Firsthand reports from contributors inside Iran
The latest round of café closures in Tehran is a reminder to ordinary Iranians that wartime or otherwise, those in power still decide how much space they are allowed to occupy.
On Sunday morning, authorities sealed several well-known cafés on Sanaei Street in central Tehran, with reports of similar closures in nearby Iranshahr. Among them were Dobar, 1401, Sam Café, Jo Café and Café Man.
The website Emtedad reported that each café was given a different explanation. Some were told it was because of hijab. Others because they served sandwiches. Others because they had chairs on the pavement.
The variety of reasons almost felt more revealing than any single one.
Hamed, who manages one of the affected cafés, says staff had already been warned that officials would come to seal the premises before inspectors even arrived.
"They told us they were coming," he says. "Now I'm trying to work out how we're supposed to pay wages, rent and everything else. First there was the war. Now this. Every few weeks there's another blow for small businesses and ordinary people."
The official explanations seemed almost secondary. The decision, many felt, had already been made.
Sanaei has become a familiar place in these dispatches because it represents something increasingly scarce in Tehran: a refuge. Its cafés are not cheap, often more expensive than many young people can comfortably afford. Yet they remain full. Students spend hours over a single coffee. Couples linger. Friends argue about politics, music and migration.
After weeks of war, blackouts and an internet that barely functioned, the street had slowly begun to feel alive again. For a few weeks, Sanaei almost felt like itself again. That, many people now believe, was precisely the problem.
Shiva, 33, who regularly meets friends there, says cafés are more than businesses. They are among the last places where the city still feels like a city.
"The war could have brought people together," she says. "Instead, it feels as though they're using its aftermath to settle scores with people they don't see as loyal."
Whether that is the authorities' intention is impossible to know. What is striking is how many people independently reached almost the same conclusion.
Many believe the authorities fear respite almost as much as dissent. When a city begins to relax, people gather, talk, laugh and slowly reclaim public life. Moments like Sunday's, they believe, are periodic reminders that no part of that life exists beyond the state's reach.
Ladan, a 28-year-old nurse who rarely visits Sanaei anymore because cafés have become too expensive, nevertheless took the closures personally.
"It almost feels as though someone decided the war hadn't put enough pressure on people," she says. "So they went after the places where people still gathered. It's difficult not to feel that ordinary life itself has become the target."
That helps explain why the closures provoked such bitterness. It was not the inconvenience, but the contempt. Many people felt that after months of war, inflation, blackouts and uncertainty, the authorities' instinct was still not to ask what society needed, but to remind society who remained in charge.
The Islamic Republic has already lost many of the social battles it once fought so fiercely, at least in Tehran. Compulsory hijab is openly challenged. Young men and women mix freely. Cafés remain among the few places where a generation battered by protests, repression and war can still carve out something resembling an ordinary life.
But losing the social argument is not the same as losing the power to enforce it. That may be the real message behind Sunday's closures: not that chairs on the pavement or sandwiches suddenly became intolerable, but that almost any pretext can be enough to take away a business, a meeting place or simply somewhere people had begun to feel at ease.
Hamed shrugs when asked whether the cafés will eventually reopen.
"They probably will," he says. "But that's not really the point anymore."
Perhaps he is right. After everything people have lived through, the instinct of those in power still seems to be not to give society a little more room to breathe, but to remind it that even breathing remains a privilege, not a right.
The panel, held at Iran International's Washington headquarters and moderated by Fardad Farahzad, brought together Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, Ilan Berman of the American Foreign Policy Council, and Iranian-American analyst Fereshteh Pezeshk.
The discussion came amid renewed US strikes, with attacks tearing through bridges and infrastructure across Iran's south.
Is Washington heading for a ground operation?
The question hanging over the room was whether the air campaign is a prelude to something larger. Rubin framed the choice in stark terms.
"When you have a hornet's nest, you have two good options. One is to leave it alone. The other one is to get rid of it," he said. "The last thing you want to do is sit underneath it lightly tapping it with a stick, and we're getting to the point where that stick tapping is over."
The open question, he added, is "are we heading to boots on the ground? And if we're heading to boots on the ground, are we simply talking about the islands in the Persian Gulf, or are we talking about some of the ports?"
Pezeshk talked about the risks. A move onto Iranian soil, she argued, would be "disastrous," and not only in military terms. "A very good population of Iranians, unlike the rest of the Middle East, are pro-American," she said, describing "a chasm between the people and the Islamic Republic" after the killing on Iran's streets.
An occupation, she warned, could close that chasm rather than widen it. "The solution is in Tehran, not on the coasts. You've got to resolve that problem."
Berman placed the same question inside American politics, noting that gasoline prices and looming midterm elections are shaping every decision the administration makes.
The task now, he said, is to establish what military planners call escalation dominance, "to show the Iranian regime that they have more firepower and they have politically more will to stay and to fight."
Regime change or transformation?
The most contested idea of the evening came from Berman, who argued that a quieter transformation has already taken place inside the Islamic Republic.
The current rulers, he said, "have a different DNA. They behave differently, they negotiate differently," a shift he traced in part to a war that opened at the very top of the escalation ladder with the killing of the supreme leader.
However, he pointed out that the change has not produced true regime change. “The Trump administration hasn’t dug deep enough... “You haven’t had regime change as most of us have historically thought about it – a transition from the Islamic Republic to a fundamentally different governing system.”
Rubin pushed the logic toward the machinery of power, describing an effort to peel away the leadership layer by layer. With the Revolutionary Guards numbering well over 100,000, he argued, "somewhere along those ranks there is someone who wants to enrich himself" and would deal with Washington.
But he cautioned that the administration may not know who actually runs the country, comparing its approach to "negotiating with the doorman in a skyscraper rather than negotiating with the owner."
