The Strait of Hormuz is both leverage against Washington and a domestic test of who rules post-Khamenei Iran—and whether anyone can still enforce a unified decision.
In the latest phase of the confrontation between Iran and the United States, Washington outwardly claims to have only one “simple demand”: Tehran must keep the Strait of Hormuz open, refrain from targeting ships, and abide by the previous fragile understanding under implementation terms dictated largely by Washington.
Behind this “simple demand,” however, lies a profound uncertainty. The United States wants a guarantee from “Iran,” but it does not know exactly whom in Tehran it should ask to provide one.
The government? “Mohammad Something”? The inexperienced new Supreme Leader? The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps? The Supreme National Security Council? Or a network of power centres, each independently capable of signing, interpreting, eroding, or neutralising a memorandum of understanding in the middle of a war?
Donald Trump used the phrase “Mohammad Something” when apparently referring to Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament and its representative in negotiations with the United States. His inability—or refusal—to name him captured Washington’s broader uncertainty over who now possesses authority in Tehran.
The real story unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz is that both sides face a profound crisis of interpretation.
This uncertainty goes beyond Tehran’s traditional use of calculated ambiguity as a geopolitical strategy. Today, the decision-making mechanism itself has become ambiguous. It remains unclear how the nervous system of the Iranian state issues commands and sets the body in motion after Ali Khamenei.
The danger for Iran’s new leadership is that an ambiguity once deliberately managed from the top may now reflect a genuine fragmentation of authority.
While Khamenei was alive, the final authority in Tehran’s response to crises of this kind was unmistakable. Even when voices opposed to negotiations or diplomatic agreements could be heard, everyone knew that the conductor of the orchestra—with all its tuned and untuned instruments—was one person.
But what about now?
Is Mojtaba Khamenei, Ali Khamenei’s son and successor as Supreme Leader, truly in command? If he is, does he hold power as firmly as his father did? Does he govern with partners? If so, what are the terms of that partnership—and who holds the controlling stake?
For this reason, the latest confrontation between Iran and the United States may be fundamentally different from those that preceded it.
The Limits of the Memorandum of Understanding
Iran says the current confrontation is the result of American backtracking. The United States makes precisely the same accusation against Iran.
This situation stands in direct contradiction to the horizon outlined in the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding.
Signed by the Iranian and American presidents amid the current conflict, the memorandum established a fragile framework for ending hostilities and managing the confrontation. Its broader horizon approached something that would previously have seemed almost impossible to put on paper: a form of security coexistence among Iran, the United States, and Israel.
Yet the signatures beneath it appear to have meant little more to both sides than: let us write something down and see what happens next.
For the MoU to become a durable agreement between Tehran and Washington, what matters more than the words on paper is whether the two sides can develop a coherent understanding of one another.
The United States, for example, would have to begin viewing Iran not as an adversary that can be eliminated, absorbed, or forced into total submission, but as a persistent regional actor that might be incorporated into a broader balance of power.
That would constitute a genuinely significant shift. It would move Washington beyond the exhausted binary of “regime change or total surrender” that has shaped its Iran policy for decades and open the possibility of bargaining, prioritisation, and political realism.
Does Trump see Iran in this way?
No. At least not yet.
There is another side to the problem. How does Tehran assess Washington’s intentions? Does the Islamic Republic believe the United States has abandoned the goal of overthrowing it?
Again, not yet.
Had this interpretation of Washington taken hold in Tehran, the Islamic Republic would have attempted to present itself as a state whose conduct could be calculated and whose commitments could be relied upon. It has not done so.
Had the two countries truly been constructing a path towards a broader understanding, Washington and Tehran would have needed to know whom they were speaking to—and whether the other side’s signature represented its principal centres of power and strategic objectives.
The troubling question is not only where Iran’s centre of decision-making lies. It is whether such a centre exists—and, if it does, whether it possesses the power to implement its decisions.
The Cost of Succession
Succession after Ali Khamenei would not have been easy even without war or an acute security crisis. Now that multiple disasters have descended upon the Islamic Republic at once, consolidating the succession has become considerably more difficult.
The succession project must produce credible answers to three questions: legitimacy, command, and the distribution of patronage and economic rents.
Even if the new Supreme Leader formally occupies the highest seat of power, consolidating his position requires the loyalty of the Revolutionary Guards, the security apparatus, the state-aligned clerical establishment, the economic bureaucracy, and the official media.
Under these conditions, every diplomatic concession can be interpreted internally as a display of weakness or humiliation, while every external confrontation can become an instrument for demonstrating resolve and authority.
In this context, the Strait of Hormuz is not merely a bargaining tool for extracting concessions from the United States. It is also the arena in which the right to make Iran’s final decision is being contested within the country’s ruling establishment.
Every missile, drone, and speedboat, every military warning, and every diplomatic message from Tehran is not addressed solely to the United States. Some of these messages are intended for a domestic audience.
They function like ritual declarations: ostensibly directed outward, but intended to instruct the living centres of power inside Iran about who still commands the machinery of crisis.
Their purpose is to demonstrate who can create a crisis, who can contain one, and who can raise the price of peace.
Hormuz as a Domestic Battlefield
Within this struggle, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is not a marginal actor. It is itself one of the central institutions of decision-making and implementation.
The IRGC is not merely the military force of the Islamic Republic’s third Supreme Leader. It is a military, security, economic, media, and ideological apparatus that both absorbs costs and creates opportunities.
The Guards regard the Strait of Hormuz as a major political card: a means of demonstrating that no regional order is possible without Iran’s consent—and that Iran’s consent is meaningless without the approval of the IRGC.
