On Apr. 17, when Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi announced that the Strait of Hormuz would be reopened to commercial shipping, the backlash within Iran was immediate. Hardline commentators in Iran, semi-official news outlets, and voices on state television questioned the timing and the language of his statement. On Saturday, Iranian armed forces declared that the Strait was closed again because the United States continued its naval blockade of Iran.

The sequence of events was quickly interpreted in sections of the American press as evidence of a rift between Iran’s political leadership and its military hardliners associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The argument: that those willing to compromise may no longer command the support of the forces that now hold real power in Iran. That reading oversimplifies a complex reality by incorrectly assuming that a distinction exists between political and military decision-making in the Islamic Republic. 

The war has not pushed Iran toward a dual structure in which civilians speak one language and the security establishment speaks another. After the war, power in Iran has become more concentrated within a military-security core, and the space for visible flexibility has narrowed.  What the recent controversy revealed was a system under pressure from two directions at once: President Donald Trump’s coercive diplomacy from the outside, and a domestic ideological support base that frames any signal of flexibility as weakness or capitulation.

The more relevant question is: Who is making the decisions in Iran today? Since the start of the war, the trajectory of power in Iran has been toward further consolidation. Authority over questions of war, diplomacy, and escalation has increasingly shifted to a relatively cohesive military‑security core, which includes a network of actors spanning the IRGC, the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), and political figures whose influence rests on deep ties to the security establishment.

Iran’s civilian institutions have not disappeared or become irrelevant. The presidency, the foreign ministry, and other parts of the Iranian state remain active, but their roles have been redefined. They no longer function as independent centers of strategic direction but instead implement decisions shaped elsewhere. This should help explain why the notion that a senior diplomat........

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