For most governments, war is the emergency to be ended. For the collective of generals, security chiefs, and clerics now governing Iran, the logic appears to run the other way. Continued conflict, in their calculus, holds the regime together. Peace might not.
The war began with joint US-Israeli airstrikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and destroyed much of Iran's conventional military capacity, its navy, and wide swathes of its economy. His son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has since assumed the role of Supreme Leader. But the new Iran is not structured as before. Power is now distributed across a narrow inner circle rather than concentrated in a single authority, with Mojtaba Khamenei sitting at the centre of a collective system alongside military, security, and political figures, Time reports.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran's most powerful military and security force, is a dominant presence within that circle. The question now being pressed by analysts, and apparently by at least one Iranian official, is whether this establishment can survive what it has long claimed to want: an end to hostilities.
The answer emerging from inside the system is telling. When asked why Iran had not accepted a multiyear suspension of uranium enrichment, one Iranian official was blunt. 'If we had accepted, we would have suffered more damage than war,' the official said, according to Newsmax.
The regime's fear is not primarily military. It is political. Earlier in 2026, Iran saw the largest protests since those that followed the 1979 revolution — driven, according to The Edge Malaysia, by soaring inflation and the compounding failures of the Islamic Republic's economic management. The protests were violently suppressed. The underlying conditions have not changed. Without an external enemy to invoke, the regime's legitimacy — already eroded — would face scrutiny it may not survive.
Analyst Arash Azizi has argued that the collective leadership distanced itself from a June memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Washington — which would have allowed the Strait of Hormuz to reopen — partly because routine governance is more intimidating to the regime than crisis, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports. Managing a battered economy, satisfying popular demands, and justifying its grip on power without a war to point to: these are the pressures the hardline establishment appears least equipped to handle.
The Strait of Hormuz — a narrow passage that, in peacetime, carried about one-fifth of global oil shipments — sits at the centre of the current impasse. Iran and Oman are pursuing an agreement to reopen it, with Oman acting as mediator between Tehran and Washington, Al Jazeera reports. But the conditions Iran's Supreme National Security Council has attached to any such reopening are sweeping: an end to US threats, a halt to attacks on Iran's allies, the lifting of the US naval blockade, payment of war compensation, removal of global sanctions, and the unconditional release of frozen Iranian assets. Whether Washington is prepared to meet any of these terms is not known.
In parallel, Iran has been moving in the opposite direction militarily. Mojtaba Khamenei has made a series of senior military appointments, and Bloomberg reports that Iran has reorganised its armed forces around an offensive doctrine. Analysts read this as preparation for a protracted era of regional conflict rather than a negotiated exit from the current one.
A fragile ceasefire has broadly held since early July 2026, though skirmishes have continued in and around the Strait of Hormuz. None of the underlying causes of the war have been addressed, the BBC reports.
Not everyone in Tehran accepts this limbo. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has publicly called for an end to the 'neither war nor peace' state, arguing that Iran was in a position of strength and that the moment was right to reach a settlement with the US. The statement placed him at visible odds with the hardline military and security figures who hold effective authority over these decisions, Al Jazeera reported. Whether Pezeshkian carries meaningful weight in war and peace decisions — as distinct from the IRGC-dominated security council — is not clear.
What is clear is that the man nominally leading Iran's government and the men actually shaping its security policy are not speaking with one voice. The hardliners have history on their side, in one narrow sense: the Islamic Republic has always used external threat as a tool of internal discipline. A war it did not choose has, in a grim way, served that function. The harder question — one the regime has not yet been forced to answer — is what holds it together once the war is gone.
Comments (0)