Iran once again finds itself around the negotiating table with the Unted States. Its resolve is still strong, believing righteousness and time remain on its side, but it has been weakened, that much it cannot deny. 

I come from a dealmaking world, where asserting leverage is crucial for getting a favourable agreement but how can Iran do that when it is coming from a position of perceived weakness? What are the steps they could take to flip that and begin to negotiate from a position of strength?

Iran’s Current Position

The weakening of Iran began with the denigration of its ‘axis of resistance’. Hamas, Hezbollah, Iraqi militias and Houthis once provided a formidable joint threat but have been largely degraded by joint Israeli and US operations. 

Iran has been made to look potentially like a paper tiger, unable to suitably defend its allies or mount a meaningful military threat. At the same time, Washington’s policy of “maximum pressure” continues to constrain its economy and limit its room for manoeuvre.

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The protests represented the most serious challenge to the regime’s legitimacy in decades. In any political system, authority rests not only on power but on consent. Faced with this challenge, the regime fell back on hard power, which may preserve control in the short term but corrodes leverage over time. 

In that respect, Iran’s approach mirrors that of the United States under Trump: a belief that coercion can be a substitute for consent. The crucial difference is capacity. Washington can sustain “might is right”; for Tehran it simply looks like a last roll of the dice.

The Tasnim Battle Plan

So how does a state that is objectively weaker still negotiate from a position of strength? We are now much clearer on how the Iranian regime imagines this playing out after a detailed battle plan was published by Tasnim, the news agency affiliated to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). 

The first step, they say, is to redefine the........

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