Iran International
While Iran’s foreign minister is right now visiting Oman for bilateral talks with the United States, in Tehran’s calculus, negotiations now promise steady erosion. War, by contrast, offers a chance – however risky – to reset the balance.
This marks a shift from the Islamic Republic’s long-standing view of war as an existential threat. Today, senior decision-makers appear to believe that controlled confrontation may preserve the system in ways diplomacy no longer can.
That belief explains why war is no longer unthinkable in Tehran, but increasingly framed as a viable instrument of rule.
At the core of this shift lies a stark assessment: the negotiating table has become a losing field.
This is not because an agreement with Washington is impossible. It is because the framework imposed by the United States and its allies has turned diplomacy into a process of cumulative concession.
When nuclear limits, missile restrictions, regional influence, and even domestic conduct are treated as interlinked files, Iranian leaders see talks not as pressure relief, but as strategic retreat without credible guarantees of survival.
From Tehran’s perspective, diplomacy no longer buys time. It entrenches vulnerability.
In that context, confrontation begins to look less like recklessness and more like a way out of a narrowing corridor.
War as a domestic instrument of control
Why war? Because war is the one scenario in which the Islamic Republic believes it does not necessarily lose.
Domestically, the regime faces its most severe legitimacy crisis in decades.
Widespread repression, the killing of protesters, economic collapse, and a society increasingly resistant to fear-based governance have eroded the state’s traditional tools of control.
Under these conditions, war serves a powerful political function. It rewrites the rules of governance.
In wartime, dissent can be reframed as collaboration with the enemy. Protest becomes sabotage. Opposition becomes a national security threat.
Among the emails released from the Jeffrey Epstein case is a letter written by Robert Trivers, a prominent American evolutionary biologist, referring to a meeting between Epstein and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s former president.
This is not the only instance in which Iran appears in the documents made public by the US Department of Justice.
The letter, dated March 24, 2018, appears among millions of documents released as part of the Epstein case. In it, Trivers refers to a meeting between Epstein and Ahmadinejad in New York following the Iranian leader’s speeches at the United Nations General Assembly, where he had delivered strongly worded remarks against Israel and Zionism.
Trivers notes that his own information about Ahmadinejad was limited and partly based on online research, including accounts that Ahmadinejad came from a poor family and had previously worked as an engineer and a teacher.
In the letter, Trivers poses a tentative question to Epstein, asking whether this social background may have served as a basis for a connection between the two men.
He also describes Epstein as “polymorphously perverse” in his political and social relationships, suggesting that he was capable of maintaining ties simultaneously with figures from sharply opposing ideological camps.
As examples, Trivers points to Fidel Castro, whom he characterizes as a symbol of radical socialism, and Ahmadinejad, whom he describes as representing radical Islamism.
Denial from Ahmadinejad’s camp
Ali Akbar Javanfekr, Ahmadinejad’s former media adviser, responded to the disclosure on February 1, rejecting the claim outright.
“The allegation raised in the media about a meeting between someone named Epstein and Dr. Ahmadinejad is completely false, and such a meeting never took place,” Javanfekr wrote.
He described the claim as nothing more than fabricated news based on lies and deception.
Ahmadinejad traveled to New York eight times between August 2005 and July 2013 during his eight-year presidency to attend and address the United Nations General Assembly.
His first trip became one of the most controversial episodes of his presidency after claims about a “halo of light” surrounding him during his UN speech. His final visit also drew criticism after he brought a delegation of around 120 people, reportedly including his son, daughter-in-law, and his daughter-in-law’s mother.
Alireza Ittihadieh in Epstein’s correspondence
In an earlier release of Epstein-related documents, the name of another Iranian also drew media attention: Alireza Ittihadieh, an Iranian businessman and chief executive of Freestream Aircraft, a private jet brokerage company.
The relationship between Epstein and Ittihadieh appears to have originated primarily through Epstein’s use of Ittihadieh’s private jet services. The two exchanged emails repeatedly between 2014 and 2018. Initial correspondence focused largely on coordinating private flights for Epstein and his guests, but over time their exchanges expanded to topics related to Iran.
These later emails included the sharing of political analysis and information about Iran’s domestic situation and US policy toward Tehran.
Political analysis and a warning before the nuclear deal exit
In May 2017, Ittihadieh forwarded parts of a New York Times report to Epstein addressing then-President Donald Trump’s speech on Iran, his efforts to build closer ties with Sunni-majority countries in the region, particularly Saudi Arabia, and social reactions inside Iran following the electoral defeat of Ebrahim Raisi.
The report included a quote from Fadel Meybodi, a political activist, pointing to the challenges faced by then-President Hassan Rouhani in expanding social freedoms and breaking hardliners’ monopoly over state media such as Iran’s national broadcaster.
Epstein replied to the email by writing: “I told you this would happen. Before things get better, they will get much worse.”
One year later, Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal.
Shift in tone and business exchanges
In an email dated July 2018, the tone of the correspondence changed. Epstein requested technical information about a Boeing business jet, asking Ittihadieh for detailed specifications and maintenance schedules.
In the same message, Epstein referred to Trump’s statements expressing interest in reaching a deal with Iran, describing the approach as “madness.”
