Can an Internally Divided Iranian Regime Meet Trump’s Demands for a War-Ending Deal?

As President Trump says he is negotiating with unidentified Iranians, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a former senior Revolutionary Guards official, is widely reported to be the most likely Tehran interlocutor. Yet is a deal with the Islamic Republic feasible to begin with?The Iranians have offered him a “great present,” Mr. Trump said Tuesday, adding that Tehran’s “oil- and gas-related” offer had to do with traffic in the Hormuz Straits. Iran has shut down that critical passage, charging $2 million to any ship wishing to sail through. The president added that the offer convinced him he was talking to the right people at Tehran.On Monday, Mr. Trump said that a deal must be reached in five days or else “we’ll just keep bombing our little hearts out.” Thousands of Marines are reportedly scheduled to arrive at the Middle East when Mr. Trump’s deadline expires on Friday, and the Pentagon ordered the Army’s 82nd airborne division to deploy to the Mideast on Tuesday. While Egypt, Pakistan, and others are calling on Washington to negotiate an end to the war, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates are reportedly urging Mr. Trump to maintain the military pressure until the Iranian regime collapses. Is a deal in the offing? Mr. Trump says that the “number one, two, and three” of his demands are that Iran would have “no nuclear weapons.”Israeli sources say that Mr. Trump’s interlocutors might be army generals, rather than insiders of the rival Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps who have dominated decision making since the war was launched on February 28. As of now, though, the Guards are widely seen as the power at Tehran. Mr. Ghalibaf, “a pragmatic extremist,” is “the top heavyweight” among the regime’s remaining senior leaders, a veteran Middle East professor at Haifa University, Amatzia Bar’am, tells the Sun. The former IRGC commander, Mr. Bar’am adds, might agree to a deal on opening the Hormuz Straits, and even to a removal of the remaining highly enriched uranium out of Iran.Yet Mr. Ghalibaf “would never agree to a complete freeze on enrichment, to limit Iran’s missiles reach, or to end support for regional proxies,” Mr. Bar’am says. “And he certainly can’t agree to end the cruel mass killing of regime opponents in Iran.” Would such a deal, even if some Iranian can swing it, meet America’s goals for ending the war? “There is no real Venn diagram here,” the Iran program director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Behnam Ben Taleblu, tells the Sun.“There is no Iranian Delcy Rodriguez,” Mr. Ben Taleblu says, referring to the current Venezuelan leader. Mr. Ghalibaf, he adds, is a “corrupt IRGC veteran and thus an opportunist, but he is looking to maximize his power from within the system, one that is built on enmity with America.” Mr. Trump said he was dealing with a “man who I believe is the most respected” at Tehran. He declined to publicly identify the man, “because I don’t want him to be killed.” While many commentators assumed that Israel would be the one to target the interlocutor, Iranian rivals are more likely to oppose, or even assassinate, whoever makes a deal with the “Big Satan.”Since Mr. Trump declared he was negotiating a deal,“regime officials are either turning on each other, pointing fingers, accusing one another of negotiating with the United States or in their own media and social platforms they’re warning against character assassination of figures like Ghalibaf,” the Iranian-born activist Masih Alinejad writes on X. Mr. Trump, though, increasingly seems convinced that his interlocutors can reach a deal, and that as in Venezuela it would leave parts of the regime intact and pliant with America’s needs. “We have really a regime change,” Mr. Trump said Tuesday. “The leaders are all very different than the ones that we started off with that created all those problems.”Yet it is not clear that Mr. Ghalibaf, or anyone in the regime, can agree to a deal, or even that he can survive the ire of more extremist elements inside the regime. Mr. Trump “should not fall for the mistake that has haunted generations of U.S. policymakers, namely the quest for a regime moderate in Iran,” Mr. Ben Taleblu says.Ordering the deployment of troops to the Middle East, meanwhile, seems to be Mr. Trump’s insurance card against diplomacy failure.

Can an Internally Divided Iranian Regime Meet Trump’s Demands for a War-Ending Deal?

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