Whom Is the U.S. Negotiating with in Iran?
On March 1st, a day after Israel, guided by American intelligence, killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in a series of air strikes, the little-known hard-line speaker of Iran’s parliament vowed revenge. “You have crossed our red line and must pay the price,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf declared on state media. “We will deal you such terrifying blows.” He wore funereal black. His face glowered. He called President Donald Trump and the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, “filthy criminals.”
Six weeks later, after continued strikes by the United States and Israel killed dozens of Iranian government leaders, the sixty-four-year-old Ghalibaf has emerged as one of the regime’s most powerful figures. And, over the weekend, he made history. In Pakistan, he led an Iranian delegation in marathon peace talks with the U.S., marking the highest-level meeting between the two countries since Iran’s Islamic Revolution, in 1979. Ultimately, the twenty-one hours of negotiations ended in a deadlock, with the main sticking point being the extent to which Iran’s nuclear activity will be allowed to continue. The disagreement prompted Trump to announce a U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, to pressure Iran into accepting a deal by cutting off its ability to export oil. Still, Ghalibaf has made an impression on the U.S. delegation. On Sunday, in a post on Truth Social, Trump wrote that his negotiators, including Vice-President J. D. Vance, the Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, became “very friendly and respectful” toward Iran’s representatives. The foreign-affairs columnist David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post that “after long hours of discussion, Ghalibaf had impressed the American team as a refined and professional bargainer—and potential leader of a new Iran.”
Since Khamenei’s death, Trump has openly expressed interest in an outcome similar to what the U.S. was able to accomplish in Venezuela, viewing it as a blueprint for the current war. After U.S. Special Operations Forces captured Venezuela’s authoritarian ruler, Nicolás Maduro, in an overnight raid, the White House quickly made a deal with Maduro’s Vice-President, Delcy Rodríguez, to run the country in accordance with U.S. aims. “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario,” Trump told the Times in March. Later that month, he told reporters at a Cabinet meeting that taking control of Iran’s oil was an “option,” noting that the United States had made “billions of billions of dollars” in its deal with the Rodríguez government to access Venezuela’s oil reserves. And, on Sunday, he posted an article on Truth Social that compared his strategy for the U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz to American tactics in Venezuela. There, U.S. forces had seized tankers and attacked boats allegedly used by drug traffickers before capturing Maduro. Trump, the article gushed, “brought the Venezuelan economy to its knees with a naval blockade that strangled the nation’s oil revenues.” The talks in Pakistan illustrated this aim. After leaving Islamabad, Vance said on Fox News that there had been “some good conversations” with Iran over the weekend and that progress had been made. And on Tuesday, at an event held by the conservative group Turning Point USA, Vance said that “the person who is effectively running the country in Iran” sat across from him in the talks, referring to Ghalibaf, adding that he thought the Iranian delegation “wanted to make a deal.” Trump also declared Iran’s new leadership as “less radical and much more reasonable,” and insisted that regime change has already occurred “because the one regime was decimated, destroyed. They’re all dead. The next regime is mostly dead. And the third regime—we’re dealing with different people than anybody’s dealt with before.”
But several Iran experts told me that it was highly unlikely there would be anyone similar to a Delcy Rodríguez-like figure in the Iranian leadership. The newly elevated leaders, including Ghalibaf, owe their power to the same authoritarian theocracy that sustained the Ayatollah’s regime. They were inculcated in the belief that America is the “Great Satan”—and that mentality hasn’t changed. The structure of the Iranian government is also not similar to that of Venezuela, which was highly centralized and relied partly on a cult of personality revolving around Maduro, and Hugo Chávez before him. Although the Ayatollah certainly operated as the head of state, Iran’s power structure is largely decentralized, with several overlapping spheres of influence including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the judiciary, and a specialized, all-powerful council that dictates national-security policy. This structure has allowed the Iranian regime to survive decapitation strikes, and to regroup and fight back. Since the Ayatollah was killed, Iran has gained leverage over the United States and Israel by blockading the Strait of Hormuz and torpedoing the global economy. “The Iranians don’t feel the need for a Delcy,” Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Brookings Institution who has advised both Democratic and Republican Presidents on Iran policy, told me. “They believe they won the war, and they believe they still hold the trump card of control over the strait,” adding that the blockade “will continue to have massive economic implications for the entire world. As long as they can control that, they don’t see the need to present a more amenable or compliant face to the Americans.” Iranians, Maloney said, are “a very proud and determined people,” and unless they faced “a full-fledged defeat,” it’s unlikely that someone from the existing system “would be prepared to abase themselves in the way that Delcy Rodríguez has.”
