Trump's shadow diplomacy may be fracturing Tehran

President Donald Trump said Monday that recent exchanges with Iran had been “very, very good,” and announced a five-day postponement of threatened strikes on Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure.

He later said both sides wanted to “make a deal" and that Iran had agreed to "zero" enrichment of uranium.

Reuters quoted a senior Iranian official on Monday saying that US had requested a meeting with Iran's parliament speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, but Tehran has yet to respond. Trump, however, said he was already speaking with "a top person" in Iran.

“They called, I didn’t call. They want to make a deal, and we are very willing to make a deal," he told reporters.

Tehran denied any talks had taken place. Markets nevertheless reacted sharply: US stocks surged while oil prices fell after Trump’s comments.

For Joel Rubin, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Obama administration, any apparent outreach should be viewed as one front in a broader conflict.

“There’s two wars underway,” Rubin told Iran International. “There’s the physical war … [and] it’s also fought on social media, I guess, influencing global opinion.”

Rubin said Trump’s move looked like “a tactical maneuver,” aimed in part at steadying jittery oil markets while buying time to build broader international backing.

“Trump’s move here with a little patience, the tactical maneuver is a very smart one if you want to try to build up more international backing for this effort, which quite frankly would be in our national security interests to do so,” Rubin told Iran International.

At the same time, Rubin cautioned against reading too much into reports of a US-Iran channel, especially when Tehran is publicly denying any engagement.

“Ever since the war began, [Iran] has basically said they don’t want to talk,” Rubin said. “But that doesn’t mean they aren’t talking.”

If messages are being passed, he said, they do not appear to be part of any formal negotiation.

“I think if there is any information sharing between the sides or through third parties, it is not very structured,” Rubin said. “I would say people need to view this as part of the dance because there will ultimately be some kind of endgame.”

Internal retaliation, external assassination

The very act of naming Ghalibaf as a potential interlocutor could itself carry serious consequences inside Iran’s power structure. In a system already shaken by precision strikes on senior figures — including Ali Larijani — publicly linking an official to backchannel contacts with Washington risks casting suspicion on his loyalty and exposing him to internal retaliation or even making him a target for external actors.

Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Iran program, said Ghalibaf’s name surfacing in these reports is not far-fetched.

“Ghalibaf is a deep state insider who the value he offers this regime is much more than his civilian title leads on,” Taleblu told Iran International.

Still, Taleblu warned that the picture remains deeply unclear.

“We are still very much in the fog of war,” he said. Even if some coordination is happening behind the scenes, he argued, it is far more likely to be about deconfliction than diplomacy.

“These conversations, if they’re true, are not about a deal,” Taleblu said. “Likely would it be about de-confliction and an off-ramp and how to phase in the ceasefire. It’s hard to see how folks could be talking about a deal right now rather than a way to end the conflict.”

Taleblu also said Trump’s temporary pause on energy strikes appeared aimed at preventing the war from spilling more decisively into the global economic arena.

“I think it’s absolutely a way to calm the markets,” he said. “The conflict is continuing. The regime continues to fire missiles and drones.”

In his view, the White House is trying to stop the war’s political and security rationale from sliding into a full-blown energy and economic crisis.

“The framing for the conflict is evolving very quickly from something that is political and security related to something that is about energy and economics,” Taleblu said.

'Tehran buying time'

Dr. Eric Mandel, founder of the Middle East Political Information Network, said the regime’s core strategy "is all about delaying and outweighing the Americans, not the Israelis."

Drawing on his experience around the 2015 nuclear deal debate, Mandel argued Tehran is using intermediaries to buy time and test Trump’s resolve.

“The Iranians are using the intermediaries, Turkey, Egypt, Oman, for this delay,” he told Iran International.

Mandel said Washington should be wary of mistaking tactical messaging for a genuine shift in the regime’s intentions.

“We cannot be fooled by this,” he said. “As long as the regime [is] there, the spots are the same, even if they try to paint them over.”

Taken together, the analysts said Monday’s mixed signals do not point to a clear diplomatic breakthrough. Instead, they reflect a fast-moving conflict in which military pressure, market shock, psychological warfare and backchannel messaging are all unfolding at once.

As Taleblu put it, this is a moment to see the conflict not as “a snapshot but as a video.”

President Trump said on Monday that Iran had reached out to Washington for talks after the US threatened to strike Iranian energy infrastructure.

He said, “They called, I didn’t call. They want to make a deal, and we are very willing to make a deal.”

He also claimed that the United States had been speaking to “a top person” in Iran, though not to the new supreme leader, and added that “we don’t know whether he is living.”

