For years, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader and ultimate powerbroker, has been insisting to his people that there would be no war with the United States or Israel. That claim was shattered when more than 1,000 Iranians were killed in June’s 12-day war. Now he warns against the country sliding into a “state of ‘no war, no peace.’” The diagnosis isn’t wrong—but refusing to confront hard choices is vintage Khamenei.
Rather than signal a strategic rethink, his latest reshuffles merely paper over factional rivalries. And instead of pushing harder for a diplomatic breakthrough while talks still sputter along, many officials in Tehran are clinging to the illusion that China and Russia will rescue Iran from Western pressure. That is hope, not strategy. And it leaves Iran’s fate in the hands of powers that have repeatedly shown they will never risk much on Tehran’s behalf.
The 12-day war with Israel and the United States should have been a wake-up call. Israeli—and later U.S.—strikes exposed glaring weaknesses in Iran’s air defenses and damaged parts of its nuclear infrastructure. The regime has not looked so fragile since 1979. Yet Tehran still insists on its sovereign right to enrich uranium; rejects limits on its missile program; and shows no intent to roll back proxy interventions in Lebanon, Yemen, or elsewhere that the United States, Israel, and Arab countries deem destabilizing. Amid crisis at home, President Masoud Pezeshkian is preparing to address the United Nations General Assembly this month. Supporters insist his visit cannot be another symbolic performance. What will it take for Tehran to embrace a much-needed strategic pivot?
Already judged by many as the weakest president in the Islamic Republic’s history, Pezeshkian is denounced by hard-liners as naive for calling for accommodation with Iran’s enemies. Although there is widespread appetite for change both in society at large and in the political elite around Pezeshkian, Khamenei keeps him on a short leash, and his calls for reform keep hitting walls. Yet Pezeshkian is not alone; figures such as former President Hassan Rouhani and former Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif are also pressing for a reset and new paradigms.
For now, though, the faction-ridden system cannot unify around de-escalation. Tehran remains nominally open to diplomacy, and some progress with the International Atomic Energy Agency is underway, most recently seen in the Cairo meeting between the agency’s chief and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Such incremental steps keep diplomacy alive but fall far short of the decisive turn the crisis demands. Instead of bold moves to break the stalemate with Washington, the regime is signaling that it is prepared to absorb limited clashes with Israel and the United States—or even a snapback of U.N. sanctions, code for refusing deep concessions.
Several factors drive this hesitation, above all Khamenei himself. His revolutionary identity is built on never yielding to the United States, and he will not abandon that legacy unless the payoff is unmistakably greater. So far, U.S. President Donald Trump has offered no such incentive. Washington, in fact, shows little sign of having a coherent strategy for compromise with Iran beyond pressing for capitulation on three issues: enrichment, missiles, and its network of militant allies. In the absence of clarity, Tehran assumes the Iran file has been subcontracted to Israel—making a negotiated deal even more perilous from Khamenei’s perspective.
Meanwhile, Khamenei’s ability to prepare the country for greater turmoil is constrained, leaving him to shuffle the national security team around without authorizing a fundamental change of course. And he still clings to the hope that U.S. rivalry with China and Russia will create exit ramps from Western pressure—even as many in Tehran warn against mistaking Beijing’s pageantry for protection.
The Revolutionary Guard generals, too, remain convinced that they can ride out pressure. Three observations feed that confidence. First, the regime did not buckle during the 12-day war, and the public did not rise against it at its most vulnerable moment; the lesson drawn, or perhaps the gamble, is that society is angry but not yet revolutionary.
Second, the United States and Israel show no coherent plan for regime change; at most, Iran should expect intermittent, limited strikes that the leadership believes it can survive, as it did in June.
Third, hard-liners read the escalating U.S.-China fight as political cover if U.N. sanctions snap back. This hope dates back to the early 2000s but gained momentum with Pezeshkian’s debut in China. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summitry and military parade optics were seen as a signal that China (with Russia) will not let the Islamist regime fall.
That is a perilous bet. As Shargh, one of Iran’s leading newspapers, warned, this approach risks turning Iran into a proving ground for great-power competition, a Middle Eastern echo of Ukraine. Just as Kyiv has become the arena where Moscow and Washington are testing each other’s resolve, Tehran could find itself reduced to a pawn in a contest between the “club of the powerful”—the United States and Europe on one side, Russia and China on the other.
