Iran says skipping Sharm el-Sheikh summit will not limit regional influence

“Had we not taken out Iran’s nuclear facility… it would have a really dark cloud over" the Gaza peace deal, "because in two months they would have had a nuclear weapon,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on his way to the Middle East.

He recalled that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had pleaded with former President Barack Obama and then–Vice President Joe Biden not to move forward with their Iran policy.

“Remember when Netanyahu came and he begged that Obama and Biden not do what they were doing with Iran? Begged him and they wouldn’t even listen to him. Everything they did was the opposite of what you should have done. Biden and Obama backed Iran,” Trump told reporters.

Iran’s president Masoud Pezeshkian has declined Egypt’s invitation to attend the Sharm el-Sheikh peace summit on Monday, where more than twenty world leaders are expected to discuss Gaza’s post-war future.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi also announced he would not attend, citing continuing US sanctions and what he called “threats against the Iranian people.”

The summit, co-chaired by Trump and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, includes leaders or top diplomats from Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Spain, Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, Pakistan, and Indonesia.

“Iran wants to work on peace now,” Trump said earlier this month. “They’ve informed us they are totally in favor of this deal. We appreciate that, and we’ll work with Iran.”

The Islamic Republic has announced that it was invited by Egypt to participate in the summit, but the more important point is that Cairo does not act on such sensitive matters without coordination and a green light from Washington.

Therefore, this invitation should be analyzed within the broader framework of the US policy of “managing and consolidating the Middle East” — a policy that has entered a new phase following the de-escalation in Gaza and the Arab states’ move toward normalization with Israel.

On the surface, Washington suggests that Tehran, too, could be part of the peace process and even a potential signatory to the Abraham Accord. In reality, however, this message is not driven by a genuine desire to integrate the Islamic Republic into a new regional order, but rather to exert soft pressure on Tehran to move toward implicit recognition of Israel.

In other words, the invitation to Sharm el-Sheikh is a strategic test for the Islamic Republic: is Iran prepared, in exchange for an end to pressure and sanctions, to take a step — even indirectly — toward “recognizing Israel”?

Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic faces a situation where rejecting the invitation could also prove costly. Cornered and weakened, it finds its options reduced to a single question: to go or not to go to Sharm el-Sheikh.

Iran’s nuclear program has been indefinitely stalled — or, as Donald Trump put it, obliterated. Its missile program has also suffered heavy losses, with Israeli strikes inflicting serious damage on Iran’s arsenal and defense infrastructure.

In this context, the United States seeks to use Iran’s relative military weakness, mounting economic strain, the decline of its regional proxies, and Hamas’s defeat to make Tehran understand the kind of peace and stability Washington envisions for the region — a peace built on accepting the new Middle East security order, where Israel is no longer the enemy but a recognized, established power.

From Tehran’s perspective, however, attending such a summit would amount to implicitly accepting a fundamental shift in the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy.

Recognizing Israel — even indirectly, through participation in a joint conference — could create a deep rupture in the Islamic Republic’s ideological legitimacy. Yet refusing to attend would perpetuate the same policy of isolation and stagnation that has left the country politically and diplomatically paralyzed.

Since October 7, 2023, the Islamic Republic has repeatedly found itself in unviable positions.

Had Iran attended the Sharm el-Sheikh summit at the presidential level, it could have marked the beginning of a new chapter in its regional and even global relations.

A Pezeshkian flight to Cairo would have symbolized the collapse of the Islamic Republic’s ideological core and suggested a historic turn toward negotiation and compromise. But repeating the old pattern — avoiding such openings — once again leaves Tehran isolated, or perhaps worse, on the verge of collapse.

Thus, the real meaning of the invitation lies not in goodwill or mutual respect, but in the pressure and testing designed by the United States and its allies to define the Islamic Republic’s future course.

Today, the Islamic Republic faces a historic choice: to adapt its regional policy and join the emerging order, or to persist in its old path and bear the growing costs of isolation, economic decline, and security erosion. So far, its choice — and the fate it leads to — has become increasingly clear.

The summons came after state-affiliated Oman Observer cited Royal Oman Police as saying the country banned the import of bottled water from Iran after two people died from drinking a contaminated batch.

Abdolrasoul Shabibi, director of the ministry’s second Persian Gulf department, formally protested what he described as “unfounded and negative media coverage” of Iranian products and urged Omani authorities to clarify the facts swiftly.

Shabibi added that the incident had nothing to do with the Iranian company’s drinking water and was in fact “a family-related criminal case driven by revenge.”