At the same time, Trump said the threatened strike on Iran’s major power plants had been paused for five days. Oil prices fell after his remarks, while Iran’s foreign ministry denied that any such talks had taken place.

But the importance of Trump’s remarks is not only in the news itself. It is also in what the statement is designed to do.

Trump is trying to achieve two things at once.

First, he is using ambiguity as a political and psychological weapon inside the Islamic Republic. By saying he has been talking to a very senior Iranian figure without naming that person, he is planting doubt and suspicion among what remains of the leadership.

In current conditions, that matters. Iran’s leaders are living in hiding. Command centers are disrupted. Communications are limited out of fear of interception and assassination.

Meetings are difficult, if not impossible. In that setting, a statement like this will be deeply unsettling. Each senior figure will now be asking: Who is talking to Washington? Who is looking for an off-ramp? What is being hidden from the others?

By naming no one, Trump makes everyone in Tehran wonder who is talking to Washington.

This does not affect only the top. Lower-ranking officials also hear the same message. If they begin to believe that some of their leaders are quietly searching for a way out, they will become more uncertain, more demoralized, and more open to defection.

At the same time, hardliners will turn even more aggressively against figures they see as less rigid and begin looking for the supposed traitor within the system, especially after Trump suggested that even Mojtaba Khamenei is unaware of these contacts.

Some reports pointed to Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf as the possible figure involved. Ghalibaf himself denied that and called the reports fake news aimed at influencing financial and oil markets.

But in an atmosphere like this, denial does not cancel out the effect. It creates new questions instead of closing them down. Some will ask: What if Ghalibaf is lying? Others will ask: what if someone else is involved?

The foreign ministry’s denial will have the same effect. In a system already shaped by fear and mistrust, public denials can deepen suspicion rather than contain it.

In a leadership living in hiding, ambiguity is not just rhetoric. It is a weapon.

Some hardline members of parliament, including Hamid Rasaei, have already gone public and started asking questions. That is exactly what Trump wants to achieve.

Second, Trump is also sending a message to the markets. By talking about a possible deal and pausing strikes on critical Iranian infrastructure, he signaled that the conflict will not move immediately into a more dangerous phase.

The effect was immediate: oil prices fell. This also gave Trump an off-ramp of his own. It allowed him to step back, for now, from a strike on Iran’s power plants while still claiming momentum and leverage.

So even if these contacts are real, limited, exaggerated, or deliberately ambiguous, the statement is already producing an outcome Trump wants: psychological pressure inside Tehran and calmer energy markets outside it.

That is the core point. This is not a normal diplomatic process. We do not know whether these talks are real, serious, or meaningful in any conventional sense. But that is no longer the only question. The statement itself is already doing political and economic work. It is widening mistrust inside the Islamic Republic and helping calm panic in global oil markets.

But there is a deeper question. Even if the reports are true, even if someone inside the system is involved in real contacts, can he actually deliver anything that matters? Will IRGC commanders listen? Will the men sitting behind the missile launchers take their cue from a political figure seeking an off-ramp? Or will they see whoever is talking to Washington not as a decision-maker, but as a traitor who deserves punishment or death?

That is the real uncertainty. The problem is not only whether there is a channel. It is whether anyone on the Iranian side still has the authority to make that channel meaningful.

On the last day of February, as reports emerged that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had been killed in an Israeli bombardment, it was also announced that a meeting of the Defense Council had been struck.

Several senior figures were killed in the strike, the Israeli military confirmed on March 16.

Among those killed were Ali Shamkhani, a senior adviser to Khamenei and secretary of the Defense Council; Abdolrahim Mousavi, chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces; and Aziz Nasirzadeh, the defense minister.

Also killed were two figures associated with Iran’s Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, known by its Persian acronym SPND, the direct successor organization to Iran’s pre-2004 nuclear weapons program.

The two figures were former SPND chief Brigadier General Reza Mozaffarinia and the organization’s new head Brigadier General Hossein Jabal Ameli.

Washington has sanctioned more than 30 SPND scientists and multiple affiliated entities, accusing the organization of overseeing “dual-use research and development activities applicable to nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons delivery systems.”

While Tehran denies pursuing a nuclear weapon, the UN nuclear watchdog and Western powers including the US and its European allies maintain that Iran's high-level uranium enrichment (up to 60%) has no credible civilian justification.

Iran currently possesses some 400 kg of near-bomb-grade enriched uranium. The US and Israel have in recent days discussed sending special forces into Iran to secure the stockpile at a later stage of the war, according to a report by Axios.

