Stocks rise after report of Iran’s Hormuz proposal - Bloomberg
Stocks advanced after a report said Iran had offered the United States a proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Bloomberg reported.
MSCI’s Asia Pacific share benchmark rose 1.5%, while its emerging markets index climbed to a record after Axios reported on Iran’s proposal to end the war.
Asian chip stocks outperformed, with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. surging 6% to a record. A gauge of Asian tech stocks also reached an all-time high.
Bloomberg said the report eased concerns that efforts to restart peace talks had stalled.
Al Jazeera reports that Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said his trip to Russia is aimed at continuing close consultations between Tehran and Moscow on regional and international issues.
Speaking upon arrival, Araghchi said his meeting later today with Russian President Vladimir Putin would provide “a good opportunity” to discuss developments in the war and review the latest situation.
“I am confident that these consultations and coordination between the two countries in this regard will be of particular importance,” he added.
The US dollar was steady on Monday as wavering hopes of a deal to end the war between the United States and Iran kept investors on edge.
US President Donald Trump scrapped a planned visit to Islamabad by his envoys over the weekend.
Sentiment improved later after Axios reported that Tehran had sent Washington a new proposal through Pakistani mediators to reopen the waterway and end the war, while postponing nuclear negotiations to a later stage.
The euro trimmed earlier losses to trade flat at $1.1724, while sterling traded at $1.3536.
Reports that Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf may have been sidelined from Iran’s negotiations with the United States have revived an old question from Soviet history: can an insider reform a rigid ideological system without becoming one of its casualties?
Ghalibaf may be emerging not as Iran’s Mikhail Gorbachev, but as something closer to Nikita Khrushchev—an establishment figure attempting controlled change not to dismantle the Islamic Republic, but to preserve it.
The Majles speaker, a former IRGC commander with deep ties inside the security establishment, has in recent weeks appeared to sit at the center of Tehran’s debate over diplomacy or confrontation.
Supporters of diplomacy see negotiations as a way to stabilize the system and prevent further confrontation with the West. Hardline factions warn that concessions would undermine the ideological foundations of the Islamic Republic.
US President Donald Trump, intentionally or not, has helped fan the flames by publicly portraying Iran’s leadership as divided, echoing the way Washington’s rivalry with the Soviet Union often intensified internal debates in Moscow.
The comparison with Gorbachev has appeared before in Iranian politics. During the reform movement of the late 1990s, President Mohammad Khatami was frequently described as “Iran’s Gorbachev.”
Hardliners used the label to attack him, while parts of the opposition embraced it in the hope that his reforms might accelerate the system’s collapse.
In reality, neither Khatami nor his allies accepted that role. Their reforms were framed as an effort to strengthen the Islamic Republic rather than dismantle it. More importantly, the structure of power at the time made a Gorbachev-style transformation nearly impossible.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei held ultimate authority and maintained the balance between rival factions, limiting both reformist ambitions and hardline overreach.
The conditions today are markedly different. Iran has endured direct external military pressure, and the legitimacy of the system has been shaken by recent protests. A younger generation appears deeply alienated from the ideological foundations of the state.
At the same time, the supreme arbiter who once managed factional competition no longer appears able—or willing—to impose the same discipline.
In such circumstances, change may come not from a reformist outsider but from a figure embedded within the system itself. Ghalibaf fits that description. His background in the IRGC, his political experience, and his connections across multiple factions give him a platform few others possess.
Yet any move toward accommodation with Washington provokes resistance from ideological loyalists who view compromise as betrayal, even as warnings grow that without meaningful change the system could buckle under pressure from abroad and deepening discontent at home.
Here the Soviet analogy becomes harder to ignore.
Khrushchev’s reforms were intended to strengthen the Soviet system, not dismantle it. But attempts to modernize rigid structures often produce consequences their architects cannot control.
In 1964, Khrushchev was quietly pushed aside by his colleagues and officially “retired due to old age and ill health.”
If Iran’s leadership ultimately chooses a path of limited reform to preserve the state, Ghalibaf could still emerge in such a role. But if the system rejects even controlled adaptation, he may instead become an early casualty of its resistance to change.
Recent tracking data suggesting Iran is still moving millions of barrels of crude despite a US naval blockade has raised fresh questions about the effectiveness of Washington’s effort to choke off Tehran’s oil exports.
TankerTrackers.com on Sunday cited satellite images that it said showed Iran loaded at least 4.6 million barrels of crude at export terminals in recent days, with another four million barrels appearing to have crossed the US blockade line.
The figures suggest Tehran retains at least some ability to keep oil flowing despite a US naval blockade launched nearly two weeks ago and repeated claims from Washington that the operation is crippling Iran’s maritime trade.
The Islamic Republic that has emerged from the killing of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei may prove more operationally aggressive than the one it replaces, analysts say.
