Tehran now reads Israel and the US as preparing an existential war on the regime, abandons de-escalation, and shifts from managing tension to planning high-risk confrontation.
Five months after the 12-day war of 13–25 June 2025, no one in Tehran calls the current situation a “ceasefire”. Official language instead speaks of a temporary “stopping of the clashes”. At the strategic level, this is exactly the suspended state Ali Khamenei once described as “neither war nor peace”: not a return to the pre–13 June 2025 status quo, not yet a new full-scale war, but a condition that keeps all players on permanent alert.
In the past days, however, the balance has tilted toward something harsher: “no peace, and probably war” – a step beyond seeing peace and war as equally likely, toward a horizon where war appears more plausible than calm.
An abnormal ‘pre-war’ atmosphere in Tehran
The signs of abnormality in Tehran are not confined to security. The economy, too, seems to be bracing for a massive shock. Khamenei’s public meetings and speeches remain more limited than in the months before the war. A large portion of his schedule has shifted from mass speeches to small, closed-door sessions with commanders and political and military officials – a pattern that signals the persistence of a “potential wartime” mood.
In this context, the strange remarks of Intelligence Minister Esmail Khatib gain meaning. On Friday, 21 November 2025, in a provincial security meeting in Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad, he called Khamenei the “axis and pillar” of the Islamic Republic and said:
“The enemy is trying to target the leadership… sometimes through assassination, sometimes through hostile campaigns that today are even echoed inside the country.”
At the military level, risk sensitivity has also increased. One example was criticism from IRGC-linked media about the recent simultaneous trip of Mohammad Pakpour and Alireza Tangsiri – the IRGC ground forces commander and navy commander – to Bandar Abbas to jointly inspect the “Mehre Khalij-e Fars” refinery project. Critics argued that, at a time when energy infrastructure and senior commanders are on Israel’s threat list, concentrating this level of command in a single location creates unnecessary security risk.
These sensitivities must be read alongside a new assessment of Israel’s behaviour in Tehran: an assessment no longer built on the assumption that Israel is “containable”, but that after the 12-Day War, Israel has defined its goal as striking the “source of threat” inside Iran and its branches in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
Larijani’s Arabic tweet: farewell to ‘de-escalation’?
It is not only Khamenei whose words have taken on the quality of “the absent present”. Other parts of the system are also behaving and speaking in unusual ways. A striking example is the Arabic-language tweet by Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, after the assassination of Haitham Ali Tabatabaei in Beirut’s Dahiyeh on Sunday, 23 November 2025.
On X (Twitter), Larijani wrote in Arabic – not in Persian or English – that this assassination showed “no path remains but confronting this fake regime”, calling for a change of approach towards Israel.
Which approach is supposed to change? The strategy of indirect blows? Containment? Managed escalation?
And toward what new approach should the system slide? Direct confrontation between Tehran and Tel Aviv? Or a major retaliatory strike from Sana’a, Baghdad or Beirut?
The significance of Larijani’s message lies in two points. First, it comes from a figure who, due to President Pezeshkian’s weakness, is effectively sitting in the second chair of Iran’s security decision-making after Khamenei. Second, the message was issued only in Arabic – as if its primary audience were not domestic public opinion, but Arab allies and constituencies of the “Axis of Resistance”.
The assassination of Hezbollah’s number two and military chief risked shattering the fragile ceasefire in Lebanon, yet Israel did not hesitate. In Tehran, this is read as a return to the pre-attack-on-Iran scenario: deliver big, shocking blows to the most important external arm of the Islamic Republic – Hezbollah – cripple it, and then move on Tehran itself.
‘The road to Washington runs through Jerusalem’
Within this atmosphere, recent interviews by Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi add another piece to Tehran’s assessment of Israel and the United States. In a detailed discussion of the 12-Day War and its aftermath, he recounted how, in the months before the war, Washington used secret channels – including a letter Donald Trump sent to Khamenei – to present two options: either effectively shut down the nuclear and missile programmes and accept “zero enrichment”, or face military confrontation.
Araghchi also referred to the post-war talks, saying that special envoy Steve Witkoff, before Araghchi’s trip to New York to plead against triggering the snapback mechanism, delivered a last-minute message: to meet me, you must accept US conditions in advance.
What conditions? Araghchi did not list them in that interview. But in that same September, when his New York trip failed, it was reported that Washington’s demands included formally halting enrichment, transferring all enriched material – including 60-percent stockpiles – to US soil, and capping missile range at 500 kilometres.
Araghchi’s conclusion in his recent interview: this was “not negotiation, but dictating a surrender”, and Tehran rejected it.