US War Secretary Pete Hegseth said Thursday that President Trump saw Iran advancing ever closer to nuclear capability and viewed it as unacceptable, prompting his decision to launch the war against Tehran.

Why A-bomb was focus of Defense Council meeting

There are four reasons suggesting the meeting of the Defense Council was likely related to the final stage of decision-making on constructing a nuclear weapon.

First, the composition of the gathering is a key indicator. The simultaneous presence of two former and current SPND chiefs alongside the defense minister — their superior — suggests the meeting concerned nuclear matters rather than battlefield operations. If the session had been focused on the war itself, senior operational or battlefield commanders would have been expected to attend instead of officials tied to the nuclear weapons industry.

Second, Ali Shamkhani had publicly spoken about nuclear weapons months earlier. Four months before his reported death, he said in an interview that if he could go back in time during his tenure as defense minister, he would build an atomic bomb.

Third, Shamkhani’s roles placed him at the center of coordination between multiple institutions. As Khamenei’s senior adviser and secretary of the Defense Council, as well as a former defense minister, he maintained extensive ties with officials within the ministry, including the department responsible for special weapons development, SPND.

He was also described as a senior commander overseeing Revolutionary Guard officers involved in nuclear weapons development and as the link between these networks and Khamenei himself.

Fourth, in one of his final public remarks, Shamkhani told Lebanon’s Al-Mayadeen television that a war with the United States and Israel was inevitable and that the Islamic Republic needed to prepare for it.

Taken together, these elements may indicate that the meeting struck in the bombardment may have been connected to the final stage of decision-making regarding nuclear weapons development.

It is unknown whether Israel was aware that the gathering concerned possible deliberations over building a nuclear weapon, or whether it targeted the meeting simply because senior Iranian officials were known to be present.

Wars rarely end on political will alone, and this conflict is constrained by a dense web of strategic, economic and security pressures that neither side can easily escape.

What began with stated goals—containing Iran’s nuclear program, degrading its missile and regional capabilities, and “helping” the Iranian people—has hardened into a confrontation between objectives that are arguably incompatible.

As the conflict spreads into the arteries of the global economy, ending it will require more than a shift in rhetoric—or even policy. A durable ceasefire would depend on mediators capable of sequencing reciprocal steps and bridging fundamentally incompatible aims.

More likely, the war will end not through decisive victory, but at the point where continued fighting no longer improves either side’s position and the mutual threat environment begins to recede.

Incompatible endgames

For the United States and Israel, the conflict forms part of a broader attempt to reshape the Middle East’s security architecture. Since October 7, Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly invoked a “new Middle East” in which Iran’s regional reach is sharply curtailed.

Drawing on past confrontations, including the 12-day war of June 2025, Washington and Tel Aviv appear to be seeking tangible outcomes: dismantling key military capabilities and preventing their reconstruction—an objective that may prove harder than the initial blow.

Iran’s logic is different. Tehran is pursuing what might be called coercive endurance: safeguarding regime survival while preserving deterrence by imposing high costs on its adversaries. Its demands—compensation and assurances against renewed war—serve not only strategic ends but domestic ones, helping sustain elite cohesion and legitimacy.

Regional actors, particularly Persian Gulf Arab states, and external powers with major energy interests remain cautious, oscillating between defensive positioning and watchful restraint. For now, mediation remains peripheral. The war is being shaped less in diplomatic forums than under fire.

A war of arteries

The Strait of Hormuz has evolved from a geographic chokepoint into a central strategic lever. Iran’s approach rests on the premise that disrupting this vital waterway transforms a bilateral confrontation into a global economic crisis.

Energy prices become not just an indicator but a weapon, intended to erode political will in Washington and its allies by destabilizing markets and raising costs worldwide.

Washington, in turn, has focused on Kharg Island—Iran’s primary oil export terminal and the loading point for roughly 90 percent of its crude exports. The threat to Kharg is a direct counter to Tehran’s Hormuz leverage. If Hormuz raises global costs, Kharg raises the cost of survival for Iran itself.

This duel points to a central constraint: the war will move toward closure only when both sides conclude that choking each other’s economic lifelines yields diminishing returns compared with the systemic risks to global energy markets.

Any durable settlement would therefore require a new security arrangement that guarantees safe passage through Hormuz while removing the threat to Iran’s export infrastructure.

Question of authority

The killing of senior political figures, including Ali Larijani, has raised concerns about gaps in coordination at the center of power. The question is whether an institutional structure still exists capable of accepting defeat—or even signing a ceasefire.

Yet the continuation of Iranian strikes suggests the system’s resilience does not rest on individuals alone. Tehran’s military order, shaped by a doctrine of decentralized “mosaic” defense, appears to have maintained operational coherence.