An unexpected consequence of the U.S. and Israeli decision to strike Iran is that the country’s new leaders appear to be, in fact, more hard-line, more militaristic, and more reckless than their predecessors. In addition to Ghalibaf, General Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, who now leads the Supreme National Security Council, and Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi, the new commander of the I.R.G.C., are currently in charge of the Iranian government’s day-to-day operations. And, despite Ghalibaf’s appearance at the negotiations in Pakistan, Vahidi and Zolghadr are widely seen as far more influential than him behind the scenes. Ghalibaf “is a senior figure, but he’s not the one who truly holds power in Iran,” Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli defense-intelligence officer with expertise in Iran, posted on X, shortly after Vance spoke at the Turning Point USA event. “At most, he would have come to any engagement with clearly defined limits set in Tehran. He is neither empowered nor inclined to compromise on core strategic issues.”
Ghalibaf, Zolghadr, and Vahidi all rose to prominence during the Iran-Iraq War of the nineteen-eighties, as part of a class of experienced I.R.G.C. commanders, and they maintain close ties to the hawkish wing of the paramilitary group, which the U.S. has designated a foreign terrorist organization. In January, before the war, Trump called upon Iranians to keep demonstrating in the streets as the regime viciously cracked down on protesters, killing thousands. He declared on Truth Social that “HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” This crackdown was largely conducted by the I.R.G.C. and the Basij, an ideological militia it controls and deploys to suppress domestic dissent. So, the leaders that the Trump Administration has dubbed “less radical” are among Iran’s worst abusers of human rights. “You now have power shifting from the office of the Supreme Leader to the Revolutionary Guards, and a group of Revolutionary Guards leaders who have a very dim view of the outside world, of the U.S. in particular, and also have a long track record in domestic repression,” Ali Vaez, the Iran Project Director at the International Crisis Group, told me.
In January, Ghalibaf branded the nationwide protests as “sedition,” declaring them instigated by the United States and Israel. He praised the police and the Basij, for their brutal crackdown. Ghalibaf has long been involved in brutal attacks against protesters. Early in his career, in July, 1999, when he was the I.R.G.C. Air Force commander, Ghalibaf signed a letter alongside other I.R.G.C. leaders warning Mohammad Khatami, a President who had campaigned on a reformist platform, that they would remove him from power if he didn’t suppress ongoing student protests triggered by the censorship of a newspaper that advocated for more liberalization. He has also admitted to going out into those protests on a motorcycle and beating people in the crowd with a wooden stick. In 2003, as Iran’s national police chief, Ghalibaf played a central role in the violent clampdown on student demonstrations. He reportedly boasted about ordering police to fire live rounds at demonstrators. Later, from 2005 to 2017, Ghalibaf served as mayor of Tehran , where he was credited with building bridges and highways, and improving public transportation. He unsuccessfully ran for President several times. He has also long been dogged by accusations of corruption; in 2022, he took heat after his family reportedly went on a lavish shopping spree and purchased luxury apartments in Istanbul. Ghalibaf has denied the allegations. At the same time, he has shown a chameleonlike ability to change his image. In 2008, while serving as Tehran’s mayor, he visited Davos, Switzerland, where he was the subject of a profile in the Times. The paper described Ghalibaf as an “authoritarian modernizer” who had “earned a reputation as someone who gets things done.” He told the paper that he favored a more open Iran to attract foreign investment. Iran, he said, didn’t want to build nuclear weapons, and that dialogue with Washington was possible if it treated Iran as a partner, not as a renegade.
The seventy-two-year-old Zolghadr spent much of his career climbing the ranks of the I.R.G.C., eventually becoming its deputy commander. He has also taken on a number of high-level political, judicial, and security roles in the regime. Zolghadr played a central role in the regime’s strategies for cracking down on anti-government demonstrations, including in the 2009 Green Movement protests. In 2007, the U.N. Security Council sanctioned him for his role in advancing Iran’s missile programs, and in 2023, the U.K. sanctioned him for involvement in “nuclear activity.” In his current role, he succeeded Ali Larijani, who was killed in an Israeli air strike. Larijani oversaw the bloody repression of protesters in January but was widely seen as a pragmatist, and more moderate than Zolghadr. His appointment is “more proof of hardline military aka IRGC consolidation,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert at the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote in a post on X, adding that there can be no doubt “that the war expedited and accelerated the ongoing trend of increasing IRGC control of the country.”
