An interim agreement to end the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran looks likely, and it may very well find Donald Trump acceding to Iranian demands he has long resisted. Many in the Iranian regime are feeling triumphant, and understandably so, despite the exchange of some strikes in the Persian Gulf this week. But an end to the war will leave the Islamic Republic with a host of unsolved problems.
The deal is expected to open the Strait of Hormuz, lifting the blockades imposed by both Iran and the United States. But it may also include language asserting that sovereignty over the waterway is to be shared among Iran, Oman, and other countries in the region, a political consultant close to the Iranian side who is not authorized to speak about the negotiations publicly, told me. Iran won’t get away with charging passing ships a toll per se, but it may be permitted to levy an environmental-protection fee and split the proceeds with Oman and perhaps other regional countries. The source also said that a portion of Iran’s billions of dollars in frozen assets may be released.
The initial deal is to be followed by talks on the war’s supposed casus belli, Iran’s nuclear program. On that, too, Trump has publicly signaled a significant concession. The president has said that he might accept a commitment to dilute Iran’s highly enriched uranium inside the country, as opposed to shipping it outside. (The consultant in Tehran told me two weeks ago that the United States had budged on this issue—Trump may now be making public what he had already agreed privately.)
These are not unreasonable parameters for a compromise between the two countries. But if accurately conveyed, they are also a triumph for the Islamic Republic. The regime will not only have survived a major military onslaught from the U.S. and Israel but emerge with a deal better than any on offer before the war. No matter what happens, the Islamic Republic will not have an easy time reigning over its exhausted populace and rebuilding its economy and infrastructure. But its officials reportedly feel that Iran has won the war, or at least not lost it.
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The security elites currently leading the country appear to have prevailed over the ultra-hardliners, who coalesced around the conservative politician Saeed Jalili to oppose diplomacy with the United States. Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the leader of the Iranian negotiating team, was this week overwhelmingly reelected as speaker of the Parliament. The anti-deal faction had hoped to remove him, and tried to delay the vote, but ultimately failed. According to an Iranian news outlet, Jalili has been so sidelined that he no longer attends the national-security council meetings. (His team has denied this claim.)
As the regime finds some breathing space through its diplomacy with the U.S., it might well ease up on some of its most draconian wartime measures. Since January, when it killed tens of thousands of Iranian protesters in cold blood, the regime has blocked the internet. But the reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian said this week that the internet will be reopened soon, and he appears to have made a bureaucratic end run around a pro-censorship body dominated by hardliners in order to enact this policy. On Wednesday, millions of Iranians reconnected to the internet.
None of this suggests that the regime is softening, however. It continues to prosecute dissidents and rough up political prisoners, dozens of whom have been executed in recent weeks on flimsy grounds. Four protesters arrested in 2022 were sentenced to death this week.
Iran’s foreign-policy stance does not appear to be moderating, either. Almost three months after he was appointed as supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei has still not been seen publicly, nor has he released a single video or audio recording. He also hasn’t used his wide-ranging constitutional powers to dismiss or appoint new officials—not even to fill vacancies, such as for the military’s chief of general staff, or for his office’s representatives on the security bodies. But in one message, published online and read on state television, Mojtaba warned neighboring countries that Iran would continue to target U.S. bases on their soil. He also reaffirmed the regime’s eliminationist stance toward Israel: “The precarious Zionist regime, this cancerous tumor called Israel, has neared the end of its heinous life,” he wrote. He repeated a 2015 boast by his father that Israel would be destroyed by 2040.
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But professing hatred for the U.S. and Israel won’t solve Iran’s problems. Neither will the interim agreement to end the war, even if it is as favorable to Iran as my sources project. Iran was apparently unable to secure a provision to end Israel’s war on Hezbollah; instead, Israel has engaged in direct talks with Lebanon, much to Tehran’s chagrin. And in order to get the sanctions relief that it will need to reconstruct its economy, Iran still has to come to a nuclear agreement with the U.S.. Meanwhile, Iran has further alienated its Arab neighbors by attacking them, and Israel will not rest easy alongside an adversary committed to its destruction.
The Islamic Republic’s leaders may soon learn that the problems of peace are the hardest to solve.
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