Reports that US policymakers are considering Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, as a potential diplomatic partner point to a familiar problem in Washington: the persistent search for the “right” insider within the Islamic Republic.

This instinct is not new. It has surfaced in different forms across administrations, each time grounded in the belief that Iran’s trajectory can be influenced through the selection of a more pragmatic or manageable insider. This logic has often been paired with a broader tendency toward accommodation, the hope that engagement with perceived moderates might gradually alter the regime’s behavior. Yet experience suggests otherwise. Policies built on this assumption have not produced meaningful structural change and have frequently reinforced the system they were meant to soften.

But this approach rests on a misunderstanding of how power actually operates in Iran.

Ghalibaf is not an outlier within the system. He is a product of it. A former commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an organization designated by the United States as a terrorist entity, he rose through the very structures that define the Islamic Republic’s security and political order. His career has intersected with the same institutional networks that produced figures such as Qasem Soleimani, reflecting not distance from the system but deep integration within it. He represents continuity, not departure. To frame such a figure as a potential vehicle for change is to confuse familiarity with flexibility.

The deeper issue is structural. As a theocratic system, political authority in Iran does not flow from elected offices in any meaningful way. It is concentrated in a network of institutions anchored by the Supreme Leader and reinforced by security and intelligence bodies. Individuals rise and fall within this system, but they do not redefine it. Any figure operating at Ghalibaf’s level does so within constraints that are not easily negotiated, let alone transformed.

This is why the recurring search for a workable partner inside the regime consistently falls short. It assumes that the system can be gradually redirected through internal actors, when in reality it is designed to preserve itself through them.

There is also a strategic cost to this line of thinking. By focusing on personalities, US policy risks sidelining the more difficult but necessary questions. What would a political transition in Iran actually require? Where does institutional capacity for such a transition reside? And how should external actors position themselves in relation to a society that is far more dynamic than its governing structures suggest?

Engaging states diplomatically is necessary. But diplomacy that is built on misreading the internal logic of a political system is unlikely to produce durable outcomes. Elevating insiders as potential solutions may offer short-term channels of communication, yet it can also reinforce the very structures that limit meaningful change.

The question is not whether one insider appears more pragmatic than another. The question is whether US policy is prepared to move beyond the search for personalities and confront the realities of political structure in Iran.

That shift would require a different starting point. Rather than looking for solutions within the existing system, it would mean recognizing that meaningful change is more likely to emerge from Iranian society itself, particularly from those segments that have demonstrated organization, resilience, and a sustained demand for accountable governance and democratic principles.

Until that shift happens, Washington will continue to look for answers in the wrong places.

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