Iran International
President Donald Trump’s claim that he postponed a planned military strike on Iran has deepened uncertainty in Tehran, where officials and analysts remain divided over whether Washington is bluffing, buying time or preparing for another round of strikes.
Trump said Monday he had postponed an attack planned for Tuesday, before warning the United States remained ready to hit Iran hard.
Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister for legal and international affairs, wrote on X that “the United States says it has temporarily halted an attack on Iran to give diplomacy a chance, while simultaneously speaking of readiness for a large-scale strike at any moment. This means calling a threat an opportunity for peace.”
He added that the Islamic Republic was prepared to confront “any military aggression” and that “surrender has no meaning” for Iran.
Mohsen Rezaei, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader and former commander of the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), accused Trump of setting and then canceling military deadlines in an attempt to force Iran into submission. He warned that Iran’s armed forces would “force America into retreat and surrender.”
Gharibabadi later told members of parliament that Iran’s latest proposal to Washington included demands such as recognition of Iran’s right to uranium enrichment, lifting the US naval blockade, releasing frozen Iranian assets and ending sanctions. He did not provide details about Washington’s response.
Iranian digital outlet Avash Media cited “a source close to the negotiating team” as claiming that Washington had accepted some Iranian conditions, including ending regional conflicts and establishing a reconstruction fund.
On Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance said Washington and Tehran had made “a lot of progress” in talks and that neither side wanted to see a return to war.
Jalal Sadatian, a regional affairs analyst, told the website Fararu that the comments should be viewed “within the framework of the current Iran-US relationship, which is in a phase marked by political attrition and pressure tactics.”
“There is a perception in Tehran that the United States, for now, is using military threats more for political leverage than because it is truly ready for war,” he said.
“Tehran’s calculation is that if it makes major concessions now under maximum pressure, this model could later expand to issues such as missile capabilities and regional influence,” Sadatian added. “Therefore, Iran’s current policy is a combination of restraint, maintaining readiness and continuing protracted negotiations.”
Reformist journalist Ahmad Zeidabadi questioned Trump’s credibility, writing that if the US president’s account was accurate, then “one must seriously doubt the minimum level of rational calculation in him.”
“Does Trump not know what historic catastrophe restarting the war would bring to the entire Persian Gulf region?” Zeidabadi asked. “Was he planning to resume war without consulting allied leaders?”
Still, several analysts and conservative media outlets warned that the possibility of military escalation remains high.
The conservative newspaper Khorasan, which is close to parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, argued that Washington may seek to “unlock negotiations through a limited but effective strike.”
Ehsan Movahedian, a professor of international relations at Allameh Tabataba’i University, told Fararu that “the probability of war in the coming days is very high,” adding that even if conflict does not erupt next week, “that does not mean the danger has disappeared.”
Some Iranian political and media figures argued that the postponement may have had little to do with regional interventions and more to do with operational difficulties.
Ali Gholhaki, a commentator close to Ghalibaf, wrote that “the reason for delaying the attack on Iran appears to be something other than requests from Arab leaders; the United States and Israel are still not certain they can strike their key targets.”
Journalist Davoud Modarresian suggested Pakistani Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi’s extended visit to Iran could be linked to intelligence-gathering efforts.
“Under the pretext of sending messages, they may be trying to track and identify the locations of leaders and commanders,” he wrote.
On May 19, 2024, a helicopter carrying Raisi disappeared in the mountains of Iran’s East Azarbaijan province. The final Iranian inquiry blamed bad weather, dense fog and atmospheric conditions, not sabotage.
But the image was too powerful to ignore: a leadership convoy moving through poor visibility, losing sight of itself, then trying to project a state still in control.
That is the better way to read Raisi’s death – as metaphor, not conspiracy.
The crash did not change Iran because Raisi ruled Iran. He did not. Real power sat above him, with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the Revolutionary Guard, the security state and the regional networks Tehran had built over decades.
Raisi mattered because he showed how continuity was supposed to look. He was loyal, hardline, severe and predictable; a figure once widely discussed as a possible successor to Khamenei.
Raisi was not the Islamic Republic’s future. He was its rehearsal for a future that never arrived.
In May 2024, the system still seemed to have a succession plan, a regional shield and the patience to wait out its enemies. Two years later, almost every pillar that made Tehran look untouchable has been tested or broken.
The countdown had already begun on October 7, 2023.
Hamas’s attack on Israel opened a war that pulled Iran’s wider network into motion: Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Iraq and Syria, the Houthis in Yemen. For years, this was Tehran’s doctrine of strategic depth.
After October 7, that depth became a target map.
