The Iranian Regime’s Dynamics Are Fooling Trump

One strange aspect of the U.S. faceoff with Iran is that, in this modern age of advanced warfare, some basics have been forgotten.

Stuff like: Make sure you have enough weapons. Keep your friends on your side. And clearly define your ultimate goal.

Perhaps most important, though, is “know your enemy.” An awareness of your enemy’s strengths and weaknesses is key to figuring out how to defeat them.

When it comes to the regime in Tehran, the Trump administration appears to still be in the early learning stages.

A clear sign of this is administration assertions that Iran’s regime is splintered or so divided that it can’t even effectively negotiate. At times, President Donald Trump and his aides, including those who’ve negotiated with Iranian officials, seem frustrated or outright surprised by such dynamics.

In April, Trump claimed on social media that the Iranian government was “seriously fractured.” Last month at a rally, he complained that one of his biggest problems with Tehran was “I don’t know who the hell to deal with.” A Trump aide separately told my colleagues that the regime’s “factions” have objectives that “are at times radically different.” “They keep changing the goalposts,” the official said.

But Iran’s Islamist regime has never been monolithic. And everyone in the upper circles of the Trump administration — given the risks they are taking with this war — should know this.

The regime has multiple layers and elements that debate each other and compete for influence, especially with the supreme leader. People have been sidelined, yet for nearly five decades, the regime has held together, even during yearslong wars. It has never fractured.

Even though newly installed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei isn’t a visibly galvanizing force, that doesn’t mean there’s a splintering.

“There are undoubtedly serious debates within the Iranian regime, but that’s not new. Mojtaba is a wild card because he is new and out of sight, but there’s no public sign yet of unprecedented or destabilizing regime splits or fractures,” one U.S. official familiar with the Trump team’s Middle East policy acknowledged to me.

Officially, the White House is dismissing such analysis.

“These armchair quarterbacks are merely postulating, and the idea that they have a better grasp of the Iranian position than American negotiators, who have actually spoken to the other side, is absurd,” said Anna Kelly, a spokesperson for the White House.

For anyone fresh to the topic, it’s easy to be seduced by the prospect of exposing and exploiting what seem like cracks in a brutal regime.

After all, Iran looks unusually vulnerable. Though it has flexed its muscles in the Strait of Hormuz, it has never before been so isolated or faced so much pressure. Its military institutions and arsenals have taken massive hits, and dozens of its top leaders were killed in the war’s first days — including its then-supreme leader. It is under a U.S. naval blockade, faces even more sanctions, and still gets hit by U.S. airstrikes.

And in recent weeks, the regime’s internal debates have become more visible.

Some Iranian officials, such as President Masoud Pezeshkian, have pushed for diplomacy to get back on track, knowing the Iranian economy is in peril. Others advocate continued resistance by casting doubt on a now-defunct memorandum of understanding reached with Washington. One hard-line Iranian news outlet described the MOU as a “scrap of paper” that was a “pure loss for us.”

Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen or heard publicly since reportedly suffering grave wounds early in the war. But he has shaken up his national security team, lifting figures seen as hard-liners who might be keen to avoid diplomacy. Some of Mojtaba Khamenei’s public comments about the war also have been ambiguous. For instance, he approved the memorandum of understanding, a critical moment, but he also said in a written statement that “in principle, I had a different opinion.”

But when I ran the recent Iran developments by current and former U.S. officials and others who closely follow the Iran crisis, they generally agreed that the Iranian regime’s shape-shifting was business as usual.

The bottom line for many was that the regime, having survived despite the assassinations of many of its top officials, appears solidly in control for now. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a military body that reports directly to the supreme leader, has significant sway. Internal disagreements are about tactics, not strategy.

Khamenei’s ambiguous statements have familial precedent. His father, the previous supreme leader who was killed early in the war, often took positions that could be read in multiple ways. The late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei gave only a half-hearted blessing to the 2015 nuclear deal Iran struck with the United States. Taking such murky stances was a way to give himself wiggle room with the various factions he oversaw in case things fell apart (as they did when Trump left the nuclear deal in 2018).

Iranian officials declined to comment for this column.

The Trump negotiating team shouldn’t be surprised if Iranian interlocutors won’t make promises without getting sign-offs from others back in Tehran, said Sanam Vakil of Chatham House, who is in touch with Middle Eastern officials, among others, about Iran.

“It's a system that's always been based on internal negotiation and consensus. So everyone is always covering their back,” Vakil said.

The internal Iranian debates, according to many I talked to, aren’t that different from what we see from the Trump administration. Vice President JD Vance is clearly less hawkish on Iran than, say, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Capitol Hill is also divided — though due to Republican fears of crossing Trump, Congress is not weighing in to the extent it normally would. Then there’s Trump himself, who constantly changes his mind, sometimes in the same breath.

By overstating the regime’s divisions, Trump could be missing strategic opportunities. That’s especially true if the U.S. military and economic pressure campaigns don't work and Trump decides to once again try diplomacy. To get to a deal, it will likely be critical to structure an offer that would pass muster with the pragmatists, the hard-liners and whoever is in between in Tehran.

Khamenei’s choice of advisers is a key data point. His recent reshuffling of his national security team is earning mixed reviews from those familiar with the inner workings of the Iranian government.

Some commentators cast it as a signal that Iran is taking a more confrontational stance with the United States. Others say the changes are more about Khamenei’s efforts to consolidate and project power inside Iran, where many citizens are deeply unhappy with their leaders.

Any Trump effort to widen the Iranian regime’s fissures is likely futile, said Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group, who is in touch with Iranian and American officials. If anything unites Iran’s leaders, it’s the desire to endure this storm.

“These people are sitting in the same boat,” Vaez said. “They either sink together or survive together.”

But Behnam Ben Taleblu of the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who is in touch with an array of Western policymakers about Iran, argued that time may make all the difference.

For now, regime leaders may be united in trying to survive and resistant to outside meddling. But in the long run, the external pressure could spark defections or dysfunction that leads the regime to make mistakes at home or abroad.

“In short, a death spiral,” Taleblu told me.

Days ago, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced new U.S. sanctions on Iran, he spoke to such possibilities by urging Iranian troops to defy the regime.

“To the ordinary soldiers supporting this regime, as more and more of your paychecks stop or are supposedly just delayed, ask whether your commanders are leading your country to triumph or to ruin,” Bessent said. “And recall that the Berlin Wall fell when ordinary soldiers decided not to shoot at their own people.”

Ariane Tabatabai, a Pentagon official during the Biden administration, agrees that the regime’s long-term challenge may come from inside the country as its citizens grow more unhappy over governance, corruption and economic challenges.

She warned, however, that it was exactly such Iranian discontent, which led to mass protests and mass killings in late 2025 to early 2026, that led many U.S. hawks to believe — mistakenly — the regime was ripe for toppling.

“There was a belief that we could just nudge collapse using that vulnerability instead of letting it play out and letting the Iranian people determine their fate on their terms, and now we’re here,” Tabatabai said.