Matthew Gould is a former British ambassador to Israel and former deputy ambassador to Iran.
In early July, the Iranian regime trashed the ceasefire deal it had reached with the United States by attacking three commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Having negotiated an extraordinary package — ending sanctions, unfreezing assets and establishing a $300 billion reparation fund — Iran made the seemingly nonsensical decision to pick a fight instead. Understanding why it did this is essential to figuring out how to handle the regime.
When I was stationed in Iran for the British Foreign Service 20 years ago, I developed two rules to explain the actions of the regime.
First: Iranian leaders are focused single-mindedly on preserving their grip on power. They know that the overwhelming majority of Iranians despise them and that the people will not be forgiving if the regime is finally removed.
Determination to stay in power guides the regime’s actions. In that sense, Iranian leaders are rational — but that does not mean they are moderate. In January, the Islamic republic slaughtered thousands of Iranians to quell protests. Iran’s missile attacks on its neighbors may have looked like mindless lashing out, but it was an expression of the regime’s doctrine of “horizontal escalation” — building leverage by continuing to escalate.
Second: Iran’s actions often have more to do with internal regime dynamics than with statecraft. Western governments tend to interpret Iranian actions as aimed at them. But often, they are aimed internally.
The Islamic republic’s leadership is not a monolith. The informal power structures are at least as important as the ones set out in the Iranian constitution, and they are endlessly shifting. The regime has always been built on fear, with even its leaders constantly watching their backs, protecting their revolutionary credentials and signaling to one another in obscure ways. Even they struggle to understand each other. Figuring out regime dynamics from the outside is nearly impossible.
I got a sense of this subtlety when I first arrived in Tehran in 2003. Then-Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei gave a sermon at Friday prayers attacking Britain in vicious terms. I went to see the head of a think tank allied with the leader’s office and asked what led to this tirade. He looked at me as if I were stupid — I should have spotted the things that Khamenei hadn’t said and realized that the sermon actually signaled a softening of approach.
Since then, Iran’s leaders have become more paranoid, more two-faced and more backstabby. Waves of popular protests, put down with ever-increasing brutality, have left the regime more precarious. Decapitation of the regime by U.S. and Israeli attacks at the end of February left power structures broken and Iranian leadership in chaos.
Khamenei was supreme leader for almost four decades. Despite the title, even he was always calibrating his authority inside the regime. To do so was more complicated than simply issuing edicts. He was the crucial arbiter between the regime’s factions and would describe to the conservatives and reformers as “like the two wings of a bird.”
Since his death, the regime has lacked its umpire. His son Mojtaba has taken the title but not the role. Injured in the same strikes that killed his father (and his wife), he has not been seen since, even at his father’s funeral. The regime’s line is that he is in a secure location, communicating only through couriers to avoid giving his location away. Even if this is true, it means the new supreme leader is much less able than his father was to stabilize the system.
The regime has lost other figures who could help its disparate elements cohere. Ali Larijani was a bridge between the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the clerics and the politicians. He was effectively in charge after the supreme leader was killed in February but was himself killed in a strike barely two weeks later. He was no moderate, but he was a pragmatic operator who could make deals and bring the regime with him.
These deaths have left the regime in turmoil. Amid the chaos, Iran’s leaders are more vulnerable to charges of insufficient loyalty and will more acutely feel the need to assert their power. The IRGC is on the rise, driving the regime in a more hard-line direction, and the group’s own members are divided between factions.
All of which helps to explain why the regime chose to sabotage a highly attractive deal — not primarily as statecraft or with an eye to Washington, but as internal jockeying by its leaders with an eye on one another.
If the U.S. and its allies are to deal effectively with the Iranian regime — calibrating threats, strikes and inducements in the right proportions — they need to understand that the regime is a viper’s nest of leaders and groups with competing claims to power. Much of the time, they are thinking about their internal standing before they think about the West.
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