By April 2024, Iran and Israel had moved from shadow war into direct confrontation. Then, one month later, Raisi’s helicopter fell out of the fog.
The state answered with the familiar theater of mourning: coffins, black flags, portraits, clerics and commanders. The message was continuity.
But after Raisi, the funerals began to tell another story. One by one, they marked not continuity, but exposure: a system losing the people, places and networks that had made it feel protected.
His death forced a snap election. Masoud Pezeshkian, a reformist in tone, won the presidency after a first round marked by record-low turnout. The system gained a softer face, but not a new center of power.
Then came the first great humiliation of the post-Raisi era.
Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader, came to Tehran for Pezeshkian’s inauguration. Hours later, he was killed in the Iranian capital.
This was not only the killing of a Hamas leader. It was a message that even the patron’s capital was no sanctuary.
That became the sentence for what followed.
In September 2024, Hezbollah’s pagers and radios exploded across Lebanon and Syria, turning the group’s own communications into weapons against it. Days later, Hassan Nasrallah was killed in Beirut.
A movement built on secrecy and underground command had been pierced from inside and struck from above.
Then Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar was killed. Hamas remained, Hezbollah remained, the slogans remained. But the axis was bleeding leaders, territory, routes and confidence.
The deeper break came in Syria.
Bashar al-Assad’s fall in December 2024 was not just the loss of another Islamic Republic's ally. It damaged the geography of Iranian power: the route to Hezbollah, the Mediterranean opening, and the Qasem Soleimani-era claim that weak states could be turned into Iranian depth.
By June 2025, the war had moved to Iran itself.
Israel struck Iranian nuclear and military sites during the 12-Day War. The United States then hit the most fortified parts of the nuclear program.
For years, nuclear ambiguity had been Tehran’s shield. In 2025, it became a battlefield.
Outside pressure then met the inside front.
The protests that erupted in late 2025 and early 2026 were driven by economic collapse, repression and the old demand for a different political order. By January 8 and 9, the state answered with mass violence and an internet shutdown.
The Islamic Republic could still shoot, jail and terrify. But it could no longer persuade enough of its own people that it had a future.
Even shocks beyond the Middle East began to feel part of the same weather. The US capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January 2026 mattered less as an Iran story than as an atmosphere: another anti-American ruler, once protected by sovereignty and distance, suddenly exposed.
Then, on February 28, 2026, the war reached the institution at the heart of the Islamic Republic’s power: the supreme leadership.
Ali Khamenei was killed in US-Israeli strikes. For a state built around velayat-e faqih, this was not only the death of a ruler. It was the breaking of an aura.
Mojtaba Khamenei was named Supreme Leader days later. The appointment was meant to project continuity. Instead, it made the Islamic Republic look smaller, more closed and more dynastic.
The revolution born against monarchy had passed its highest office from father to son in wartime.
And then came the strangest funeral of all: the one that could not settle itself.
Iran postponed Khamenei’s state funeral. Months later, even his burial remained unclear. For a Shiite revolutionary state that has always known how to turn death into power, the delay was astonishing.
The republic of funerals had lost command of its most important ritual.
The old model had four layers. At home, fear contained society. In politics, elections gave the state a civilian mask. In the region, proxies kept enemies away from Iran’s borders. At the strategic level, missiles, nuclear ambiguity and the Strait of Hormuz made the cost of attack seem unknowable.
Since Raisi’s crash, every layer has been damaged.
Fear has produced revolt. Elections have exposed emptiness more than legitimacy. Regional depth has been penetrated. Syria has fallen away. Hezbollah and Hamas have been battered. The supreme leader’s office has lost its aura of untouchability.
Hormuz remains Iran’s strongest card. But it also shows the trap. The strait gives Tehran leverage over oil, shipping and global markets; it also keeps Iran at the center of a crisis it cannot easily end.
This is not the story of a regime that has already fallen. The Islamic Republic still has prisons, missiles, commanders and a long memory for survival.
But it is also not the story Tehran wants to tell.
Two years ago, Raisi’s death was wrapped in the language of martyrdom and continuity. The state said nothing vital had been lost.
Yet what followed revealed how little room the Islamic Republic had left for error.
The crash did not start the chain. October 7 had already started the clocks. But Raisi’s death gave the years after it their image: fog, poor visibility, a convoy losing contact, and a state insisting the road ahead was clear.
Two years later, Iran is still falling through that fog.
The question is no longer whether the Islamic Republic can survive another crisis. It has survived many.
The question is whether it can survive the loss of the things that made survival possible: distance, fear, succession, sanctuary and the belief that time was on its side.