Both men returned to a warning that any transition badly managed could produce something worse.
Pezeshk offered the strongest caution against treating decapitation strikes as a complete regime-change strategy. “You have to resolve the political issue in Tehran, not the manifestation.”
She pressed the point harder: removing the leadership without a plan for the day after risks chaos. "How do you ensure it's not going to be a Taliban-like power that comes in? Are you working with the opposition? Are you inclusive enough?" She saw little sign of that groundwork.
"The guy sitting in Tehran is going to be there forever until they die. The US president, two and a half years from now, is gone."
The next uprising, and a fumbled chance
If there was a shared conviction, it was that Iran's streets, not its negotiators, will decide the outcome, and that Washington keeps missing its moments there.
Berman described unrest in Iran as a cyclical force, erupting roughly every two and a half years and accelerating. The lesson of the past six months, he said, is that the US was caught flat-footed when it mattered.
When the internet went dark in January, he recounted, the administration assumed it could "just pierce that veil" with Starlink units and VPNs. Instead it found the jamming, aided by Russia and China, far more robust than expected, and its own tools not prepositioned.
"One of the most important lessons that this last half year has brought is we should be thinking now about the next round of protests, because the next protest is going to start."
Pezeshk argued it already had. She credited the January protests, set off in part by an opposition call to the streets, as "one of the biggest protests ever in Iranian history," met with a killing she put at around 40,000. Her frustration was that such a force draws so little attention in Washington.
The Kurds, the islands, and a mafia state
Asked whether the US might arm Kurdish or other groups to open a ground front, the panel was wary. Rubin noted Washington's long reluctance to back separatist movements in the region, and Pezeshk attributed the on-again, off-again talk to "the chaos of the Trump administration."
Berman said officials he had spoken to were "very nervous about the steadfastness and the resolve of these elements."
Rubin, speaking "as an analyst rather than advocate," sketched where a limited campaign might fall: not the ports, but strategic islands, from Abu Musa and the Tunbs to Kish and Qeshm, "the gateway to Bandar Abbas."
He warned that seizing Iranian territory could backfire by rallying a fiercely nationalist public. The Islamic Republic, he argued, would not be moved by the loss of land the way a normal state would.
"They act like a mafia. They don't care if part of the country is gone as long as they're still in power."
Pezeshk’s argument was that territorial occupation – whether by US forces, Kurdish groups or another regional actor – could unite Iranians around national sovereignty.
Can an ideological system make a lasting deal?
Rubin argued that the Islamic Republic’s political identity limits its ability to reach the kind of pragmatic agreement sought by the Trump administration. Rubin argued that the Islamic Republic’s political identity limits its ability to reach the kind of pragmatic agreement sought by the Trump administration.
Pezeshk was skeptical any lasting deal is possible with a system she sees as ideological to its core.
Persian Gulf states, she said, want development, not confrontation, "they do not want to go back to the 18th century," while the Islamic Republic "has a tolerance for absorbing a lot of pain just because they don't care about their people."
Whether the war ends at the table or on the coast, the panel's consensus held that its true resolution lies elsewhere.
As Rubin put it, the nuclear file, the missiles and the proxies are all "the manifestation of the root cause, which is the Islamic Republic."
The backlash followed Araghchi's appearance on the YouTube program Majaray-e Jang (Story of War), in which he discussed the wars with the United States and Israel, internal security planning, succession preparations and negotiations with Washington. He also said security gaps that enabled attacks on senior officials and leadership sites "probably still have not been fully resolved."
"If you wanted publicity or to repair your image, you made it worse," Mostafa Khoshcheshm, a political analyst appearing on Iranian state television, said in response to the interview.
Araghchi's remarks, Khoshcheshm said, reflected what he described as "a lack of strategic thinking," adding: "I am genuinely concerned." He called the interview "a disaster in public relations, image-building and image repair."
Araghchi had said attacks on the former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's compound were carried out through "security gaps" that continued to affect decision-makers and the public atmosphere.
He also described wartime contingency plans, including preparations for the possible killing of the country's leader and the government's response to attacks on senior officials.
Conservative newspapers criticize disclosures
Javan, a newspaper affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, wrote on Tuesday that confirming details surrounding the attacks, discussing the day the former leader was killed or revealing that the foreign minister had no contact with new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei were not matters that should have been disclosed publicly.
"Please keep the locations of the remaining tunnels and military bases to yourself in future interviews, and exercise restraint when discussing important events," the newspaper wrote.
Safeguarding national security, protecting public trust and defending the country's interests should outweigh the appeal of widely viewed media interviews, Javan added.
Conservative outlet Tabnak also questioned Araghchi's decision to give the interview to documentary filmmaker and online host Javad Mogoei rather than an experienced journalist.
The outlet wrote that some of the information discussed was likely to be of greater value to Israeli and US intelligence services than to viewers. It also argued that diplomacy and journalism are both specialized professions, asking whether senior officials should grant interviews to content creators without established experience covering political affairs.
The commentary compared Araghchi's media approach with that of former Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, arguing that although Zarif also preferred interviews with individuals rather than media organizations, he chose interviewers who better understood political and security sensitivities.
Reaction from Raisi allies
Raja News, a media outlet close to supporters of former president Ebrahim Raisi, also criticized the interview, focusing on remarks by Mogoei identifying locations of underground tunnels and saying military commanders frequently used them.
Araghchi, the outlet said, should not have disclosed such information and argued that the program's producers should have removed those passages during editing. It also questioned why the host publicly identified locations associated with senior commanders, even if foreign intelligence agencies were already aware of them.
The wide-ranging interview touched on issues that Iranian officials have rarely discussed publicly, including internal security failures, wartime contingency plans and high-level decision-making during the conflict.
