When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, spoke at an event in late August, he dismissed calls for direct talks with Washington as “superficial” and declared the conflict with the United States “unsolvable.” America’s real aim, he said, was to make Iran “obedient”—an insult Iranians would resist “with all their strength.”
Khamenei’s words, though influential and commanding, are only one strand of Iran’s fractured postwar politics. In Tehran, rival factions have rushed forward with statements and proposals for how the country should respond to the devastation: thousands of casualties, shattered defenses, and a nuclear program badly damaged but not destroyed.
Beneath the clamor lies a deeper question: What real choice has Washington offered Iran beyond pressure and hostility? Out of this internal Iranian debate, a tentative middle ground is emerging—one that moves Iran further from any hope of detente with the United States and Europe and closer to a more fundamental pivot toward China.
It is within this unsettled political landscape that the Reform Front—today the main coalition of Iran’s reformist parties—has emerged as a focal point of debate. With roots in the movement that carried Mohammad Khatami to the presidency in 1997, it has long advocated democratic change at home and improved relations with the West. Despite years of repression, it remains influential, having backed Masoud Pezeshkian in last year’s snap presidential election following conservative Ebrahim Raisi’s death in a helicopter crash. Against this backdrop, the Reform Front’s postwar “National Reconciliation” statement landed with unusual force: It called for releasing political prisoners, reforming state media, restoring public trust, and—most provocatively—voluntarily suspending uranium enrichment in exchange for the complete lifting of sanctions.
The backlash was immediate. Hard-line outlets branded the statement naive, a “surrender,” even treasonous. Abdullah Ganji, a leading conservative journalist, called it a “common intersection” with U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in rejecting enrichment. Mahdi Mohammadi, an advisor to parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, went further, denouncing it as a “historic betrayal” and “tantamount to a statement of the army of the Israeli regime.” Such rhetoric sought not only to oppose but to criminalize the very idea of compromise over uranium enrichment.
Nor was the criticism limited to hard-liners. The Pezeshkian government—despite the president’s reformist background—quickly distanced itself from the statement. Prominent reformist figures did the same. Mohammad Reza Jalaeipour, a sociologist and rising political voice who now serves as a deputy in the president’s strategic affairs office, argued that the text reduced Iran’s choices to “surrender or war,” warning that even total capitulation on enrichment would not shield the country from future attacks “under another pretext.”
The backlash to the Reform Front’s statement, however, was only one facet of the shifting landscape. Across the spectrum, political figures are maneuvering, and official institutions are undergoing deeper realignments, pointing to a broader recalibration of Iran’s postwar politics. Former President Hassan Rouhani has reemerged with a tacit critique of the Revolutionary Guards and the Guardian Council—the unelected body that vets candidates for office—warning, “We must return the armed forces to their intrinsic duties. The economy is not the work of the armed forces.” Yet he paired this call for domestic reform with sharp rebukes of Washington and Europe, arguing that they have repeatedly proved untrustworthy negotiating partners.
At the institutional level, too, change is underway. Ali Larijani, the centrist former parliamentary speaker who was twice barred from running for president, has been appointed secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Iran’s top decision-making body for foreign and defense policy. Within it, a new “defense council” has been established—the first since the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War—signaling that Tehran is not only digesting the lessons of the past conflict but also actively preparing for the next.
These maneuvers and realignments are unfolding against extraordinary uncertainty over what Washington actually wants from Iran. Since beginning his second term, Trump has unleashed a barrage of contradictions: calling for negotiations without clear bottom lines and then joining Israel’s war against Iran; issuing evacuation orders for Tehran one day and signaling de-escalation the next; demanding “unconditional surrender,” only to later seek a cease-fire after boasting that Iran’s nuclear program had been obliterated. Faced with such volatility, Tehran’s leadership has seen little reason to alter its long-standing posture.
