In early August, Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, was granted a few minutes with the country’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei. According to media reports, the meeting took place in the back seat of a car with tinted windows. Pezeshkian heard a voice but never saw a face and, on his return, reportedly wondered whether he had met Khamenei at all. Days later, he said publicly that contact with the supreme leader was “very difficult”.
Pezeshkian spent the week of 21 September in New York, making Iran’s case to the UN General Assembly while his foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, held Qatari-mediated talks with US president Donald Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. From the same podium on 22 September, Trump mused about whether to strike a deal or “annihilate the Islamic Republic”. He also said he was open to meeting Pezeshkian, something an Iranian foreign ministry official all but ruled out.
Whether anyone in Tehran can agree to a deal that ends the US war against Iran, and then make it stick, is far from clear. This year’s record alone gives little reason for any optimism in this regard.
In April, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, led his country’s delegation at the Islamabad talks, alongside Araghchi. Pezeshkian signed the memorandum that resulted from these talks and then saw it lapse in August. Araghchi is now the point of contact for Witkoff and Kushner, and it was Araghchi, not Pezeshkian, who set out Iran’s seven-day roadmap to end the war.
Above all of them, in theory, sits a supreme leader who has not appeared in public since his appointment in March. Nor is it clear to what extent Khamenei directs and coordinates any diplomatic efforts and how much access Iran’s civilian and military leaders and diplomats have to him.
Below them, parts of the security apparatus appear able to act on their own. According to the New York Times, the July attacks on merchant ships in the Strait of Hormuz that wrecked the June memorandum were ordered by a hardline faction around Hossein Taeb, the cleric now in charge of the Basij militia. Neither the Revolutionary Guards commander, Ahmad Vahidi, nor the Supreme National Security Council knew in advance. Pezeshkian reportedly found out after the fact and phoned Vahidi in anger.
The same pattern surfaced within hours of Trump rejecting the roadmap on 26 September. According to Iran International’s live blog, Araghchi said Tehran was waiting for the mediators to pass on the American position formally, and the Supreme National Security Council insisted that talks were continuing. The armed forces spokesman, Abolfazl Shekarchi, warned instead that the Americans would be “slapped” if they interfered in the strait.
President Pezeshkian does not call the shots, but neither, it seems, does anyone else.
Part of the explanation lies in how the Iranian system works, part in how the war has been fought. Coercive diplomacy needs someone on the other side who can weigh the cost of holding out against the cost of settling, and who can then impose a concession on the sceptics in their own system. For 37 years, that person in Iran was the previous supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who could overrule the Revolutionary Guards and absorb the domestic price of compromise, as he did when he allowed the 2015 nuclear deal to go ahead.
The strike that killed him on 28 February removed that capacity. His son inherited the title but, as far as anyone on the outside can tell, not the authority. Few in the system will want to be remembered as the person who gave up the nuclear programme or control of Hormuz to the adversary that killed the old supreme leader.
From Washington’s perspective, the war has made Iran easier to hurt and harder to negotiate, let alone settle, with.
Trump’s threat to “drive them into hell” registered with his audience at the UN General Assembly in New York but is unlikely to have the intended effect in Tehran. For the faction around Taeb, every such threat confirms that negotiating is pointless and that Washington still wants regime change. For Pezeshkian and Ghalibaf, it makes talks harder to defend at home.
The two sides are also working to opposite clocks. Pezeshkian told NBC News that he wants Washington back in the memorandum before November: “We don’t want it to get to the midterm elections.” Trump has said a deal will come “right after the election“.
On 26 September, the US president dismissed Iran’s offer as one that was made “because they are losing so badly” and claimed the US already had “total control of the Hormuz Strait”. According to the Wall Street Journal, he has also told aides that renewed bombing is likely after the midterms. A president who believes he already controls the strait has little reason to pay for its reopening. The weeks until the 3 November election, meanwhile, give anyone in Tehran bent on wrecking a deal time to show that none will hold.
Washington has a credibility problem of its own. Trump abandoned the 2015 nuclear deal in 2018 and declared his own memorandum with Iran “over” less than three weeks after signing it. The same day as Trump’s rejection of the roadmap, Pezeshkian told Al Jazeera that Iran had “no trust in the American side”.
The critical structural difference between the two capitals is that Tehran has many points of failure, Washington only one.
In the White House, a single decision-maker can drop a deal as fast as he made it. For the faction around Taeb, talk of renewed bombing after the midterms confirms that American commitments last only as long as one man’s patience or attention span. For Pezeshkian, it is an argument for settling before November.
If there is a way forward, it probably lies in small steps that can be checked and, if necessary, reversed, each one testing whether anyone in Tehran can deliver. Iran’s roadmap points in that direction, with Hormuz reopening on day six. But it front-loads American concessions and leaves open who in Tehran would guarantee that the sides ever get to day six. Safe passage through the strait remains the obvious first test. It is easy to observe and hard to fake, and it matters to the Gulf states and China, both of which have leverage in Tehran that Washington lacks. When he hosted his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, at the White House on 24 September, Trump asked for China’s help in isolating Iran and reopening the strait. Xi did not oblige and instead backed a return by both sides to the Islamabad memorandum, which is precisely what Tehran has been asking for.
Pakistan, Qatar and Oman, the mediators, could verify each step. A commitment kept would show who in Iran actually commands, while one broken would expose the spoilers without bringing down the whole framework, unlike what happened in July.
The coming weeks will show whether the mediators can carry anything back from Washington beyond Trump’s rejection, and whether anyone in Tehran can keep ships moving through Hormuz without Vahidi’s Revolutionary Guards or Taeb’s Basij militia men deciding otherwise. On current evidence, neither is likely before November.
This analysis draws on Stefan Wolff’s commentary published in Channel NewsAsia on 30 September 2026.
If safe passage through Hormuz is the first test, who on Iran’s side could credibly guarantee it, and what should Washington be prepared to offer in return before the 3 November midterms?
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