The assassinations of Iran’s senior leaders by Israel and the United States have triggered unprecedented churn within Tehran’s political and military establishment, eliminating the supreme leader and some of the most powerful men in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but have left in place a hard-line government and little hope of a diplomatic breakthrough, according to regional and Western officials.
Rather than usher in what President Donald Trump has called “more reasonable” leadership, the surviving Iranian regime is newly emboldened to inflict economic pain, pushing Tehran and Washington further apart in negotiations, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive details.
“Discussions are ongoing,” Trump said Wednesday in an address outlining his administration’s achievements a month into the war, saying operations would conclude in the next two or three weeks.
“If during this period of time no deal is made, we have our eyes on key targets,” Trump said. “If there is no deal, we are going to hit each and every one of their electric-generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously.” Trump also threatened to strike oil infrastructure.
But officials in the region say they see little hope of a negotiated breakthrough in the next few weeks, even as Israel continues to pursue its assassination campaign against senior Iranian leadership. In public comments, Iran’s leaders have played down talks with the United States and laid out steep demands to end the war, including reparations and formalized control over the Strait of Hormuz, with a right to collect tolls.
“They’ve demonstrated to the Gulf states how vulnerable they are and how vulnerable the global economy is,” said a European official briefed on diplomatic efforts to end the war. “So the price has gone up. The Strait of Hormuz never featured in any of these negotiations, and now it’s like front and center.”
A second European official, along with a former Trump administration official, confirmed the assessment that the war has emboldened Iran. But all cautioned that it is virtually impossible to judge the true impact of the assassinations on the strength of the Iranian regime from the outside.
The officials pointed to changes in behavior among Iran’s leadership, with fewer people appearing in public especially since Ali Larijani, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, was killed in a strike days after appearing at a Tehran rally marking a national holiday last month.
Yet Iran has continued to launch retaliatory attacks, often hitting high-value targets, demonstrating sustained command and control beyond the conflict’s initial days when units largely operated on autopilot under Iran’s “mosaic” defense strategy, which emphasizes decentralized autonomy. In recent weeks Iranian attacks have struck critical energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf, industrial and energy sites in Israel and key U.S. military installations, including a direct strike on an advanced U.S. spy plane.
As the Trump administration continues to explore the possibility of a negotiated end to the war, it believes the assassination campaign can be used to force Iran to capitulate, according to the former administration official, who worked in government earlier in the conflict.
“If the Iranian side is not flexible, then they can keep killing them until you find someone who is willing to cut a deal,” he said. “When you put more pressure, that’s what the Iranians seem to be more responsive to.”
The former official said he saw a “slim chance” that assassinating Iran’s leaders would eventually produce an individual willing to engage with Trump, but regardless he said the campaign is weakening the Iranian regime by stoking mistrust within senior leadership ranks.
“It’s actually like two birds with one stone. You could get someone who is willing to cut a deal or you could get more turmoil, maybe they break ranks and the regime is further weakened,” he said.
An Iranian diplomat said such an approach revealed a deep misunderstanding of the culture and history of Iran, where martyrdom is revered. “He can kill 10 more layers” of Iranian leadership “and it won’t work,” the diplomat said.
Iran’s governing system today is more “militarized regime” than the already hard-line one in place before the war, said Suzanne Maloney, a former senior State Department official on Iran who is now the vice president of the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. Many of those promoted to replace slain colleagues are “people who have been steeped in the culture of martyrdom, sacrifice and hostility to the international system,” Maloney said.
“This is a system with a very, very deep bench,” she said. “It’s not a personalist system with a small, elite crew of close advisers. This is a country that has spent 47 years trying to ensure that it cannot be upended by an external adversary or by its own population.”
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament with whom Trump has said he’s negotiating, began his career during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. The careers of Ahmad Vahidi, the new commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Mohsen Rezaei, the military adviser to the supreme leader, followed similar trajectories.
These leaders emerged from Iran’s “war generation,” said Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow and Iran analyst with the Middle East Institute in Washington.
“They all came through the ranks together as young men in their teens or early 20s,” he said. After spending decades with the system, he said he doesn’t think these are the types of figures who want to cut a deal with Trump.
“They are they going to sort of double down and believe their own slogans,” he said. “They have all been part of the system for decades and they might have their differences, but at this point survival is a collective interest.”
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