Dominated by the Revolutionary Guards, the leadership in Tehran may be less constrained by theology and more driven by revenge.
This is an assessment by analysts tracking the post-war power shift in Tehran, as a string of attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets have taken place since the Feb. 28 US-Israeli strikes.
Across Europe, an Iran-linked group calling itself Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia has claimed several attacks, including the targeting of Jewish volunteer ambulances in London, a synagogue in Belgium and a synagogue and Jewish school in the Netherlands.
In Azerbaijan, an alleged Iranian plot targeting the Israeli embassy in Baku and Jewish community sites was foiled by authorities.
Danny Citrinowicz, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, says the post-Ali Khamenei Islamic Republic is likely to become more operationally aggressive, with sleeper cells and lone-wolf attacks posing a growing threat to Tehran’s adversaries.
"Lone wolves are a bigger threat," Citrinowicz told Iran International, referring to the act of an individual committing a violent act alone without a direct order.
"You just need to create the atmosphere," Citrinowicz said. "It will lead to someone saying, I'm going to do something."
Citrinowicz describes the Islamic Republic in 2026 as "Iranian Revolution 3.0" — its third iteration since 1979 — in which a military junta has taken control of the founding doctrine of clerical rule, Velayat-e Faqih, with the IRGC dominating all meaningful decisions.
It is a regime that has demonstrated, through the foreign fighters it brought in to suppress its own population during the January 2026 uprising, that it harbors sizable loyal support outside its borders.
"The regime will try to present itself as a continuation of Ali Khamenei's regime," Citrinowicz said.
Yet the IRGC-dominated leadership still faces a limitation in its power, inheriting a government whose revolutionary appeal has long outlasted its domestic popularity.
Iran International reported that around 800 members of Iraqi militia groups — including Kataib Hezbollah and Harakat al-Nujaba — entered Iran days before the January 2026 crackdown that killed tens of thousands of protesters.
The Pakistani contingent — the Zainabiyoun Brigade — is an armed wing rooted in Tehran's ideological network, drawn from South Asia's Shia communities. But one militia is only part of the picture.
Simon Wolfgang Fuchs, an associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, describes Lahore-based cleric Jawad Naqvi as running a sprawling and sophisticated Shia seminary operation in Lahore, Pakistan.
The seminary produces Qom-trained scholars, high-quality social media content, and an explicit political model.
"He's really someone who says we have to implement the Iranian model in Pakistan," Fuchs told Iran International. Naqvi's political model draws inspiration from Hezbollah, Fuchs argues — a Shia minority that embraced Velayat-e Faqih and came to dominate Lebanon's political field.
"The vision and the boldness to simply claim that you could also dominate the state is definitely there," Fuchs said, though he cautioned the comparison has limits — Pakistan's Shia community has no history of armed resistance.
"Iran's efforts to gain a following as the legitimate leader of the Shia (community) has paid off somewhat in South Asia," said Cliff Smith, a fellow at the Middle East Forum who visited Indian-administered Kashmir and documented Iranian influence on the ground.
"The idea of Iran is stronger outside its borders than it is inside."
India, home to between 20 and 40 million Shia — the second-largest such population after Iran — has received less scrutiny than its neighbour.
Smith observed during time spent in Kashmir that New Delhi had effectively tolerated Iranian influence among the Shia community, calculating it served as a useful counterweight to Sunni radicalism from Pakistan.
The wave of protests and unrest that was seen in India following Khamenei's killing has prompted a reassessment, according to Smith.
"I had one of those people tell me, when they had seen the riots and demonstrations after Khamenei’s death, that I was right. We should have paid attention to this sooner," he said, recalling a contact at an Indian think tank.
Abhinav Pandya of India's Usanas Foundation argues the blind spot runs deeper than Kashmir, as Iran's influence among Indian Muslims is not confined to Shia communities.
India is home to around 200 million Muslims — the world's third-largest — and Pandya argues the Indian security establishment has been too focused on the Sunni threat to register how deeply the Islamic Republic's influence has taken root among the country's Shia groups.
"The biggest misunderstanding is that most of the jihadist problem comes from the Sunni Muslims, and the Shias — they don't need to bother about them, Shias are completely loyal," Pandya said.
"So far Shia Muslims have not majorly participated in any terrorist activity... But partly this understanding is problematic."
For Citrinowicz, the killing of Khamenei —a figure seen as much as a religious leader as a political one — risks transforming Iran's conflict with the US and Israel into something far harder to contain.
“The killing of him is potentially opening some sort of religious war that I think that we have to make sure it won't expand between the Shias and the state of Israel," he said.
Citrinowicz also warned of an increase in Iranian terror activity abroad. "While they have this kind of capabilities and shared communities all over the world, especially in places like India, definitely we'll see an uptick."
