ژورنال سایت خبری سیاسی ژورنال
English Journal is published on Fridays
PDF-English Journal-08 November 2025-No37
On the eve of the anniversary of the US embassy seizure in Tehran in 1979, Khamenei once again crawled out of his hole and declared that, in his view, “the dispute between the United States and the Islamic Republic is not a tactical or occasional one, but an essential dispute”. He set out three conditions, and said that if the US accepted them, “the Americans’ request for cooperation” could be considered at some distant point in the future. The three conditions were these: “America must completely abandon its support for the Zionist regime, remove its military bases from the region, and cease its interference in the region.”
Khamenei has thrown Trump’s own demands back at him. Trump demanded that Khamenei should abandon pursuit of nuclear weapons, give up the ballistic-missile programme and support for proxy forces, and recognise the state and government of Israel.
Anyone unfamiliar with the Islamic Republic’s position in the region and the world — and in Iran itself — might assume the ground under the speaker’s feet is firm, for him to talk this way. But the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising and a society brimming with protest have left no doubt that the ground beneath Khamenei and his regime remains hot inside Iran. The 12-day war in June and its aftermath also showed that the Islamic Republic’s footing in the region is hollow. In these circumstances, Khamenei’s list of conditions is a hollow pose — a political bluff.
What is the aim of this bluff and empty posturing? We know that after the 12-day war, and given the overall state of his proxy forces, Khamenei has no cards left to play in regional politics. He imagines that by setting out his “three conditions” he might induce the other side to water down theirs.
But Khamenei’s primary audience lies inside Iran. He once said that both “accommodation” (his “heroic flexibility”) and “confrontation” (warmongering) carry costs, but the cost of accommodation is higher. In other words, in the Islamic rulers’ cost-benefit calculations, perhaps war and warmongering would narrow the space for the people’s final showdown with the state. A vain hope. For the people will, in any case, fill the deep chasm between themselves and the Islamic regime with the carcass of that very regime. By that logic, Khamenei’s only hope is the constituency that has been told all their lives that America is the “inherent enemy” — and the only way to keep that constituency by the regime’s side, as it hurtles downhill, is to sustain hostility to this “inherent enemy”, even if only through political bluff and empty gestures.
Editor: Patty Debonitas
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