Iran isn’t moving toward a deal — it is hardening into a new junta

The most important issue in any negotiation over Iran is not uranium, sanctions or military de-escalation — it is the political will of the Iranian people. That will has been expressed repeatedly, in wave after wave of anti-regime protests, in a single demand: regime change. No durable outcome can ignore this central reality.

Yet this central fact remains largely absent from talks held in places such as Pakistan. Nearly 90 million people have lived under repression for 47 years, and still their political will is treated as secondary to the diplomatic process. The question is not only what Tehran wants or what Washington wants. It is what becomes of the Iranian nation. This is not only a moral failure—it is a strategic one.

The bitter truth is that the Iranian people have no defender but their own will. Since 1979, they have risen repeatedly against religious despotism. By many counts, there have been 19 major uprisings, each crushed with force. The latest crackdown, in January, reportedly left more than 40,000 dead. The protesters were not demanding that a religious tyranny be replaced by a military-style junta ruling through fear. They were demanding liberty, dignity and democratic change.

Today, many Iranians are no longer thinking about reform—they are thinking about decisive confrontation.

President Trump may be focused on Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium and on preventing a nuclear weapon. That concern is understandable. But the theocracy in Tehran is playing a deeper game. In political terms, these negotiations are already dead, because the leadership is unwilling to sign any agreement that could be framed as surrender.

Iran’s rulers still operate under the shadow of nineteenth-century humiliation, shaped by military defeats that produced the Treaty of Gulistan and the Treaty of Turkmenchay. In their political imagination, any agreement with Washington risks being seen not as diplomacy, but as surrender — in effect, the signing of a modern surrender document for Trump.

That fear drives a deeper instinct: resist, delay and escalate rather than concede. The same Shiite clerical order that has repeatedly steered Iran toward confrontation now risks repeating that history — pushing the country toward renewed ruin to avoid the appearance of retreat.

Today, Tehran is openly signaling that it is prepared to raise tensions rather than lower them. It shows little genuine interest in a lasting ceasefire. Instead, it seeks to reopen the crisis and undermine diplomacy from within. Its signals are contradictory because its strategy is layered: it talks and threatens at the same time. It hints at negotiation while preparing confrontation. It activates allied Shiite militants in Yemen and Iraq to raise the cost for the U.S. and gain leverage against Trump.

This is not confusion. It is the classic operating pattern of the ruling clerical order in Tehran: It manufactures crisis, sends mixed signals, tests the resolve of the other side and hopes fear will produce concessions.

Inside Iran, meanwhile, the situation is unstable. The country is politically shaken, socially exhausted and economically strained. The regime uses Israel and the U.S. as pretexts to suppress dissent at home. Executions continue. Internet blackouts and censorship have pushed the country toward a model of state control more reminiscent of North Korea than any modern society. This is not just repression — it is systematic isolation.

 At the same time, the ruling core’s internal fractures are becoming harder to hide. A power struggle is emerging between those focused on regime survival at any cost and those pushing for a potentially riskier ideological confrontation and escalation. The succession crisis is also becoming more visible. Even now, the public does not know who truly governs in Tehran. Regime propaganda projects continuity and control, but beyond staged imagery and official theater, even outside observers cannot tell who really holds power.

That uncertainty matters, because Washington may not fully understand with whom it is dealing. Trump now faces a dangerous test. If the U.S. issues threats and does not act, its deterrence will be weakened. If it does act, the conflict may not remain controlled.

Tehran understands this dilemma and is trying to exploit it. The regime appears to believe that negotiations have already failed and that it has politically outmaneuvered Trump, the U.S. and the West. Its own media openly celebrates what it portrays as the collapse of diplomacy before it even began.

That may be a fatal miscalculation. The regime is evolving into a more overt coercive order sustained by force and crisis. The Iranian people have shown, repeatedly, that they reject this system. Their demand has not changed. What is changing is the regime itself — from religious despotism into a more naked form of rule sustained by pure force, propaganda and permanent crisis.

The world should stop pretending that the Iranian state is a normal negotiating partner moving toward compromise. It is not. It is a collapsing order trying to survive through tension, terror and deception.

In the end, it will be the will of the Iranian people — not the regime’s theater — that overturns the equation.

Erfan Fard is a counter‑terrorism analyst and Middle East researcher based in McLean, Va.

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