After the latest round of talks between the United States and Iran in Islamabad, Iran’s foreign minister and negotiator Abbas Araghchi stated in a post on X on April 17 that the Strait of Hormuz was “fully open”. It came after he also signaled that his government could be flexible on the issue of nuclear enrichment as well as Iran’s support for its proxies in the region.
Then came an unexpected correction. Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, a former commander in Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) who was recently appointed secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, is understood to have complained to the IRGC, submitting a report that criticized Araghchi for “deviation from the mandate of the delegation”.
The negotiating team was called back to Tehran. Araghchi was attacked by state media, which said his post “gave Trump the best opportunity to go beyond reality, declare himself the winner of the war and celebrate victory”. And the Strait of Hormuz was declared closed.
This episode demonstrates the new reality in the Islamic Republic, where the IRGC increasingly calls the shots in all matters of citizenship and government. The rest of the state is mostly facade.
Six weeks into the war, Iran’s former leadership has been destroyed: Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in a US strike on the first day of US-Israeli strikes. Many of his senior colleagues have also been killed. Iran is no longer understood as a state with a powerful militia. It is done, more precisely, a powerful militia with state – a political order with the IRGC at its core.
The other traditional centers of power – the government and the clergy – have in fact shifted to simple front organizations. Amidst the fog of war, even the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, appears simply as a legitimizing ornament. In any case, Khamenei is reported to have been seriously injured in the attack that killed his father and apparently does not participate in the government.
So who runs the country? The answer unmistakably directs the IRGC and its leader, Ahmed Vahidi.
Guardians of the revolution
The IRGC was created after the 1979 revolution precisely because Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his allies did not trust the conventional state apparatus to defend the revolution.
Over time she grew beyond her role as the guards of the revolution in a comprehensive network, with all channels. It became an army, an intelligence service, an economic conglomerate and a regional network of expeditions. Its internal security force, the Basij, gave it an arm of mass social control inside Iran. The Quds Force was created to export the revolution through Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and beyond.
Far from destroying this architecture, the sanctions deepened it. They led to the creation of IRGC-linked front companies that made illegal deals and operated patronage circles that enriched those closest to the center of power. What emerged was a parallel state that gradually surpassed the formal one.
The IRGC is organized as a network with a core and a periphery. Its central hub sets strategy. This is surrounded by a network of decentralized cells capable of operating with a high degree of autonomy. This is called Iran’s “The doctrine of the protection of the mosaic.” And it was built to function exactly as it is now: to continue the war between attempts at decapitation and disruption.
A new leader appears
After IRGC chief Mohammad Pakpour was killed on the opening day of the conflict, Ahmed Vahidia former interior minister and a founding member of the IRGC, has emerged to take his place. Appointed in emergency duty after his predecessor was assassinated, he has consolidated effective control as the civilian presidency has been vacated.
With the new supreme leader seemingly incapacitated and the clergy sidelined, Vahidi and his band of allies – IRGC commanders and security council members such as Ali Akbar Ahmadian and Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr – have set the mandate and red lines for the ceasefire talks.
The IRGC’s red lines are clear: it will not give up uranium enrichment altogether; it wants to maintain its missile program and axis of resistance; it wants sanctions lifted and wants access to Iranian assets overseas that are currently frozen. Room for negotiation exists only on technical details regarding enrichment levels, timelines for lifting sanctions, or the language of any deal that is agreed upon.
In times of war, states tend to centralize while civilian institutions shrink. Strong men tend to rise, especially after many of the influential political pragmatists are taken. An example of such a pragmatist in Iran is Ali Larijani, the former secretary of the security council, killed by Israel on March 16.
The IRGC was not spurred out of the blue by this war, but prepared by decades of institutional entrenchment, economic capture, and delegated coercion. The nascent IRGC military dictatorship needed this war to consolidate its influence over competing nodes in the network – most importantly the clergy.
This has profound consequences for negotiations. Instead of engaging in direct state-to-state bargaining, Washington’s real-estate tycoons-turned-negotiators are talking to Iranian counterparts, who are on short shrift held by the IRGC. Progress in negotiations should not be judged by what Iranian diplomats say in public, but by what the guard allows to be implemented in practice.
The failed Trump-Israel decapitation strategy leaves in place a powerful system emboldened by desperation in the White House to find a diplomatic platform out of the loop. To think that this war-hardened system will capitulate is wishful thinking.
Recent days have made it clear that the IRGC is now a one-state militia that uses the Islamic Republic’s civilian and military institutions as an outer skin. While there is room for negotiation to build a mutually acceptable deal, the US administration must be realistic about where the IRGC’s red lines are and what card it must actually play against a resilient network with a very high pain threshold.
Andreas Krieg is Associate Professor, Department of Defense Studies, King’s College London.
This article was reprinted from Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read on original article.