That resilience, however, raises doubts about whether a ceasefire could produce lasting stability while the machinery of war remains intact.

Inside Iran, external attacks appear to have strengthened nationalist sentiment among parts of society, yet leadership losses could also trigger fissures within the security establishment or embolden dissent. The balance between cohesion and fracture remains unclear.

For now, political and military leadership appear aligned in their belief that the situation remains manageable.

Some in Washington therefore see a more realistic objective not as immediate regime collapse but as forcing Tehran into a form of strategic accommodation—perhaps through the rise of more pragmatic figures capable of imposing restraint on military actors.

Such an outcome could allow Tehran to concede in practice while presenting the result domestically as survival or even victory.

Whether that path is viable remains uncertain. Internal purges, factional tensions and competing strategic visions continue to complicate any transition, even as some voices within Iran’s security establishment advocate widening the conflict.

Ultimately, how the war ends will depend not only on economic and regional pressures but on a deeper unknown: how much organizational capacity, military discipline and political authority remain in Tehran to accept a new strategic order.

Wars of this kind end when exhaustion converges with recognition. The decisive question is whether there remains a clear address in Tehran capable of signing—and enforcing—a ceasefire, and what form that political will ultimately takes.

On March 18, Israeli strikes targeted facilities linked to South Pars and the onshore hub at Asaluyeh in Bushehr Province.

Qatar, which shares the reservoir, directly blamed Israel, while the United Arab Emirates branded the attack a "dangerous escalation" threatening global energy security.

Tehran responded with a swift call for the evacuation of energy infrastructure across the Persian Gulf, including in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

South Pars is not simply another hydrocarbon asset. Together with Qatar’s North Dome, it forms the world’s largest natural gas field, holding an estimated 1,800 trillion cubic feet of gas and 50 billion barrels of condensate.

Iran’s share accounts for roughly 36 percent of its proven gas reserves and about 5.6 percent of global reserves, placing a central pillar of its economy at risk.

Asaluyeh serves as the operational core of this system, concentrating upstream, midstream and downstream infrastructure in a single coastal zone. Offshore production feeds into refineries, petrochemical complexes and export terminals that underpin Iran’s electricity generation, industrial base and energy exports.

This concentration creates both efficiency and vulnerability. A strike on Asaluyeh does not merely disrupt production; it threatens the entire value chain.

Positioned along the Persian Gulf and connected to export routes through the Strait of Hormuz, Asaluyeh sits at the intersection of production and transit. Any sustained disruption could compound supply shocks across global markets.

Israel has moved beyond military and nuclear assets to strike the economic core of Iran’s power, signaling a shift toward economic attrition in which energy systems become primary targets.

Iran’s response suggests escalation will not remain contained. Outlets linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have published lists of potential targets: Ras Laffan and Mesaieed in Qatar, the SAMREF refinery and Jubail petrochemical complex in Saudi Arabia, and the Al Hosn gas field in the United Arab Emirates.

The fallout is already visible. Iraq has reported a halt in Iranian gas supplies following the strike on South Pars, while Ras Laffan installations in Qatar are being evacuated.

The shared nature of the reservoir raises additional risks. Qatar’s North Dome underpins a significant share of global LNG supply to Europe and Asia. Instability on the Iranian side introduces concerns over reservoir management, operational safety and spillover effects.

Qatar’s swift condemnation reflects a clear calculation: escalation around the world’s largest gas field threatens global markets as much as regional stability.

The risks extend beyond the Gulf. Israel’s offshore gas fields—Leviathan, Tamar and Karish—are critical to domestic supply and regional exports and remain exposed to potential retaliation. Expanding the conflict to the Eastern Mediterranean would transform a regional confrontation into a multi-basin energy crisis.

The strike also exposes a strategic asymmetry. Israel has limited comparable domestic energy infrastructure vulnerable to direct retaliation, while Iran operates within a region where energy assets are densely clustered.

Tehran cannot easily mirror the strike, but it can impose costs across a wider regional system by targeting Gulf producers, shipping lanes or offshore infrastructure.

The choice of South Pars and Asaluyeh therefore reflects more than tactical targeting. It marks a deliberate shift toward pressure on economic systems and systemic vulnerability.

The immediate damage may prove limited. The strategic consequences are not. Once energy infrastructure becomes a battlefield, escalation thresholds shift, retaliation broadens, and interconnected energy systems become more fragile.

South Pars is not just a gas field; it anchors Iran’s economy and links directly to global energy markets. By placing it in the crosshairs, the conflict has entered a phase in which local strikes carry global consequences.