The sequence of events was quickly interpreted in sections of the American press as evidence of a rift between Iran’s political leadership and its military hardliners associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The argument: that those willing to compromise may no longer command the support of the forces that now hold real power in Iran. That reading oversimplifies a complex reality by incorrectly assuming that a distinction exists between political and military decision-making in the Islamic Republic.
The more relevant question is: Who is making the decisions in Iran today? Since the start of the war, the trajectory of power in Iran has been toward further consolidation. Authority over questions of war, diplomacy, and escalation has increasingly shifted to a relatively cohesive military‑security core, which includes a network of actors spanning the IRGC, the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), and political figures whose influence rests on deep ties to the security establishment.
The SNSC has long functioned as a key decision‑shaping body, but it too is now more heavily weighted toward military figures than civilian ones. Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, the current secretary of the top national security body, is a senior IRGC commander. Ahmad Vahidi, who serves as the acting chief commander of the Revolutionary Guards, is another key person in the system.
There is also the question of the Supreme Leader and his role. Under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the system was structured around a figure who stood above both formal and informal civilian and military institutions and retained the final say on almost all strategic matters. In a departure from the practice of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Khamenei—supreme leaders who towered over the system—Iran’s security structure and decision-making processes have functioned differently since Mojtaba Khamenei was chosen as Supreme Leader following his father’s assassination at the beginning of the war.
Pragmatists and ideologues in Tehran
The most consequential divide in Iran today is not between civilian institutions and the military, but within the hardline camp that underpins the country’s security establishment. On one side stand security‑oriented elites like Ghalibaf, who approach the war through a pragmatic lens. For them, diplomacy is not a concession but an instrument—one to be deployed alongside military pressure, not instead of it.
The same divide also clarifies why dissent surfaces most visibly in certain institutions. State broadcasting in Iran—often described by outside observers as simply “official media”—is in practice controlled by figures aligned with the Stability Front, who were appointed by Ali Khamenei, and functions as a dedicated platform for that ideological current. A similar dynamic plays out in parliament, where the same camp holds a commanding majority and uses it to challenge the tone and direction of policy whenever an opening presents itself.
A system in transition
The Hormuz episode revealed the inner workings of a system in transition—one in which an emerging security–centered order now coexists uneasily with remnants of the older hybrid arrangement, part ideological, part coercive, that took shape over decades under Ali Khamenei. That older system always had a strong security component, but its internal balance has shifted. Since the war began, the security elite has moved closer to the center of decision‑making, while the ideological camp has grown less decisive at the core yet remains highly capable of exerting pressure. That pressure carries weight because the war did not simply militarize the state. It also politicized the regime’s support base in ways the leadership did not fully anticipate.
That dynamic narrowed Iran’s room for maneuver over Hormuz, and external factors compounded the problem. Trump’s style of coercive diplomacy made any Iranian flexibility harder to sustain politically, because it turned even limited movement into proof, in his telling, that pressure was working. Every public declaration of American success, every suggestion that Iran could be pushed further—on sanctions, naval restrictions, or enriched uranium—raised the domestic cost for Tehran of appearing accommodating without a tangible reciprocal gesture in return. In that sense, the reversal over Hormuz was less a sign of institutional disarray than of mounting constraint.
Iran is not fractured along a civilian-military fault line. What it is navigating is a post‑Khamenei transition in which the old order resists displacement, the new one is not yet fully consolidated, and the Supreme Leader appears to function less as an undisputed final arbiter than as a participant in a broader security‑led consensus. That may change if Mojtaba Khamenei eventually consolidates his authority. For now, the system is operating less as a hierarchy organized around a single dominant figure and more as a hardline coalition trying to manage war, diplomacy, and internal competition simultaneously.
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