Iranian source warns CENTCOM presence could jeopardize Oman talks - Reuters

Iran discussed its nuclear file with a senior Chinese foreign ministry official during a visit to China by an Iranian deputy foreign minister, state media reported.

Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister for legal and international affairs, met Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister Liu Bin, with talks focusing on Iran’s nuclear issue, the reports said.

Iranian state media quoted Liu as saying China supports Tehran’s right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy and favors resolving the nuclear file through political and diplomatic means.

An Iranian lawmaker said Iran views its missile industry as a legal and indigenous right and would respond forcefully if attacked, state media reported.

Esmail Kowsari, a member of parliament’s national security and foreign policy commission, said Iran would “defend itself with strength” in the event of military action, according to the report.

Kowsari also said talks between Iran and the United States would not produce results and that Tehran would not accept what he described as imposed negotiations.

Some oil tankers are increasing speed as they pass through the Strait of Hormuz amid rising tensions between the United States and Iran, Bloomberg reported on Friday.

Very large crude carriers were moving through the narrow waterway at speeds of up to 17 knots, compared with a typical top speed of about 13 knots for fully laden vessels, according to ship-tracking data cited by the outlet.

Roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade passes through the strait, the report said.

“The current uprising marks a defining historical moment - one in which silence, equivocation, or misplaced neutrality carries consequences,” the scholars said in a collective statement released on Thursday.

The statement said academics who work on Iran benefit professionally from their research and therefore bear a responsibility to acknowledge the realities facing Iranians. It pointed to widespread state violence, including killings, imprisonment, torture, enforced disappearances and executions, alongside broader repression through surveillance, internet shutdowns, economic pressure and restricted access to medical care.

Universities have become central sites of repression, the statement said, with students, faculty members and researchers arrested, dismissed, forced into exile or killed for political expression. Campuses have been militarized and academic life hollowed out through intimidation and purges, it added.

The scholars rejected narratives portraying the protests as driven by foreign actors, calling such claims a core element of state propaganda that erases Iranian political agency.

“We further reject the repeated circulation - explicit or implicit - of narratives about foreign orchestration, outside agitators, or foreign boots on the ground for which the government has not provided any provable evidence,” the statement said.

The scholars also criticized what they described as an excessive focus on data disputes while documentation of events inside Iran is actively suppressed.

At the same time, they said they do not advocate war or external control over Iran’s future, emphasizing opposition to authoritarian violence without endorsing foreign intervention.

Calling for ethical clarity within their field, the signatories urged colleagues to stand publicly with protesters, avoid reproducing official narratives, center the voices of Iranians demanding change and prioritize documentation of lived experience. They also called for the immediate release of political prisoners and an end to executions.

While Iran’s foreign minister is right now visiting Oman for bilateral talks with the United States, in Tehran’s calculus, negotiations now promise steady erosion. War, by contrast, offers a chance – however risky – to reset the balance.

This marks a shift from the Islamic Republic’s long-standing view of war as an existential threat. Today, senior decision-makers appear to believe that controlled confrontation may preserve the system in ways diplomacy no longer can.

That belief explains why war is no longer unthinkable in Tehran, but increasingly framed as a viable instrument of rule.

At the core of this shift lies a stark assessment: the negotiating table has become a losing field.

This is not because an agreement with Washington is impossible. It is because the framework imposed by the United States and its allies has turned diplomacy into a process of cumulative concession.

When nuclear limits, missile restrictions, regional influence, and even domestic conduct are treated as interlinked files, Iranian leaders see talks not as pressure relief, but as strategic retreat without credible guarantees of survival.

From Tehran’s perspective, diplomacy no longer buys time. It entrenches vulnerability.

In that context, confrontation begins to look less like recklessness and more like a way out of a narrowing corridor.

War as a domestic instrument of control

Why war? Because war is the one scenario in which the Islamic Republic believes it does not necessarily lose.

Domestically, the regime faces its most severe legitimacy crisis in decades.

Widespread repression, the killing of protesters, economic collapse, and a society increasingly resistant to fear-based governance have eroded the state’s traditional tools of control.

Under these conditions, war serves a powerful political function. It rewrites the rules of governance.

In wartime, dissent can be reframed as collaboration with the enemy. Protest becomes sabotage. Opposition becomes a national security threat.

Emergency logic compresses public space and legitimizes measures that would provoke backlash in peacetime.

For the Islamic Republic, war is not primarily imagined as a catastrophe imposed from outside. It is a mechanism that restores hierarchy, discipline, and fear at home.

This logic is not unique to Iran, but it has taken on renewed urgency as the Islamic Republic confronts a society it can no longer reliably intimidate into submission.

Externally, Tehran’s calculations rest on another assumption – that the United States wants to avoid a prolonged war.

The experiences of Afghanistan and Iraq, combined with Washington’s cautious posture toward the war in Ukraine, have reinforced the belief that the US lacks the political appetite for a long, grinding conflict.

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From Tehran’s vantage point, even a military strike would likely be limited.

Airstrikes, cyber operations, or narrowly defined attacks are forms of pressure the Islamic Republic believes it can absorb.

This feeds into a core element of Iran’s survival doctrine: without foreign ground forces, the system is not collapsible.

Military action that stops short of sustained ground involvement is therefore seen as manageable.

More than that, Iranian leaders believe escalation can be shaped by exporting costs across the region.

By threatening US allies and regional partners, Tehran calculates that a drawn-out confrontation would quickly become politically and economically unattractive for Washington.

In this reading, a limited war could push human rights concerns off the global agenda, expose divisions among Western allies, unsettle energy markets, and ultimately force a return to narrower negotiations.

This strategy, however, rests on a dangerous assumption: control.

Wars that begin with expectations of containment rarely remain contained.

In a volatile and heavily armed region, escalation chains are hard to manage, and actions Tehran defines as deterrence may be read in Washington as crossing red lines.

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  Tehran and Washington test the limits of talks without trust

Still, the trajectory is clear.

The Islamic Republic has concluded that it loses at the negotiating table, but may endure – or even regain leverage – in sustained tension.

That belief explains why war is no longer treated as a last resort, but increasingly as a calculated, if perilous, component of its survival strategy.