The Emirati website The National quoted Oman's police as saying an expatriate woman died on September 29, and an Omani man died in hospital on October 1, after being in critical condition for two days.

The source of the poisoning was traced to a contaminated batch of Uranus Star bottled water from Iran, the report said.

It said laboratory tests confirmed the contamination after samples were collected.

It added that Oman's authorities began withdrawing the product from local markets and warned the public not to drink Uranus Star water.

“Contrary to many analyses and comments, the Al-Aqsa Storm operation was a mistake,” the paper wrote in an editorial on Sunday.

The newspaper said the attack caused significant damage to what it described as “anti-Israel movements” across the region, from Iran to Lebanon.

It also cited the death of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and the collapse of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government as “major losses” for what it described as the regional anti-Israel front.

It added that the paper's editorial board had believed from “the very first moments” the attack was a miscalculation, adding that, two years later, “our belief in this mistake has only grown stronger.”

The paper said in aftermath of the Iran's 12-day war with Israel in June — including the joint Israeli and US bombings of Iran’s Natanz, Isfahan, and Fordow nuclear facilities — had severely damaged the country’s military and nuclear command structure, setting its nuclear program back “considerably.”

Jomhouri Eslami — like Kayhan and Ettela’at — is overseen by Khamenei’s representative but is known for its more moderate tone under managing editor Massih Mohajeri, a Shia cleric who has at times criticized parts of Iran’s establishment and defended reformist figures such as Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

Khamenei has previously praised Hamas’s October 7 attack, calling it a step toward “removing America from the region” and saying the operation “overturned the table of US policies.”

Here’s the lay of the land.

Tehran. A late summer sunset. A young woman in a loose linen coat rides her moped past a billboard of slain commanders of the June war with Israel. Her hair, uncovered, whips through the air as the call to prayer echoes over rooftops scrawled with graffiti.

It’s a fleeting image— half defiance, half survival— but it captures the contradiction of life in an ailing religious state run by an 86-year old ruling over a young population which yearns for a better life.

From above, a political system struggles to survive by shedding its skin into a harder, more securitized form. From below, society is defying the pressure by quietly reinventing itself, thriving together in social and artistic places, unveiled and unbowed.

Iran’s future hangs in balance as the two realities collide.

Erosion or renewal?

Sociologists offer two contrasting readings of Iran’s condition.

One sees society at its weakest: social capital eroding, trust fading, public bonds thinning. Economic hardship has forced Iranians inward, building small islands of survival in a sea of uncertainty.

The other sees adaptation at work. Even under pressure, society is reorganizing itself. Signs of this regeneration can be found in the behavior of the young, in underground music and digital satire, in cafés and rooftops reclaimed as shared space.

Social change in Iran rarely announces itself; it leaks through the seams. What may look like resignation is often invention—a culture that has learnt to breathe under constraint.

Shedding skin for survival

The state seeks to ensure its survival by becoming thicker and more controlling—fortifying itself to endure a self-made, permanent state of emergency.

Yet it appears to be hollowing from within, clinging to symbols and slogans that few outside the security apparatus still believe in, let alone fight for.

Ordinary Iranians, especially the young, have moved on.

Everyday life in the cities reveals the contours of this transformation: in dress codes and cultural consumption, underground music, the language of youth and the growing visibility of women in public spaces.

Everyday life as resistance

Walk through Tehran and you feel two clocks ticking at once.

On one hand, the city wears the uniform of authority: portraits, banners, prohibitions. On the other, life insists on slipping past the censors.

It’s there in loosened fabrics and street style, in the sly humor of street art, in laughter spilling from cafés that double as sanctuaries.

A generation raised amid sanctions and firewalls seeks meaning not in possessions but in experiences—in fleeting freedoms, in self-expression, in joy reclaimed as a political act.

Beneath repression, a new cultural grammar is taking shape. It is diffuse yet deliberate, defiant yet creative. It asserts and insists on its agency without shouting.

Where next?

Iran’s future is not fixed.

If society can weave cohesion from its scattered threads, a “soft reconstruction” may emerge—a gradual rebuilding from below, driven by civic networks and the imagination of the new generation.

But if political and economic pressures persist and society turns inward, even this fragile tissue could tear. The state might endure, getting hollower but nastier every day

The greatest reason for optimism is that after nearly half a century of theocratic rule, Iranian society remains generative—in art, language, humor.

Life continues in fragments: whispered jokes on buses, basement exhibitions, online debates that flicker between VPNs.

From that vitality springs possibility. And from possibility, hope.