Ittihadieh responded by writing: “Let's keep our friendship and talk politics, you are after free information and I NO longer provide free information.”
In later exchanges, when Epstein inquired about the sale of a jet, Ittihadieh replied that another offer had been received and that accepting that offer was likely.
Arms trading and covert networks
In recent days, images circulating on social media have highlighted passages from a book alleging Epstein’s involvement in arms sales to the Islamic Republic during the Iran-Iraq war.
The excerpts come from pages 20 and 21 of the second volume of the book A Nation Under Blackmail, published in 2022.
According to the book, Epstein’s connections with Iran date back not to the final years of his life, but primarily to the 1980s and 1990s, involving covert activities in arms trafficking, money laundering, and intelligence networks.
This period coincided with the Iran-Iraq war and secret operations such as the Iran-Contra affair.
According to statements by Steven Hoffenberg, a former close associate of Epstein, Epstein received training in the early 1980s under Sir Douglas Leese, whom Hoffenberg described as instructing Epstein in arms smuggling, the creation of shell companies, and money laundering.
Hoffenberg has said that by 1983, Epstein was directly involved in the sale of Chinese weapons to Iran through the state-owned company Norinco, at the height of the Iran-Iraq war.
Parallel operations and the role of BCCI
Hoffenberg claims these activities were carried out as part of an operation running “in parallel” with the Iran-Contra affair. According to this account, Epstein, Douglas Leese, and Adnan Khashoggi, the well-known Saudi arms dealer, worked together in these dealings.
Under this narrative, financing and money transfers relied heavily on the services of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which was later shut down amid revelations of widespread money laundering, covert financing operations, and links to intelligence services in several countries.
Links to Israeli intelligence networks
In another account, Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli intelligence officer, has claimed that Robert Maxwell, the British-Czech media tycoon and owner of the Mirror Group, sought to involve Epstein in the transfer and sale of military equipment and weapons from Israel to Iran as part of intelligence operations.
According to Ben-Menashe, Epstein was frequently present at Maxwell’s London office during that period and maintained close ties with this network, connections that have surfaced repeatedly in later accounts and documents.
Iran-linked property in Manhattan
Epstein’s name has also been linked to Iran in the real estate sector.
According to available records, he leased a mansion on East 69th Street in Manhattan starting in 1992. The property had previously served as the residence of Iran’s consul general in New York.
The building, often described as a “small castle,” was seized by the US government in 1980 following the 1979 Iranian revolution and the severing of diplomatic relations between Tehran and Washington.
During the tenure of Secretary of State James Baker, the US State Department leased the property to Epstein for a monthly rent of 15,000 dollars. The department later sued Epstein for subleasing the mansion to others for 20,000 dollars per month.
Emergency logic compresses public space and legitimizes measures that would provoke backlash in peacetime.
For the Islamic Republic, war is not primarily imagined as a catastrophe imposed from outside. It is a mechanism that restores hierarchy, discipline, and fear at home.
This logic is not unique to Iran, but it has taken on renewed urgency as the regime confronts a society it can no longer reliably intimidate into submission.
Seen through this lens, Tehran’s recent handling of diplomacy takes on a different meaning.
Shifting venues, altering formats, narrowing agendas, and delaying talks are not merely efforts to buy time.
They are signals that negotiations will proceed only on Iran’s terms – or not at all.
This was evident in the latest round of planned talks with Washington.
After initial resistance, the meeting was moved from Istanbul to Oman at Iran’s request.
Iranian officials have insisted on a strictly bilateral format and have sought to confine discussions to the nuclear file, explicitly excluding missiles and regional activities prioritized by the United States and its partners.
Taken together, these moves point to a broader strategy: hollowing out diplomacy while keeping confrontation alive.
Externally, Tehran’s calculations rest on another assumption – that the United States wants to avoid a prolonged war.
The experiences of Afghanistan and Iraq, combined with Washington’s cautious posture toward the war in Ukraine, have reinforced the belief that the US lacks the political appetite for a long, grinding conflict.
From Tehran’s vantage point, even a military strike would likely be limited.
Airstrikes, cyber operations, or narrowly defined attacks are forms of pressure the Islamic Republic believes it can absorb.
This feeds into a core element of Iran’s survival doctrine: without foreign ground forces, the system is not collapsible.
Military action that stops short of sustained ground involvement is therefore seen as manageable.
More than that, Iranian leaders believe escalation can be shaped by exporting costs across the region.
By threatening US allies and regional partners, Tehran calculates that a drawn-out confrontation would quickly become politically and economically unattractive for Washington.
In this reading, a limited war could push human rights concerns off the global agenda, expose divisions among Western allies, unsettle energy markets, and ultimately force a return to narrower negotiations.
This strategy, however, rests on a dangerous assumption: control.
Wars that begin with expectations of containment rarely remain contained.
In a volatile and heavily armed region, escalation chains are hard to manage, and actions Tehran defines as deterrence may be read in Washington as crossing red lines.
Still, the trajectory is clear.
The Islamic Republic has concluded that it loses at the negotiating table, but may endure – or even regain leverage – in sustained tension.
That belief explains why war is no longer treated as a last resort, but increasingly as a calculated, if perilous, component of its survival strategy.