When President Masoud Pezeshkian’s government or Iranian diplomats speak of “understanding,” “mediation,” and “de-escalation,” the Guards can rewrite the meaning of that same understanding through the language of “control,” “deterrence,” and “the cost of passage.”
Washington may therefore regard a text as an agreement while a powerful section of the Iranian establishment interprets the same document as authorisation to exert greater pressure.
Western accounts of the Islamic Republic often explain this division through terms such as “hardliners,” “rogue factions,” or “internal conflict.”
These terms are not entirely useless, but they tend to diminish the scale and nature of the problem.
The issue is not necessarily that a rogue group has positioned itself against the official government. In the Islamic Republic, apparently autonomous action is not simply a breakdown of government. It is also a method of governing.
Actors authorised to operate on their own initiative give the leadership leverage while preserving plausible deniability.
The existence of forces whose precise source of authority remains unclear has historically been a form of political capital for those at the apex of power.
When it is unclear where the final decision was made, the state can benefit from military and political pressure on the ground without closing the path to diplomacy. If necessary, it can claim that an action resulted from a misunderstanding, a local decision, or a response to foreign provocation.
Ambiguity serves both as a shield from responsibility and as an instrument of bargaining.
But ambiguity does not always remain under control.
When Strategic Ambiguity Becomes Institutional Fragmentation
For the United States, uncertainty surrounding the Strait of Hormuz is costly.
Freedom of navigation, oil prices, financial markets, maritime insurance, and the security of American and allied bases in the Gulf cannot be stabilised by equivocal guarantees.
Washington wants a guarantee it can immediately present to the markets, its Arab allies, Israel, and Congress and say: look, the crisis has been contained.
Tehran, however, is seeking to avoid precisely this form of clarity.
A clear commitment would limit the freedom of action enjoyed by forces on the ground. It would also make the new Supreme Leader more vulnerable in relation to rivals and partners within the power structure.
The two signatories to the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding therefore possess fundamentally different understandings of the situation in which they find themselves. They also want contradictory things from negotiations.
The United States has delivered its blows and now wants certainty.
Iran has absorbed a great many blows and wants ambiguity—an ambiguity it can use to retaliate, regain leverage, and recover the upper hand.
Yesterday’s ideological enemies can become today’s partners in a new balance of power, provided that a larger strategic priority exists and an arrangement acceptable to both sides can be constructed.
Trump’s America has not yet accepted such an arrangement. Iran, meanwhile, has not abandoned its familiar strategy of negation and disruption.
It continues to present itself as a chokepoint actor in the global energy system: a state whose power lies less in building a regional order than in demonstrating its ability to disrupt one.
The fate of the Islamic Republic—and what happened to Ali Khamenei—should have demonstrated that although the logic of disruption can generate leverage in the short term, it can turn into its opposite over the longer term.
If Iran plays the Strait of Hormuz card too aggressively—threatening maritime passage and producing insecurity in the global energy system—even the small number of people in the West who contemplate a “grand bargain” will be left without arguments with which to defend it.
No American president can easily claim to have reached an agreement with a country that continues to hold Washington by the throat.
The same is true in Tehran.
The Islamic Republic’s new leader does not want the beginning of his rule to be associated with retreat in the face of bombing and economic pressure.
The result is a psychological and institutional deadlock in which both parties need negotiations and an agreement, while both also require displays of coercive strength.
Why Peace May Cost More Than War
The great question in Iran today is this: who can afford to pay the price of peace?
For all its destruction, war speaks a more familiar language within intensely securitised systems. It can be translated into resistance, revenge, deterrence, national honour, and independence.
Peace is more difficult to explain.
Why were concessions made? What was received in return? Who can guarantee that the United States will not violate its commitments again? If the Revolutionary Guards or other powerful currents consider an agreement insufficient, which institution will be capable of restraining them?
Two simplifications must therefore be avoided.
First, the Islamic Republic should not be understood as a unified body whose every movement is commanded from a single room.
Second, it should not be regarded as a wholly chaotic collection of forces devoid of any rationality.
The reality probably lies somewhere between these two positions: a polycentric structure in which institutions compete over survival, status, resources, and control of the authoritative narrative, while understanding that total collapse would be disastrous and costly for them all.
The Islamic Republic of 2026–27 is neither as predictable as a classical state nor as incapable as a failed state.
It can negotiate, threaten, deny, extract concessions, and simultaneously evade responsibility through carefully qualified statements that affirm a position only “in principle.”
In such a system, the very ambiguity that appears from outside to be a weakness can become an instrument of survival from within.
But a crucial question remains: does the new leadership still control the ambiguity, or is the ambiguity beginning to control the leadership?
The Test of the Third Islamic Republic
The latest phase of the Strait of Hormuz crisis offers a window onto Iran’s domestic politics at the perilous moment of succession.
The Islamic Republic’s third Supreme Leader must be able to occupy his father’s position and bring the Revolutionary Guards, the government, and the diplomatic apparatus behind a single line, while keeping the invisible strings of supposedly autonomous actors in his own hands.
If he cannot, successive crises will expose the fragmentation of the new order.
The current confrontation and its consequences will ultimately reveal the extent to which the Islamic Republic after Ali Khamenei remains capable of producing a single decision.
The Strait of Hormuz is not merely a test of the IRGC’s missile and naval capabilities. Nor is it simply an instrument of pressure against the United States.
It is ultimately a test through which the third phase of the Islamic Republic can be understood.
Who makes decisions in Tehran? Who can offer guarantees and conclude a deal? Who can implement those guarantees? And who possesses the authority to resist the temptation to break them?