Inside Tehran, pragmatists have gone on the offensive. Rouhani recently called the 12-day war a “mini-World War III,” in which the Western and Eastern blocs tested military hardware. He and other prominent figures argue that intrusive nuclear transparency for bounded relief is the only exit from the sanctions-security spiral. Rouhani has even put a price on years of delay—claiming that hard-line opposition during Ebrahim Raisi’s presidency (2021-24) to rejoining the Iran nuclear deal under U.S. President Joe Biden cost Iran some $500 billion and helped pave the way to today’s snapback crisis.
Such tough questioning is not confined to moderates. Former Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi recently revealed on national television that a deal had been possible as early as 2009 had President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad not scuttled it. These public revelations are no accident; they reflect an undercurrent of fear about another round of war.
Yet instead of embracing the need for policy recalibration, Khamenei and the security establishment are playing with semantics. The regime’s guiding rule is to keep power in the hands of the khodi (“one of us”). Since June, the most notable personnel shift has been Ali Larijani’s elevation to head of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC). A seasoned insider with a fluctuating career in recent years, Larijani is today cast as a centrist antidote to ideologues demanding defiance. He has urged Washington to respect Tehran’s red lines, noting that “the path for negotiations with the U.S. is not closed.”
So far, Larijani’s biggest change has been in personnel. He appointed Ali Bagheri—once the hard-line shadow of nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili—as his deputy. Bagheri used to deride the nuclear deal as national humiliation, but after leading talks under Raisi, he shifted markedly, defending negotiations as a tool for securing national interests and even signaling openness to Europe. His appointment reflects both Khamenei’s balancing act and the recognition that even former anti-deal firebrands have recalibrated under the weight of governing realities.
Talk of moving the nuclear file from the Foreign Ministry to the SNSC reflects structural realities and mounting frustration. In practice, the SNSC already sets the red lines; the Foreign Ministry—today led by Araghchi—executes policy. Stripping it formally of responsibility would change optics, not authority.
Still, Araghchi’s performance has drawn fire. Once welcomed as a steady hand, he is now accused of weak legal analysis, particularly his “naive” interpretation of snapback, militarized rhetoric ill-suited for diplomacy, and failure to articulate even a midterm strategy. Veteran diplomats say he too often addresses domestic audiences rather than building bridges abroad. Defenders counter that he faces extraordinary constraints: Trump’s return to the White House, escalation with Israel, and the weakening of Iran’s proxy network. But the broader point remains: Iran’s Foreign Ministry is structurally reactive, boxed in by higher authorities, and rarely able to set its own agenda.
This debate has become urgent as Pezeshkian prepares to address the U.N. General Assembly in New York this month. Spiraling economic hardship, a fragile domestic order, and looming snapback sanctions demand tangible diplomatic outcomes. The hope is that with Larijani’s return to the SNSC, decision-making can be accelerated and backed by the full weight of the security establishment. Unless Iran defines a clearer stance before Pezeshkian lands in New York, the trip risks repeating a familiar cycle: lofty speeches abroad, paralysis at home, and a nuclear file adrift between institutions—while Tehran clings to the fading promise of salvation from the East.
Pezeshkian’s recent trip to China highlighted what Tehran calls its “Eastern backstop”: local currency trade deals, pledges of cooperation, and warm words of solidarity. But Moscow can at best buy Iran time, not guarantee its security, while Beijing’s value lies in commerce, not in protection.
Barring BIG DEVELOPMENTS, the baseline is grim: Snapback completes in late September or early October; Moscow and Beijing refuse to “recognize” it and dull its edges; Iran leans further into gray networks and nondollar pipes; the economic drag deepens; and the security track stays in managed escalation rather than breaking into a major war. That is a holding pattern.
The alternative demands political courage. Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard would need to permit intrusive nuclear inspections now—before snapback sanctions take effect—while Pezeshkian’s government tests a limited bargain of real relief in exchange for verifiable caps and sequencing that yields tangible benefits, not empty promises.
Russia and China can buy Iran time to attempt such a deal, but they cannot replace it. Meanwhile, Iran’s idea of deterrence needs recalibrating. Missiles and proxy groups are not enough to protect the Iranian homeland. Economic stability and social cohesion, by contrast, provide stronger protection at lower cost. Even Pezeshkian has admitted as much, warning that weapons mean little without national unity.
Iran still has options. But the most consequential choice is not East versus West—it is whether to blink. Trading limited nuclear leverage for verifiable relief and a path back into the global economy would be costly, controversial, and reversible if the West reneges again as it did after the 2015 nuclear deal. That’s still preferable to circling the runway, hoping limited wars stay limited and ceremonial optics pass for strategic protection. If Tehran wants to avoid becoming the staging ground for a global power rivalry not of its making, verified de-escalation for real relief will be the cost of maintaining control over its own destiny.