Who Is Calling Shots at Tehran?

The ceasefire that was announced Tuesday night, as Vice President Vance describes it, is “fragile,” perhaps due to growing rifts among Tehran officials and doubts about who calls the shots there.Administration officials acknowledge that the Iranian leadership is divided. Even the top feature of the Tuesday ceasefire deal — the opening of the Strait of Hormuz — can be undermined by Iranians who oppose it. This is “a fragile truce,” Mr. Vance said on Wednesday while visiting Hungary. “You have people who clearly want to come to the negotiating table and work with us to find a good deal, and then you have people who are lying about even the fragile truce that we’ve already struck.”President Trump said recently that even one “terrorist” can drop a sea mine in the Strait of Hormuz, and it would be closed down. Such an act of sabotage could quickly undermine any American-Iranian agreement. Even now it’s far from clear that everyone at Tehran has agreed to fully open the vital waterway. Iran will demand that shipping companies pay tolls in cryptocurrency for oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. Tehran “needs to monitor what goes in and out of the strait to ensure these two weeks aren’t used for transferring weapons,” a spokesperson for Iran’s Oil Exporters’ Union, Hamid Hosseini, told the newspaper. Regime-controlled press outlets, meanwhile, claimed on Wednesday that oil tanker traffic was stopped at Hormuz in reaction to one of Israel’s largest operations in Lebanon in months.“The U.S. must choose — ceasefire or continued war via Israel. It cannot have both,” Tehran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, writes on X. “The world sees the massacres in Lebanon. The ball is in the U.S. court, and the world is watching whether it will act on its commitments.”Mr. Trump, though, says that Lebanon was not included in the ceasefire agreement. The ceasefire is “contingent” on “complete, immediate, and safe” opening of Hormuz Strait, he wrote on TruthSocial. Yet is the Strait open now?“This is a case of what they’re saying publicly is different privately,” the White House spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters. There was an “uptick of traffic in the strait” on Wednesday, Ms. Leavitt claimed. “The President’s expectation and demand,” she said, is that the strait would be opened.Meanwhile the Iranian threat to shut down the strait is far from the only violation of Tuesday’s deal.Hours after the Pakistani-brokered deal was announced, a barrage of Iranian missiles was launched at Israel. On Wednesday morning Kuwait came under attack. Qatar and Saudi Arabia were also attacked, and the United Arab Defense Ministry wrote that “on April 8, 2026, UAE air defense engaged 17 ballistic missiles and 35 UAVs launched from Iran.”Mr. Vance is scheduled to travel to Islamabad Friday along with envoy Steve Witkoff and Mr. Trump’s son in law Jared Kushner, to head an American delegation for talks with a delegation of the Islamic Republic on a possible permanent end to the war. The host, Pakistan, says that the Tehran group will be led by the speaker of parliament, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf.Perhaps Mr. Ghalibaf, a wily regime veteran, is on Mr. Vance’s list of those who are seeking a “good deal.” Perhaps not. The declared opening stances of both sides seem irreconcilable. Yet even if Mr. Ghalibaf indeed seeks to somehow split the differences, will he be able to rein-in those who are lying even about the truce? Another question is if Pakistan is as honest a broker as it claims to be. Announcing the deal Tuesday, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif claimed it included an “immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon and other places. Iran also asserted that Lebanon and Hezbollah were part of the deal.Yet just before announcing the deal, Mr. Trump reportedly called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to update him on the details. It is difficult to imagine that Israel would launch such a vast operation in Lebanon without a green light from Washington. “Yeah, they were not included in the deal,” Mr. Trump told a Public Broadcasting Service on Wednesday, referring to Israel and Lebanon. Why not? “Because of Hezbollah,” Mr. Trump said. The Israel Defense Force conducted its largest attack in Lebanon since the February 28 launch of “Lion Roar,” the Israeli name for Epic Fury. In the ten-minute attack on Wednesday it targeted “approximately 100 command centers and military infrastructure of the terrorist organization Hezbollah, the IDF spokesman said. Whether that attack will derail the talks scheduled to start at Islamabad Friday remains to be seen. Also, it is unclear if there is any deal to be made. Some Tehran officials recycled old talking points included in a 10-point Iranian plan, which Ms. Leavitt said the president “literally” tossed in the garbage. Those points, she added, are “much different than what they communicate to the United States, the President, and his team privately.”Axios is reporting that earlier this week Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has ordered his underlings to reach a ceasefire at all costs. Reports from Tehran insist that Mr. Khamenei is seriously wounded and can’t function. Who, then, makes the decisions for the regime?

Who Is Calling Shots at Tehran?

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