Vahidi, who is sixty-seven, is the newly appointed head of the I.R.G.C. Both of Vahidi’s predecessors were killed by Israeli air strikes—the first was killed last summer, the second in the latest fighting—and he took over the role in early March. A former commander of the Quds Force, the special-forces unit of the I.R.G.C., Vahidi played a foundational role in building up Iran’s asymmetric warfare and intelligence operations after the Iran-Iraq War. Vahidi has also served as Iran’s defense minister and interior minister. An arrest warrant was issued for him in Argentina, for his alleged role in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires which killed eighty-five people. Iran has denied involvement. Vahidi was sanctioned by the United States and the European Union for human-rights violations for his role overseeing security forces that violently suppressed nationwide protests, killing hundreds, following the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini. (Amini, a twenty-two-year-old student, was arrested for not wearing a hijab, or head scarf, properly, and she died in police custody.) Mohammad Ali Shabani, the editor of Amwaj, a U.K.-based news outlet covering the Middle East, wrote in a post on X that Vahidi’s predecessors as head of the I.R.G.C. were “schoolteachers compared to this guy. The man is brutal. Hardliners wasting no time filling vacancies thanks to Israel.”
Other influential hard-liners include Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i and the national police chief, Ahmad-Reza Radan. Both were instrumental in the deadly suppression of protesters in December and January, and they have continued to order arrests, executions, and large deployments of the Basij forces to intimidate Iranians and prevent dissent. “For the foreseeable future, Iran is going to remain a very repressive state and probably become even more dangerous to its own people than it has been for the preceding decades,” Maloney told me.
Then there is Mojtaba Khamenei, the fifty-six-year-old son of Ali Khamenei, and his successor as Ayatollah. Under normal circumstances, Mojtaba’s position as Ayatollah would make him Iran’s most powerful religious, political, and military leader. But the younger Khamenei hasn’t been seen in public or photographed since the war began. He reportedly suffered severe injuries in the Israeli air strike that killed his father. What’s clear is that Mojtaba has strong ties to the I.R.G.C. As a teen-ager, during the Iran-Iraq War, he served in the group’s Habib Battalion, and he has maintained close links to its leaders since, including as a part of the “Habib Circle,” an alumni group comprised of influential I.R.G.C. hard-liners. Before this year, Mojtaba was relatively unknown, working in the shadows of his father’s office. He had never held public office or given religious or political speeches. Few photos or videos of him exist. Yet he wielded influence. In the late two-thousands, American diplomatic cables, published by WikiLeaks, described him as “the power behind the robes” and someone who was a “capable and forceful” personality inside the regime. He’s considered more ideologically extreme than his father. He has backed regime hard-liners over reformists and reportedly approved the crackdowns on the Green Movement protests. A 2008 cable reported that he “has long maintained a close relationship” with the then Tehran mayor Ghalibaf, adding that “Mojtaba is close to and well briefed by IRGC senior leaders,” in particular Zolghadr. His father, though, was opposed to hereditary succession and rejected the idea of Mojtaba as his replacement. But I.R.G.C. generals have elevated Mojtaba to become Ayatollah anyway, despite his limited religious credentials, forcing out more moderate candidates and leaving him in their debt. “It is a theocracy now only in name. In practice, it is a military system. At the end of the day, power really is in the hands of the Revolutionary Guards,” Vaez told me. “When Trump says, ‘I’ve changed the regime,’ he hasn’t really changed the regime, but he has transformed it, in the sense that the power dynamic between the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guards has changed. They were subservient to him. Now he is subservient to them.”
The new leaders of Iran have swiftly moved away from the late Khamenei’s blueprint for protecting the nation, stamping their own, more extreme approach on Iran’s third Islamic Republic. The killing of the frail, eighty-six-year-old Ayatollah has helped speed up aggressive tactics and strategies that Iran’s hawkish diehards within the I.R.G.C. have for years wanted to use against the United States and Israel. They had been unable to pursue direct conflict out of deference to their Supreme Leader, who had sought to protect the Islamic Republic’s survival by avoiding long, debilitating full-scale wars that could play out on Iranian soil. They chafed as Khamenei did little to help Iran’s proxies—Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza—in their conflicts with Israel, and to prevent Syrian rebels from ousting the Bashar al-Assad regime. They were incensed when Khamenei didn’t forcefully retaliate after an American air strike in 2020 that killed Qassem Suleimani, the powerful and much-revered I.R.G.C. officer and Quds Force commander. That anger was only heightened when, last April, Khamenei chose to enter negotiations with the Trump Administration over Iran’s nuclear program. One former I.R.G.C. commander, Saeed Ghasemi, accused the regime of trampling “on the blood of the general” by negotiating with “Soleimani’s killer.” As the talks broke down, Iran was attacked by Israel and the U.S., with American warplanes bombing three Iranian nuclear facilities, during what became known as the Twelve-Day War. Even then, Iran opted for a tempered response, symbolically retaliating by firing missiles at a U.S. base in Qatar while giving advance notice to limit American casualties.
