Peace talks are set to continue in the Gulf this week as the ceasefire is set to expire. But who is in charge in Iran? And are they really in charge?

Peace talks are set to continue this week as the ceasefire clock runs down. But the talks are being complicated by the fact that Iran’s decision-making power structure is no longer easy to read, even for the people sitting across the table from it. 

There are also major signs that what authority the current rulers still possess is being challenged from within the country itself, as the regime leans harder on arrests, executions, intimidation, and fear.

On paper, the story is simple enough: Pakistan is trying to host another round of U.S.-Iran talks. Pakistani officials have said they received a “positive signal” from Tehran and were trying to get the Iranians to Islamabad by Tuesday or shortly after. Reuters also reported that an Iranian official said Tehran was “positively reviewing” participation. But Iran’s public line has been much more hesitant, with its side still signaling that no final decision had been made. In other words: the talks are on, until someone says they are off, until perhaps they are on again.

That wobble is not just scheduling confusion. It appears to reflect a deeper problem inside the Iranian system. 

Axios reported today that Trump administration officials came away from recent contacts unsure whether the people negotiating for Iran actually had the authority to deliver what they were discussing. According to that report, U.S. officials believed they had reached an understanding with one set of Iranian interlocutors, only to conclude later that the IRGC and other hardliners were effectively saying: those men do not speak for us. 

That is not a small problem. Peace talks are hard enough when both sides mistrust one another. They become borderline absurd when one side is not even certain which Iranian faction, office, or armed institution is really empowered to make binding commitments.

It is also not just American spin. 

Reuters reported last month that Mojtaba Khamenei inherited the formal powers of supreme leader after his father’s death, but lacks the automatic authority his father enjoyed and may be beholden to the Revolutionary Guards. 

AP reporting pointed in much the same direction, with analysts saying the Revolutionary Guard is now effectively the state, or close to it. Reuters further noted that the Guards have become even more central to strategic decision-making during the war, and that Iran’s elected president has already been publicly constrained when he stepped even slightly out of line. So yes, there is still some formal hierarchy in Tehran. But formal hierarchy and real power are not the same thing, and right now that distinction matters more than ever.

This helps explain why the ceasefire feels less like peace than like a pause in a hostage negotiation with several competing kidnappers. The truce announced on April 7 is expected to expire midweek, and Reuters reported that a Pakistani source involved in the talks put the deadline at 8 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday. 

Meanwhile, the military situation has remained combustible: the U.S. seized an Iranian-flagged cargo ship after a standoff, Iran has treated the blockade as a major obstacle to talks, and traffic through Hormuz has been badly disrupted. So the diplomats are not exactly building on a foundation of calm. They are trying to keep a shaky process alive while the military balance, shipping pressure, and internal Iranian command structure all remain unsettled.

And then there is the other half of the story, which is easy to miss if you only follow the summitry. 

Inside Iran, the regime does not look serene or consolidated. It looks frightened. ABC News reported this week that Iranians and observers describe an intensifying crackdown on dissent, including asset seizures targeting journalists and artists abroad, arrests on accusations of collaboration with “enemy media,” and what observers describe as an acceleration of executions. 

ABC also reported that more than 400 journalists and artists abroad had their assets in Iran seized, and that Iranian authorities have escalated measures against critics at home and across the diaspora. Some of the grimmest numerical claims in that report come from outside monitors and are not independently verified by ABC, but the broader pattern is very hard to miss.

This is where the regime’s internal weakness may be showing through the mask. 

Governments that feel strong do not usually need to keep widening the definition of “enemy” to include poets, reporters, grieving families, and frightened citizens. They do not usually need to disappear prisoners into unknown locations, threaten demonstrators with live fire, or make examples of teenagers in rushed political cases. Crackdowns can look like strength from a distance. Often they are really a confession of insecurity. The state is saying, in effect: we are not sure who still fears us enough, so we intend to remind everyone at once.

That does not mean the regime is about to fall tomorrow. 

Iran’s system still has coercive capacity. The Guards are organized to survive decapitation. They can replace commanders, keep units operating, and continue projecting force. But repression is not the same as legitimacy. If the rulers in Tehran were fully secure, the country would not feel so politically electrified and so heavily policed at the same time. The public anger described in recent reporting is not gone. 

It has been forced underground.

So that is the real shape of this week’s diplomacy. The talks may continue. In fact, they probably will, because too much is at stake for all sides to walk away lightly. But these are not normal talks between two coherent governments calmly bargaining over terms. They are talks conducted under deadline, under military pressure, and under the shadow of a regime whose lines of authority appear blurred even to itself. 

The Iranian state still has guns, prisons, censors, and men in uniform. What it may not fully have is clarity, unity, or public confidence. That is a dangerous combination. And it is why these negotiations look less like the beginning of peace than like a desperate effort to keep events from slipping out of everyone’s hands at once.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)