Since mid-April, diplomacy between Tehran and Washington has shifted into overdrive. After a seven-year freeze, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has made a stunning, if not entirely surprising, reversal: He has greenlit a new nuclear deal if U.S. President Donald Trump accepts Tehran’s basic red lines. While the fourth round of talks between the two countries last weekend in Oman contained no apparent breakthrough, both sides seem determined to continue negotiating.
In 2019, when Trump sent Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to Tehran to open up talks with the Iranian leader, Khamenei vowed never to negotiate with the U.S. president, whom he called “that man.” Sheer defiance is no longer an option. Pressured by sanctions, economic turmoil, and the threat of war, Khamenei has opted for diplomacy.
The recent momentum in talks rests on a fragile but unmistakable premise: Trump wants to block Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, and Tehran insists it has no intention of building one. Yet Tehran appears more unified and urgent than Washington, where even the basic value of diplomacy is contested inside Trump’s own administration. That’s because, for Iran’s leadership, the stakes are existential. Khamenei must walk a political tightrope: advancing talks, which enjoy broad public support, while managing a small but vocal hard-line faction that threatens the regime’s internal cohesion.
To the die-hard anti-American camp, Khamenei’s talks with Trump are like negotiating with Yazid, the archvillain of Shiite history who killed Imam Hussein in the seventh century. Yet these voices constitute a tiny fringe compared with the vast majority of Iranians—from ordinary citizens to pragmatic regime factions and the battered business class—who welcome diplomacy with Washington.
Yet even as the public has high hopes for talks to revive their fortunes, Khamenei’s bottom line remains clear. Diplomacy, in his view, is about preventing war—not fixing Iran’s battered economy. He has warned repeatedly that even a new nuclear deal will not guarantee sweeping sanctions relief.
Some regime insiders now claim that despite his public statements, Khamenei was never fundamentally opposed to diplomacy. One hard-line Iranian lawmaker even claims that Tehran has been quietly engaging Trump’s team for two years as part of a strategy to prepare for any scenario, including the possible outcomes of the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
The same cold calculus appears to be shaping the thinking of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which controls Iran’s key military and nuclear infrastructure. A deal with Trump might eventually prompt the IRGC leadership to reassess the costs of prolonged hostility with the United States and consider a deeper detente. But such intentions remain unarticulated. For now, the IRGC shares a core objective with Khamenei: avoiding war. It wants to contain escalation, buy time, and preserve strategic leverage. Embracing negotiations does not, for the IRGC, represent a fundamental shift in worldview.
To eliminate any doubts about regime unity, Khamenei’s office has made it clear that the IRGC backs the talks led by Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi—but remains “fully alert,” with “fingers on the trigger,” should diplomacy falter. In this narrative, diplomacy and military deterrence are two sides of the same coin, and the IRGC stands as both the guardian of Iran’s red lines and the guarantor that any deal proceeds strictly on Tehran’s terms.
Meanwhile, Iran’s pragmatic and technocratic factions—in many ways, the backbone of the state machinery—have openly welcomed Khamenei and the IRGC’s endorsement of nuclear talks with the Trump administration. For Araghchi and President Masoud Pezeshkian—the latest standard-bearers of the pro-engagement camp—this moment marks a calculated pivot in Tehran’s relationship with Washington.
These leaders are deliberately elevating Khamenei as the ultimate patron of the negotiations. In doing so, they shift the political burden of engagement onto his shoulders, forcing hard-line critics to either fall in line or risk publicly challenging both Khamenei and the IRGC. In effect, opposing the talks becomes synonymous with defying the regime’s core leadership. The case of Saeed Jalili is telling. A longtime opponent of making concessions to Washington, Jalili has in public defended the latest talks.
Pezeshkian has made no secret of his preference for direct talks with Washington, but he has pledged to respect Khamenei’s insistence on maintaining the fiction of indirect negotiations. This charade allows Khamenei to save face and preserve a veneer of distance from the Americans, even though it is no secret that Araghchi holds face-to-face meetings with Trump’s Iran envoy, Steve Witkoff, whenever Iranian and U.S. delegations meet up.
While Pezeshkian may be less concerned with the optics of engaging Trump, what matters most to him—and to millions of Iranians—is striking a deal that lifts U.S. sanctions. Meanwhile, the push for direct diplomacy is growing stronger, but via surrogates. As one prominent pro-engagement commentator recently put it: “There is no such thing as indirect negotiations; we need direct talks, not bargaining.”
