was not being defeatist. He was describing the actual structure of the Iranian state in April 2026.
There is precedent for this, and it is not encouraging. During the 1979-81 hostage crisis, US negotiators repeatedly thought they had agreement, only to watch the deal evaporate when a faction inside the revolutionary chaos in Tehran lost ground to a rival. Algerian intermediaries spent fifteen months chasing a moving target. The Iranians who wanted a settlement did not control the Iranians who held the hostages, and the supreme leader was either unwilling or unable to enforce a single line. The current situation is structurally similar, except that there are no hostages and the timeline is much shorter. The two-week ceasefire expires on 22 April. Trump has 28,000 troops moving towards the region.
Pakistani Army Chief Asim Munir flew to Tehran on 15 April carrying what was described as a fresh message from Washington. He met Araghchi, and presumably others, and left without any public commitment to a second round. Pakistan's prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, then began a four-day tour of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey to drum up regional pressure for talks. Erdogan said publicly that there can be no negotiating "with clenched fists." None of this addresses the underlying problem, which is not that the Iranians are stubborn or that the Americans are impatient, but that nobody on the Iranian side has the authority to commit the Iranian state to anything.
When Wendy Sherman led the JCPOA negotiations, she said publicly that you cannot do a deal with Iran in a day, or even a week. It took eighteen months in 2013-15, with a unified Iranian delegation and a supreme leader who had explicitly told them to come home with an agreement. Rob Malley, who later served as Biden's Iran envoy, put the current dynamic this way: Trump is impulsive and temperamental; Iran's leadership is stubborn and tenacious. That captures the personalities. It does not capture the more fundamental problem, which is that the Iranian leadership Malley remembers no longer exists. There is a dead supreme leader nobody has buried, an unconscious successor nobody has seen, a foreign minister whose tweets are repudiated by his own government within twenty-four hours, and an IRGC general with an Interpol red notice running the show.
A Pakistani officer at the Serena Hotel told a Western reporter, off the record, that the most striking moment of the Islamabad talks came when the Iranian delegation arrived from the airport with a row of empty seats on their plane, photographs and bloodied belongings of children killed in the war placed on each one. It was a piece of theater and an effective one. But the more revealing image was inside the hotel: Iranian diplomats arguing with Iranian generals while Pakistani mediators waited in the corridor for the Iranians to figure out who was in charge.
Nobody is.