Iran’s Revolutionary Guards are stepping up their demands regarding the Strait of Hormuz and pushing the agreement further away

Before stepping down from his post, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, had set out the conditions for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz: the definitive end to the war by the United States, the lifting of the naval blockade and all sanctions, the withdrawal of armed forces, the unfreezing of Iranian assets, the payment of war costs, and an end to threats and military actions against Iran’s allied militias in the region. The Iranian Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, continued to announce that an agreement with Oman on the Strait was in its “final stages”, and even American officials were by then convinced that negotiations for the reopening of Hormuz were nearing a conclusion; however, Tehran’s hardline stance prevailed, with the highest price demanded since the start of the war. 

The resignation of Zolghadr, a hardline official very close to Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, does not appear to represent a step backwards – quite the contrary. On Sunday, he was replaced by another staunch loyalist who had previously served as an adviser to the Supreme Leader, Mohsen Rezaei. Yeganeh Torbati writes in the New York Times that the appointment of Rezaei, who led the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps during the Iran–Iraq War, “could represent a further consolidation of power by the old guard of the country’s security establishment”, and an attempt by Khamenei to counterbalance the influence of the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who, together with Araghchi, is managing the negotiations with the United States and has backed the plan to split traffic through the Strait of Hormuz into an inbound lane near Iran and an outbound lane near Oman.

According to analysts, the most ‘hardline’ faction within the Islamic Republic is gaining the upper hand in the talks to reopen the Strait, and according to the Arab mediators who took part in the negotiations, even if an agreement were to be reached, the biggest obstacle would be precisely the hardliners who are holding the so-called ‘moderate’ wing to ransom – which, in reality, has very little that is 'moderate' about it, but is pushing for an apparent cessation of hostilities – a wing that is also under attack from the Iranian media. Last week, Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the ultra-conservative daily Kayhan, wrote that an agreement to restore traffic through the Strait of Hormuz would be tantamount to “opening an escape route for the enemy”, and an Iranian MP stated his intention to initiate impeachment proceedings against Araghchi, who should have put any agreement to a parliamentary vote.

Among the reasons for internal divisions is reportedly Khamenei’s absence from the public eye, with whom Iranian diplomats find it difficult to speak: Pezeshkian himself told the Iranian state broadcaster IRIB that communicating with the Supreme Leader is “very difficult”, meaning that the Pasdaran have effectively been left to dictate the agenda and the pace. “Their threat of escalation is designed to secure concessions and humiliate Donald Trump, but their arrogance also risks reigniting the conflict,” Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Iran programme at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, told the Wall Street Journal.

Over the weekend, Pezeshkian had announced that this was the best time to reach an agreement: “We cannot fight forever. Sooner or later, we must put an end to this struggle,” he said, speaking of “cohesion, strength and unity” in Iran, but implicitly referring to the economic aid that is increasingly needed by the country in crisis. Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister, also told the media that the Iranian economy is in desperate need of the easing of sanctions that could result from a diplomatic agreement.  Yesterday, Trump responded with a post on Truth to the Iranian demands “for damages suffered during the last five months of military conflict (which began because THEY WILL NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON), even though the issue has never been mentioned in any of our negotiations or meetings! Now I, too, am demanding compensation from Iran for all the people they have killed and seriously injured. (...) I have instructed my representatives to include this point unequivocally in all future negotiations.”