The urgency in that statement is hard to miss. Iran’s position today is far weaker than the last time Tehran and Washington reached a nuclear deal. Iran’s economy is crippled; inflation and unemployment are soaring; and the energy sector remains in deep crisis, despite Iran holding some of the world’s largest oil and gas reserves, thanks to lack of funds to invest.
Meanwhile, Tehran’s regional proxy network has been battered. Hamas, Hezbollah, and even the Houthis are all diminished, and the Assad regime in Syria is gone. Zooming out, the threat is even clearer: the risk of Israeli-U.S. military strikes is a distinct possibility, while Russia and China, Iran’s close partners, remain reluctant to come to Tehran’s aid in the event of war.
Adding to the pressure, polls show that a vast majority of Iranians—over 80%—support negotiations with the United States, and even slight positive signals from the negotiating teams after each round have strengthened the beleaguered Iranian rial. As one former Iranian nuclear negotiator put it, “Two hours of positive Iran-U.S. talks boosted the value of Iran’s national currency by nearly 20%—a result the Central Bank could not have achieved even by injecting hundreds of millions of dollars into the market.”
In fact, some of the euphoria surrounding the talks is clearly premature. Some pro-diplomacy economists are predicting that Iran’s economic troubles could be resolved within three to four years, with global markets reopening and financial bottlenecks easing once a new nuclear agreement is signed. It is true that U.S. sanctions have cost Iran hundreds of billions of dollars over the past two decades, crippling its banking, transport, and export sectors. At a minimum, a deal could unlock billions of dollars in frozen assets held in Qatar, Iraq, Turkey, and Italy. But for Khamenei, such optimism is a double-edged sword: it risks inflating public expectations at a time when sanctions are only one piece of the deeper malaise plaguing Iran’s economy.
Noy only has Khamenei to manage the expectations and narratives of the pro-diplomacy camp, he also must carefully shape the stance of hardline critics who oppose any deal with the Americans. This faction is small but loud and often reckless in both words and actions. Some figures linked to this camp have already protested that instead of negotiating with Trump, Tehran should be seeking to punish him for ordering the assassination of Qassem Soleimani in 2020.
Khamenei has publicly warned the anti-negotiation hardliners to hold their fire—watch their words, avoid rogue actions, and wait for the outcome of talks with the Americans. “Pointless protests, impatience, or flawed analysis can have devastating consequences,” he cautioned in a speech on April 25. His message was aimed at a small but vocal hardline faction, angered by what they see as excessive concessions at home and abroad: suspending mandatory veiling, canceling a planned strike on Israel in retaliation to Israel’s October 2024 attack on Iran, and now, engaging with Trump’s White House.
In fact, Araghchi, Khamenei’s hand-picked envoy to negotiate with Trump, has taken the unusual step of meddling in U.S. politics in an attempt to ingratiate himself with Trump. Araghchi has not only spoken about Trump as a wise anti-war leader but gone as far as tweeting anti-Biden messages tailored to appeal to the former president’s contempt for his predecessor. So far, hardliners in Tehran have not dared to challenge Araghchi’s overtures to Trump—gestures that, had they come from his famous predecessor, Javad Zarif, would have landed him in the deepest trouble.
Iran in 2025 is in a very different place than it was in 2015. The anti-U.S. hardliners know they must stay silent, at least for now, and await the outcome of the talks. There is no sign they intend to defy Khamenei so long as negotiations continue. For now, they are calculating that despite their frustrations, the political system —which has relied on them since 1979—will be reluctant to cast them aside.
But they also know they have little ground left to stand on. As one former member of their own camp admitted, by 2025 Iran was supposed to be the region’s dominant economic and military power. “Instead,” he said, “conditions are catastrophic across both economic and social fronts.” The pro-diplomacy camp will continue to paint the hardliners as ideological dinosaurs, either hopelessly out of touch or profiting from sanctions.
As former President Hassan Rouhani put it, negotiation is not surrender—and the regime must prioritize national interest over factional rivalries in talks with Trump. But Rouhani, like everyone else, knows the real power rests with Khamenei and the IRGC. They may hope the talks bear fruit, but they also have firm red lines as they navigate diplomacy with the Trump White House. At home, neither the pro-diplomacy camp’s euphoria nor the hardliners’ reactionary defiance is likely to shape the talks’ trajectory—at least not if Khamenei and the IRGC have anything to say about it.
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