Many within the I.R.G.C. believed that the absence of a strong reciprocal attack on U.S. targets showed weakness and opened Iran to more strikes. This war has proved them right. “It’s a leadership, particularly in the Guards, who didn’t believe that Khamenei’s restraint, and the restraints of the previous generation of Guard leaders that Israel eliminated, actually protected Iran,” Vali Nasr, an Iran expert and professor of Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “They don’t want war, but the new leadership thinks that, strategically, Khamenei was wrong, and that his stance invited the current aggression that they are facing. They’re more willing to take risks. They’re willing to do things that, previously, wouldn’t have been done.”
When Israel attacked Iran’s South Pars gas fields, the country’s largest source of energy, on March 18th, Iran retaliated by striking a massive liquefied-natural-gas hub in Qatar, causing major damage and threatening billions of dollars in lost revenue. The attack demonstrated that the new Iranian regime has little to no concern about damaging their relationship with Qatar. Under the elder Khamenei, it’s unlikely Iran would have attacked Qatar in such a manner, Nasr explained. Iran’s new leaders are basically saying, “You escalate, we escalate, or we escalate even more.” They also appear to care more about preserving Iran’s proxy forces, making a ceasefire between the Israeli military and Hezbollah in Lebanon part of a broader deal to end the war.
Despite their hard-line approach, Iran’s new leadership also seems more responsive to U.S. negotiations than Iran has been in the past. “You could say it’s more dangerous, but at the same time we’re seeing they’re not averse to talking,” Nasr continued. “And maybe even more willing to talk than Khamenei was, because he had a strategy of no talking and no war. These guys are basically saying, We’re not afraid of war, but we’re also not afraid of talking.” Memories of the Iran-Iraq War may be weighing on their minds. The conflict built the careers of figures like Ghalibaf, Zolghadr, and Vahidi, transforming them into national heroes and demonstrating how Iran can resist attacks from superior militaries—lessons that have been integral to Iran’s ability to survive thousands of U.S. and Israeli air strikes. But the Iran-Iraq conflict also showed what happens if they overplay their hand. At multiple points, Iran had an opportunity to reach a deal to end the war. But the young theocracy chose to keep fighting, determined to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein; after Iran finally agreed to sign a U.N.-brokered ceasefire eight years later, in 1988, its economy and military lay shattered, and as many as six hundred thousand Iranians were dead. Iran’s new leaders “had some tremendous successes, but they also experienced the absolute horrors of war and then a very unsettled outcome,” Maloney said. “To some extent, they have an appreciation for the costs of war and the difficulty of achieving a conclusive victory.”
During that war, Iran’s new leaders gained a high threshold for pain. And that threshold is what the current war hinges on, especially if the U.S. Navy successfully blockades the Strait of Hormuz: Can Iran handle more economic pain than its foes? If the U.S. blockade succeeds, it could cost the regime as much as four hundred and thirty-five million dollars a day in lost export and import revenues, according to Miad Maleki, a former U.S. Treasury official and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. And Iran needs these funds to rebuild hundreds of cities and towns, critical infrastructure, and industrial capacity that have been destroyed by air strikes. Economic implosion, the regime knows, could threaten its very survival. After the marathon day of negotiations over the weekend failed to secure a deal, Ghalibaf didn’t immediately revert to his bellicose rhetoric. On Sunday, he wrote in a post on X that the United States “ultimately failed to gain the trust of the Iranian delegation,” but he left the door open for future talks, which now seem focussed on three issues: Iran’s nuclear enrichment, control over the strait, and a ceasefire in Lebanon. “America has understood our logic and principles, and now it’s time for it to decide whether it can earn our trust or not,” Ghalibaf wrote. On Tuesday, as Americans grapple with rising gas prices, Trump said that talks could resume by the end of the week.
Even if a deal is reached, there’s another big hurdle: selling it to the hard-liners in the I.R.G.C. Many commanders in the younger generation, who cut their teeth in Iran’s proxy wars around the Middle East, are more extreme, including some who believe that acquiring a nuclear weapon is the only deterrent against future attacks by the U.S. and Israel. “There is a greater degree of radicalism among the younger generation of the Guard,” Maloney explained, adding that “they have not been schooled by the terror and frustrations that occurred during the Iran-Iraq War.” Some hard-liners have openly criticized the regime for agreeing to a ceasefire, saying that the United States cannot be trusted. Ebrahim Rezaei, a spokesperson for the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, urged Iranian officials to “cancel negotiations with the defeated devil so they know that we are not in a position of weakness.”
This open dissent demonstrates the problem facing the Trump Administration as it works with Ghalibaf, potentially envisioning him as an America-friendly partner who could lead Iran. “Ghalibaf himself does fit the Delcy Rodríguez profile,” Vaez, of the International Crisis Group, told me. “The problem with him, and in general, is that nobody can play that role and survive politically. This has to be a consensual decision because Iran has never been a one-man show.” ♦