The real pressure on Tehran may not just be military, but the fear that someone inside the regime is already looking for a deal.

While countries including Pakistan offer to host U.S. — Iran peace talks, and the former head of MI6 warns that peace is a greater risk to the IRGC than war, getting a true picture of the war in Iran is still incredibly difficult.

The Iranian regime is publicly denying that peace talks are underway. Maybe that denial is true in the narrowest, most technical sense. Maybe there are no formal talks, no officials seated across a table, no photographs, no flags, no signed agenda. But that is not the same thing as saying nobody in or around Iran’s fractured leadership is testing an exit. 

And in a regime this wounded, this paranoid, and this internally divided, nobody still standing can possibly know that for sure. That is the first thing worth understanding. Iran is not operating right now as a calm, coherent state with one unquestioned center of authority. 

On paper, the new supreme leader is Mojtaba Khamenei. In practice, Khamenei is missing is action and has been since the war began. In fact, multiple senior figures were killed early in the war. The Revolutionary Guards have taken on even more influence. Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf has emerged as a key political-security intermediary. President Masoud Pezeshkian still exists inside the system, as does Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, but neither appears to be the sole decision-maker. What exists in Tehran now is less a tidy hierarchy than a battered cluster of overlapping power centers, with the IRGC carrying more weight than ever.

That matters because fractured governments leak. They freelance. They hedge. They send messages without always calling them messages. News accounts now indicate that Pakistan, Egypt, and Gulf states have all been relaying communications between Washington and Tehran. 

Pakistan has publicly offered to host talks. Trump says his administration is talking to “the right people” in Iran. Araqchi says exchanges through mediators do not amount to negotiations. Fine. But that is exactly the point. If messages are moving through several capitals at once, then the line between “talks” and “not talks” becomes political, not factual. It depends on what each side needs to say in public.

And Iran has every reason to deny, delay, and obfuscate. 

A regime under military assault does not want to look weak. A regime that built its identity on resistance does not want its own people believing that somebody near the top is already feeling around for terms. A regime now leaning more heavily on the Guards does not want internal suspicion spreading through the surviving elite. 

Public denial is not evidence that nothing is happening. In circumstances like these, public denial is exactly what you would expect, even if backchannels are active. 

In fact, the public contradiction is itself revealing. 

Tehran’s official line is that there are no talks. Yet a U.S. proposal has reportedly been delivered through Pakistan, and Iran, despite an initially negative response, is still reviewing it. That means the story is no longer “talks or no talks.” The story is that there is already enough contact for proposals to be transmitted, studied, and answered through intermediaries. That is diplomacy, whether Tehran likes the label or not.

The reported U.S. plan, while not fully public, appears to center on rolling back Iran’s nuclear program, limiting missiles, curbing support for regional militias, and reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s counter-position has been far harsher: guarantees against future attacks, compensation, no missile concessions, and control questions around Hormuz. Those are not the terms of a near-deal. But they are the terms of a struggle in which both sides are signaling, probing, and trying to discover the other side’s real bottom line while pretending not to.

This is where Trump’s statecraft comes in. His public language has often been contradictory. His stated goals have shifted. He has denied wanting regime change at some moments and flirted with it at others. But even if his messaging is messy, it does not follow that it is aimless. 

One plausible reading is that some of the ambiguity is deliberate. By loudly insisting that he is talking to “the right people” in Iran, Trump does not merely pressure Tehran from the outside. He pressures it from the inside. He forces every surviving faction in the regime to wonder who else might be talking, who might be wavering, who might be trying to save themselves, and who might be positioning for whatever comes next.

That does not have to produce immediate collapse to be useful. In a centralized dictatorship, any such uncertainty is extremely dangerous. In a wounded revolutionary regime with dead leaders, reduced military capacity, and rising Guard dominance, it is even more dangerous. 

Add to that Washington’s extraordinary move of offering rewards for information on Mojtaba Khamenei and other senior Iranian officials, and the pressure looks broader than battlefield attrition alone. This is military pressure, yes. But it also looks like psychological pressure aimed at trust itself.

So when Iran says there are no peace talks, maybe that is true in the ceremonial sense. But that is not the real question. The real question is whether anyone inside that shaken system can be certain that no one is suing for peace through some intermediary, some intelligence channel, some foreign ministry cutout, some political ally in Islamabad, Cairo, or the Gulf.

The answer is obvious.

They can’t.

And forcing them to live with that uncertainty is, in all likelihood, part of President Trump’s strategy.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)