The official line remains largely unchanged: Iran insists on its right to enrichment and refuses to negotiate over nonnuclear issues. Senior officials, from Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi to Khamenei himself, have repeated that Tehran will not accept any deal requiring it to give up enrichment entirely. At the same time, hints of flexibility remain, with a deputy foreign minister recently reaffirming the long-running Iranian position that it “can be flexible on the capacities and limits of enrichment.” But as Larijani put it in a Sept. 2 post on X, while “the path for negotiations with the U.S. is not closed,” demands such as missile restrictions only “negate any talks.”
Despite all this, there is no evidence of Iran dashing for a bomb. Instead, its nuclear program is now deliberately cloaked in ambiguity, with no international oversight of damaged facilities or visibility into its stockpiles of uranium and centrifuges. Iranian analysts frame this opacity as a strategic asset, strengthening deterrence without crossing the nuclear threshold. Where the more decisive shift is unfolding, however, is in Iran’s long-term strategic orientation. While holding firm to its bottom lines on enrichment and missiles, Tehran is now tilting more decisively toward non-Western powers—above all China—positioning this partnership as the cornerstone of its postwar trajectory.
Contrary to much Western analysis, Iran never fully embraced China—even after Trump’s 2018 exit from the nuclear deal. As the conservative Farhikhtegan newspaper recently noted, Tehran long treated Beijing as a fallback, abandoning major proposals whenever fleeting openings with the West arose. The paper asserts that Xi Jinping offered a $40 billion investment package in 2016, but it went nowhere, while the much-touted 25-year cooperation road map remained largely symbolic for lack of Iranian initiative.
Indeed, in the brief window of sanctions relief after the 2015 nuclear agreement, Tehran handed lucrative contracts to Western firms such as Total, Airbus, and Boeing—sidestepping Chinese companies. As Hossein Qaheri, the head of the Iranian-Chinese Strategic Studies Think Tank, admitted: “Time and again, for short-term gains, we have abandoned China—and the Chinese have repeatedly said they do not have strategic trust in Iran.”
The war’s aftermath and the “snapback” of U.N. sanctions have forced Tehran to rethink its approach: If it wants China to invest in infrastructure and defense, it must start acting like a genuine long-term partner, not just turning to Beijing in times of crisis. Even many reformists now echo this view. For instance, Jalaeipour, while pressing for broader democratic reforms at home, has likewise argued that Iran must demonstrate consistency and reliability if it expects China to invest at scale.
That message framed the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin, China, which offered the strongest indication yet of a decisive pivot toward Beijing. For Tehran, the timing was critical. Still reeling from the 12-day war and facing the activation of snapback sanctions, it gained rare diplomatic cover as SCO leaders condemned the U.S.-Israeli strikes. At the same time, Araghchi joined his Russian and Chinese counterparts in a joint letter to the United Nations dismissing the snapback of sanctions as legally baseless and politically destructive.
Pezeshkian also used the summit to align openly with Beijing’s agenda, endorsing calls for global governance reform, de-dollarization, and new crisis response mechanisms while casting Chabahar, Iran’s Indian Ocean port, as a linchpin for China’s connectivity to Central Asia and beyond. In Beijing, Xi pledged respect for Iran’s nuclear rights, sovereignty, and dignity, and the two sides agreed on “maximum implementation” of their long-stalled 25-year pact. Most telling was Beijing’s symbolic gesture: inviting Iran—but not the United States, most of Europe, Israel, or some Gulf states—to its World War II “Victory Day” military parade, signaling Tehran’s place in China’s envisioned multipolar order. As Araghchi put it, “The president’s trip to China will go down as one of the most important in our history.”
Against this backdrop, Khamenei’s August remarks also carried a notable endorsement of Pezeshkian. He urged Iranians to “support the servants of the country, support the president,” describing him as “hardworking, diligent, and persistent.” In the wake of war, that message of unity is meant to project consensus at the top. For Washington and Europe, it marks an inflection point. Continuing down the path of pressure and conflict risks driving Iran further into China’s orbit and deepening its nuclear defiance. The alternative is to test whether serious incentives can pull Tehran back toward a more balanced course and create space for renewed engagement.
The post Iran’s Foreign Policy Is Changing in Real Time appeared first on Foreign Policy.
