Iran's leadership fractures over war goals as ultra-hardliners push for victory and negotiators seek a deal with Washington

The internal split

After six months of war, Iran's leadership is showing a united front in public while privately fracturing over what the war should achieve. On one side stand the ultra-hardliners of the Paydari movement, hard-core ideologues who oppose any negotiations with the United States and are pressing for total victory. On the other, President Masoud Pezeshkian and parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, who doubles as Iran's chief negotiator, view military pressure as a lever to extract concessions and win a negotiated deal.

“Negotiation is a political tool and a complement to military action to force the enemy to a point of compulsion and extract real concessions.”

The split was laid bare in April when the Supreme National Security Council approved a ceasefire deal with the U.S. by a vote of 12 to 1. The lone dissenting vote is widely believed to have come from Saeed Jalili, the most prominent Paydari figure. Where the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, stands remains unclear. Reportedly injured in the strike that killed his father on February 28, Khamenei remains in hiding, and both factions have claimed his backing.

Ceasefire collapses into wider war

The April ceasefire crumbled as both sides disputed how to interpret its terms. Iran struck several ships attempting to transit the Strait of Hormuz, which before the war carried a fifth of the world's traded oil and gas. Financial promises under the deal, including the release of billions in frozen assets, did not materialize, and the American blockade returned. Trump ordered retaliatory strikes, igniting cycles of missile and drone exchanges with the U.S. bombarding southern Iran.

“What we have seen in the last week is a much higher risk appetite to pre-emptively up the ante rather than always be reactionary.”

Over the past two weeks, Iran has seized the initiative, launching pre-emptive attacks designed to exhaust the U.S. and frighten its Arab allies into accepting Iranian control of the Strait. It struck a U.S. military installation in Jordan, widened the conflict to Syria for the first time, disrupted Red Sea shipping, and is suspected of a drone attack on Egypt.

A covert escalation blueprint

Two senior Iranian officials told The New York Times that the recent wave of attacks is part of a step-by-step plan devised in secret during the spring truce. The strategy would use Iran's proxy militias, the Axis of Resistance, to escalate attacks if the United States intensified its assaults. The goal, the officials said, was to make the war as costly as possible for President Trump.

“The rules of the conflict are changing and being rewritten, we are creating new conditions and platforms in the war. The fronts are multiplying from different directions in the region; they are of course coordinated but act independently.”

A drone attack sent smoke billowing from a giant Saudi oil facility, the largest such plant in the world. Two gas tankers burst into flames at an Egyptian port near the Suez Canal. Fireballs erupted over Jordan as missiles flew toward a base housing U.S. personnel.

The lay architects of regime survival

Beyond the clerical leadership, a generation of lay revolutionaries who helped build the Islamic republic now occupies the commanding heights of its power structure. Born in the mid-1950s, these men came of age during the upheavals of the 1970s, built the institutions of the post-revolutionary order, fought the Iran-Iraq war, and weathered decades of domestic unrest, international isolation, and economic sanctions. Their longevity, analysts note, has endowed them with deep institutional memory and a pragmatic understanding of both coercion and compromise.

What comes next

Trump said on Saturday night that the U.S., while "locked and loaded and ready to go," would cancel a planned attack at the request of Middle Eastern allies and that a deal with Iran was potentially close. Tehran's gamble is that it can either deter Washington from resuming major combat operations, by demonstrating how Iran could escalate the conflict, or outlast the U.S. in a lengthy war of attrition. Analysts argue that Iran views a return to full-scale fighting with Israel and the U.S. as increasingly inevitable.