Over the previous few days, the US-Israeli struggle on Iran has seen yet one more escalation that threatens to derail peace talks. Strikes by the USA on Iran have killed a minimum of 18 folks and injured dozens. The destiny of the memorandum of understanding (MoU), which the US and Iran signed as a framework for peace talks, is now more and more underneath query.
As anger grows among the many regime’s personal base, official rhetoric is more and more pointing to at least one particular person liable for the perceived failure: President Masoud Pezeshkian. Blaming the president will not be solely an try to supply the Iranian public a scapegoat but in addition to cowl up inside divisions inside the ruling elite.
The structure of a blame recreation
Days after the MoU was signed, Supreme Chief Mojtaba Khamenei offered his first public assertion on the deal. In it, he wrote that he had “a special view” on the settlement. He had permitted it solely as a result of the president, “as head of the Supreme Nationwide Safety Council”, had made a dedication to safeguard the rights of the Iranian nation and the “Resistance Entrance” and had “explicitly accepted duty for it”.
Importantly, the assertion didn’t title the person who truly negotiated the deal. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament and head of the negotiating workforce, seems nowhere within the textual content despite the fact that International Minister Abbas Araghchi told Iranian media that “duty for the negotiations was entrusted by the ‘nezam’ [the system] to Mr Ghalibaf”.
Thus, the one official the supreme chief holds liable for probably the most consequential settlement within the Islamic Republic’s current historical past is the one who didn’t run it.
The omission of Ghalibaf’s title will not be an oversight. It’s by design.
In Tehran, potential advantages and potential dangers of the deal have been intentionally separated. If the MoU delivers, the triumph will belong to Ghalibaf; if it fails, the failure shall be blamed on Pezeshkian. This says rather a lot about the place energy lies in post-war Iran.
Fractures in Iran’s actual ruling bloc
The MoU was engineered by Iran’s true ruling bloc: what I’ve elsewhere called the military-bonyad advanced. This community fuses the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and state safety forces with sprawling revolutionary-religious foundations (bonyads) such because the Mostazafan Basis, Setad and the Imam Reza Shrine Basis.
Constructed on asset transfers that masqueraded as privatisation within the 2000s and supercharged by shadow-finance networks that sanctions made indispensable, the advanced now controls the lion’s share of Iran’s financial system and operates nearly totally past civilian oversight. Its heads are appointed immediately by the supreme chief whereas the Guardian Council shields it, tailoring laws to guard its monopolies and blocking significant challengers.
However the advanced will not be monolithic. The current struggle obscured a structural fracture that the MoU has now blown open. On one facet stands a technocratic-economic wing personified by Ghalibaf, whose profession as head of the IRGC’s Khatam al-Anbiya building conglomerate, Tehran mayor, parliamentary speaker and now particular consultant for China is in impact the advanced’s institutional biography compressed right into a single man.
On the opposite facet is the ideological-maximalist wing organised across the Paydari Entrance, which views any engagement with the US as a betrayal and Western funding as a risk to the regime’s survival.
One of many clearest dividing strains runs via the proposed $300bn personal Reconstruction and Growth Fund, a key financial pillar of the MoU.
For Ghalibaf’s camp, the fund is critical as a result of stability requires financial restoration and measured integration with international capital slightly than perpetual isolation. For Paydari, international funding on these phrases will not be restoration however penetration. Its main voices argue that the fund would give Washington and its regional companions a task in deciding the place reconstruction cash goes, which they learn as sovereignty exchanged for capital.
Ghalibaf’s wing gained the interior debate and moved to safe a deal. Now that the ceasefire and MoU are faltering, it’s unlikely to be held to account for its failure. Ghalibaf has lengthy been near Khamenei’s circle and carries the IRGC lineage and institutional backing that Pezeshkian totally lacks.
A presidential circuit breaker
Pezeshkian was seen as appropriate for the position of president by the ruling bloc exactly due to what he lacks. Earlier presidents introduced their very own weight to the workplace: Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was a pillar of the revolution with a deep political and safety community; Mohammad Khatami had a mobilised social constituency; Hassan Rouhani had factional leverage and a nationwide safety legacy. Pezeshkian has not one of the three.
He was elevated in 2024 as a result of a manageable average face may rebuild public acquiescence after successive uprisings with out threatening the advanced’s authority. His weak point will not be an accident of his presidency; it’s the logic of his elevation and what makes him the perfect signatory of different males’s dangers.
The Iranian presidency, briefly, has been rewired as a circuit breaker: put in to soak up the surge if the deal fails, bypassed totally if it succeeds.
Apparently, IRGC-linked and Ghalibaf-adjacent media have recently prolonged restricted safety to Pezeshkian in opposition to Paydari’s harshest assaults. That is upkeep, not sympathy. Implementation requires a functioning presidency and a functioning repository of blame. The safety will lengthen precisely so far as the deal’s survival requires and can vanish the second the MoU collapses.
This set-up is much from improvised. Khamenei is operating his father’s playbook. Ali Khamenei accepted successive rounds of nuclear diplomacy whereas publicly insisting that the US may by no means be trusted, preserving his standing with the ideological base regardless of the final result. The son has adopted the identical strategy with one refinement: The place the daddy hedged in generalities, the son has connected the hedge to a named officeholder who “explicitly accepted duty”.
For now, scapegoating Pezeshkian is doing its job. By channelling anger over the faltering MoU in direction of the presidency, it spares the military-bonyad advanced an open confrontation between its two wings. However that is deferral, not decision. The fracture between a faction whose survival technique rests on financial restoration and one whose standing will depend on everlasting confrontation seems to be more and more structural, and no scapegoat can soak up it indefinitely. When this one is spent, the true contest over the Islamic Republic’s route shall be fought contained in the ruling bloc itself.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial coverage.
