Iran’s costly statecraft failures

However, during the Rouhani years, the supreme leader gave his blessing to a settlement of the long saga over Iran’s nuclear program in the form of UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which suspended the previous punishing sanctions. Until the E3’s invocation of the UN snapback mechanism on August 28, Iran avoided Security Council resolutions penalising the country. Likewise, at the IAEA, its Board of Governors levied only one censure resolution against Iran in 2020 when Rouhani was president from 2013-2021. There have been two censure resolutions at the IAEA against Iran since Pezeshkian took office in July 2024. Now, Araghchi, who served as a deputy foreign minister under Rouhani, is presiding over a Foreign Ministry whose record is beginning to resemble the Ahmadinejad years.

Likewise, the supreme leader’s advisors badly misread Trump. Tehran clearly feared the president based on the record of his first term in office, where he imposed maximum pressure on Tehran and was unpredictable. This is why it plotted to kill him before his election. When that did not work, the Islamic Republic tried to court President Trump using a variety of gimmicks, believing he had no principles, could be duped into embracing a version of the same nuclear deal he repudiated in 2018, and that Republicans would blindly fall in line. Iranian diplomats like Araghchi also took to mimicking MAGA talking points, seeking to play on perceived divisions on foreign policy within the Republican party.

Yet President Trump proved them wrong. Where Iranian officials and their sympathisers sought to dangle phantom investment opportunities, the potential for high-level meetings, and even the prospect of the president winning the Nobel Peace Prize if only he totally caved to Iranian demands, like being allowed to retain a domestic enrichment program, the president demonstrated that he had his own longstanding red lines on Iran – zero enrichment. The Islamic Republic’s strategists believed they had a golden opportunity to achieve another version of the JCPOA if only they killed President Trump with kindness and refrained from the posture of refusing to negotiate with him that they maintained during his first term. But that backfired in a big way.

The Iranian leadership also believed they could avert a military strike by reverting to its longtime playbook of stalling during negotiations to gradually exhaust US negotiators into conceding. The supreme leader and his deputies thought a deadline would not really be a deadline as they had seen those come and go for years prior without consequence. They also believed U.S. sentiment against military action targeting Iran’s nuclear program was stronger than it really was. Tehran failed to internalise President Trump’s criticism of President Obama’s nuclear negotiating team, when in 2016 he expressed disdain for the fact that his administration never walked out of the talks with Tehran in the lead-up to the inking of the JCPOA.

This bad bet by Khamenei turned into a disastrous gamble. He had finally met a president who would not play by Tehran’s rules anymore, seeking to accommodate the Islamic Republic with inordinate amounts of patience. This paved the way for Israel’s Operation Rising Lion and the US Operation Midnight Hammer.

These are not only failures of Iranian deterrence but Iranian statecraft. Some hardline members of parliament are now calling for Pezeshkian’s ouster as president over incompetence. In August, Pezeshkian hit back at opponents of engagement with the West, saying “if we don’t talk, what should we do? Do you want to fight? Well, they hit us, we rebuild, and they’ll hit us again.” That prompted the deputy political chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Aziz Ghazanfari to complain that Pezeshkian’s verbal mistakes are increasing and “the dangers of incorrect statements by high-ranking government officials primarily affect the governments themselves.”

Already this heightened regime discord is paving the way for more conservative voices to enter decision-making institutions, like the SNSC. Ali Bagheri Kani, who served as deputy foreign minister and chief nuclear negotiator under Pezeshkian’s more hardline predecessor Ebrahim Raisi, has been named a deputy for international affairs at the SNSC, under its new secretary Ali Larijani. This choice of Bagheri Kani may have been forced on the president by the Office of the Supreme Leader to placate increasingly vocal conservative factions who are lashing out at Pezeshkian.

As the pressure increases on Iran, its miscalculations on foreign policy will become more pronounced and factional infighting will rise.

Jason M. Brodsky is the policy director of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI). His research specialities include Iranian leadership dynamics, Iran’s military and security services, and U.S. policy on Iran.