Iran Is Not Negotiating
Iran Is Negotiating From a Command Structure That No Longer Exists.
Iran and Oman announced this month that they had agreed on shipping route coordinates through the Strait of Hormuz, a temporary corridor meant to last two to four months while a fuller arrangement is drafted. Tehran was careful to specify what the deal is not. Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi called it an understanding on passage, not a reopening of the strait, and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the same thing in different words days earlier: an agreement with Muscat would not translate into the strait itself reopening, because that, he said, is a separate issue. Donald Trump, in a speech on Long Island, offered a competing description entirely, calling the American naval presence in the strait a wall of steel and threatening to declare Hormuz a US territory outright. Three governments are now describing the same 18 miles of water in three incompatible vocabularies, and none of them has secured a ceasefire.
This is what brinkmanship looks like once the initial objective of a war has already been achieved and abandoned in the same breath. The United States and Israel opened Operations Roaring Lion and Epic Fury on February 28 with the stated purpose of creating conditions for regime change. They killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a bunker strike that morning, and with him Ali Shamkhani, his national security adviser; Mohammad Pakpour, commander of the Revolutionary Guard Corps; Abdolrahim Mousavi, chief of the general staff; Aziz Nasirzadeh, the defense minister; and, in the weeks that followed, Ali Larijani, the aerospace force commander Amir Ali Hajizadeh, and the head of the Basij, Gholamreza Soleimani. Some counts put the total number of senior officials killed at close to 40. It was, by any reasonable measure, the most complete decapitation of a state’s military and security leadership in the modern history of the region.
The question worth asking six months later is not whether the strikes worked. They did, in the narrow sense that they killed the men they were aimed at. The question is what a state negotiates with once its entire command tier has been replaced in a matter of weeks, and the answer, visible now in the Hormuz talks, is that Iran is negotiating with exactly the same leverage it had before the war began: geography, and the willingness to use it.
The Strait of Hormuz carries roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and liquefied natural gas. Iran does not need an intact IRGC command structure to close it, mine it, or make insurers price it as closed; it needs mines, small craft, and a willingness to absorb retaliation, and Tehran demonstrated all three between April and July, when at least 17 merchant ships were damaged, a tugboat was sunk, two vessels were captured, and a dozen seafarers were killed or went missing. A June memorandum of understanding aimed at ending the war within 60 days collapsed in July precisely because Iran struck three commercial ships that had used a route Iran itself had not approved. None of that required a Supreme Leader. It required a parliamentary committee vote to authorize tolls and a navy willing to enforce them, both of which survived the decapitation intact, because neither depended on the men who were killed.
This is the asymmetry the last six months have exposed. Washington and Jerusalem built a campaign around removing individuals, on the reasonable premise that Iranian strategy for four decades has run through a small number of identifiable men. But the leverage Iran has actually deployed in the Hormuz standoff, a chokepoint, a fleet of small attack craft, and the global economy’s dependence on tanker traffic that has nowhere else to go, is structural rather than personal. Mojtaba Khamenei’s ascension eight days after his father’s death demonstrated that the succession mechanism survived. The Hormuz negotiations demonstrate something adjacent and more consequential: that Iran’s actual bargaining position was never fully resident in the men who were killed. It was resident in the strait.
That does not mean the decapitation was strategically worthless. It removed a general staff with institutional memory of the 2025 12-day war and replaced it with officers who have held their posts for months rather than years, and inexperience at that level carries real risk of miscalculation on both sides. But risk of miscalculation is not the same as absence of leverage, and the distinction matters for how this ends. A regime that has lost its command tier and still controls the terms of passage through a fifth of the world’s oil supply is not a regime bargaining from collapse. It is a regime that has been forced to prove, under the worst conditions imaginable, that its coercive power was never as personalized as the strike planners assumed. Iran walked into these negotiations having lost nearly everyone. It did not walk in having lost the strait.