In his narrative, the 12-Day War and the latest International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors resolution against Iran are two links in a chain. From Tehran’s viewpoint, by simultaneously threatening further strikes against nuclear facilities and applying legal and technical pressure at the Agency, the US aims to roll Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes back to a level where they no longer pose a serious threat to Israel and America.
Scattered across Araghchi’s words and statements by other senior officials is a persistent message: they will not stop there; after missile and nuclear rollback, they will come for the system itself.
This is unfolding while media constantly talk of “secret talks between the US and Iran”. Even Donald Trump, at the White House reception for the Saudi crown prince, said negotiations with Iran were underway and might lead to agreements.
Araghchi’s account, and his description of US pressure before and after the 12-Day War, seriously undercut that picture. From Tehran’s perspective, there are no talks underway that the Islamic Republic could plausibly present as a “success” or a “potentially acceptable deal”.
Where is the blockage? In Tehran’s reading, Israel is not merely a regional actor; it is the engine of US policy on Iran’s nuclear and security files. Want a de-escalation deal with Washington? Not without Israel.
The Islamic Republic has a famous official slogan that “the path to Quds runs through Karbala”. This slogan emerged during the Iran–Iraq war in the 1980s, implying that the question of Palestine and confrontation with Israel must pass through victory on the Iraqi front and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Today, the Islamic Republic has reached the conclusion that the road to Washington inevitably runs through Jerusalem (Quds), and that returning to the situation before the dawn of 12 June 2025 – the day Israel attacked Iran – is impossible without Israel’s cooperation.
For now, that road is blocked. No model of agreement is on the table that would amount even to a de facto coexistence between the Islamic Republic and Israel. Tehran wants any such “coexistence model” to preserve its power assets; Tel Aviv sees those very assets as the root of the current incompatibility. How to solve that equation? For now, none of the players seem to have an answer – at least not one that could be implemented at the negotiating table without radical change.
From ‘return to 7 October’ to the dawn of the 12-Day War
A thread of tweets by Mehdi Mohammadi, political adviser to the parliament speaker, may offer one of the clearest windows into the current elite consensus.
Two weeks before the assassination of Haitham Ali Tabatabaei, he wrote:
“It is as if we are returning to the day after 7 October 2023. The enemy has decided to attack the entire Axis again, and in return we must decide how risk-accepting and unpredictable we will be, and how existentially we will see the confrontation.”
After Tabatabaei’s killing, he resurfaced that tweet and said the moment he described had arrived: the moment of striking the Axis of Resistance much as after 7 October.
Earlier, he had also written that there has long been “a near-consensus among Iran’s decision-makers that the US and the Israeli regime are contemplating the collapse of Iran, and no one in Washington is interested in real negotiation and agreement.” The war experience, he argued, showed that “we must be ready for confrontation, and there is no chance for an agreement with an America whose policy is driven by Israel.”
On Saudi Arabia’s mediation efforts, Mohammadi judged the months-long experiment of rapprochement with Riyadh “disappointing”, given developments in Yemen, Syria and especially Lebanon. In his view, the US is designing a set of regional deals aimed at “complete de-resistancization and guaranteeing Israel’s superiority”, and Saudi Arabia “cannot be a mediator between Iran and the US”.
In the final tweets of his thread, he calls domestic debates about “negotiation or no negotiation” largely a “polarizing project”. For decision-makers, he insists, the issue is clear: when the US and Israel are preparing for “the next strike”, Iran’s energy must be devoted to war preparation, not to talks whose goal is “removing material from Iran and completing intelligence gaps for war”.
A harder, darker assessment of Israel
Taken together – the suspended “pre-war” atmosphere inside Iran, Araghchi’s narrative of America’s zero-sum options, and the US–Israeli end goals – Tehran’s assessment of Israel has clearly hardened compared with the period after 7 October 2023 and even before the 12-Day War of June–July 2025.
In this picture, Israel is no longer an enemy that can be kept busy and managed through “cost-imposing games” in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. It is an actor that, together with the US, seeks to eliminate Iran’s “threat capacity” inside and outside its borders: from nuclear facilities to proxy networks – and, ultimately, the “pillar of the system” itself.
When the Islamic Republic today speaks of “returning to 7 October”, it imagines itself on the evening of 12 June 2025 – the night that led into the bloody dawn of the 12-Day War.
Against that horizon, the central question in Tehran is no longer “how can we de-escalate so that Israel does not attack”, but rather: “in the next war, how risk-accepting and unpredictable are we willing to be?” The answer to that question will shape both the level of confrontation with Israel and the fate of Tehran’s interaction with Washington and its allies.
