US midterms will not constrain Trump on Iran, former official says

The discussions have increasingly focused on sequencing: Iran wants the United States to lift its economic blockade before Tehran reopens the Strait of Hormuz, while Washington is seeking movement on the strait before surrendering its principal source of leverage.

Neither side appears willing to go first despite the mounting economic and political costs of the deadlock.

On the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said in an interview with Fox News that Tehran was willing to relinquish its stockpile of uranium enriched to 60% within the framework of international law and its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The choice of Fox News may also have reflected an effort to reach President Donald Trump and his political audience more directly, given the network’s close relationship with the president.

Pezeshkian also said Tehran hoped to revive its June ceasefire understanding with Washington before the US midterm elections in November.

“We don't want it to get to the midterm elections,” he told reporters.

Trump has suggested the opposite timetable, saying in his UN General Assembly address that an agreement with Iran would likely be reached after the elections.

Who moves first?

Although both sides insist they seek peace, they remain divided over how an agreement would be implemented and in what order each should make concessions.

Tehran insists that no agreement can be reached before the United States lifts its economic blockade, while Washington and its European allies favour the opposite approach.

The disagreement is compounded by the collapse of the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding.

From Tehran’s perspective, returning to an agreement that Washington previously failed to honour requires guarantees upfront. From Washington’s perspective, reviving the June arrangement risks appearing to reward Iran for using the Strait of Hormuz as leverage.

Supporters of diplomacy on both sides, along with mediators including Pakistan and Qatar, continue to urge the replacement of military rhetoric with political dialogue.

The problem is that each side is making a different calculation about timing and sequencing, while political considerations discourage either from moving first.

Iran’s demand that “all fronts” be addressed further complicates the equation, linking any agreement to Israel’s actions in Lebanon and elsewhere, while the widening confrontation in the Red Sea and around Bab el-Mandeb has added another layer of uncertainty to negotiations.

The midterms

The competing timetables reveal another dimension of the deadlock: both capitals have now openly linked a potential agreement to the November elections, but appear to be drawing opposite conclusions about who benefits from waiting.

It remains unclear whether Pezeshkian’s remarks will materially alter the course of negotiations. For now, each side appears to calculate that time is placing greater pressure on the other.

Trump’s threat to “annihilate Iran” raises the domestic political cost for Tehran of making concessions and increases the risk that any flexibility will be portrayed by Pezeshkian’s hardline opponents as capitulation.

Washington has political constraints of its own, with congressional hawks and influential regional lobbying groups likely to raise the political cost of concessions to Tehran ahead of the midterm elections.

The view from Tehran

The reformist daily Sharq argued on Thursday that the resumption of contacts offered an opportunity to prevent further escalation, but that significant differences between the two governments and political opposition at home made an immediate breakthrough unlikely.

“The mere continuation of mediation, or even a direct meeting between the presidents of Iran and the United States, lacks the capacity to overcome the current deadlock,” it said. “Changing this situation requires practical and reciprocal decisions from both Tehran and Washington that go beyond diplomatic messaging.”

That assessment points to the constraints facing Pezeshkian, including opposition from hardline parliamentary factions and Iran’s powerful security establishment.

For Iran’s leadership, the principal risk of an agreement is surrendering strategic leverage without guaranteed sanctions relief. For the Trump administration, moving first could expose it to accusations of appeasement ahead of the midterm elections.

The contacts in New York therefore suggest that diplomacy itself is not the missing ingredient. The harder question is whether either side is prepared to move first — and accept the political cost of doing so.

Among the images of the first day of the school year on September 23 were mothers who had dropped their daughters at the gate with their own hair uncovered, beside girls wearing the maghnaeh, the fitted hood that covers the hair, neck and shoulders and has been part of the girls' uniform in Iranian schools for four decades.

The scene is not new to the Islamic Republic. In the oral histories of women who remember the first years after the 1979 revolution, the same picture appears: mothers who still left the house without a headscarf, walking daughters who had to cover for school, because school was where the new state was making the rule stick first.

In the Islamic Republic's early years, compulsory hijab was established first in the spaces the state controlled most directly, government offices and schools, and only afterward extended to the street and the whole of public life.

Today the rules in schools and offices remain, and the law on compulsory hijab has not been repealed or even amended. But outside those spaces, part of the female population has been living differently for some time. This time, society has moved ahead of the rules.

Before the hood became the uniform

This summer an image of two designs for girls' school uniforms from 1979, first published by the popular weekly Javanan-e Emrooz, circulated again. Neither design includes the maghnaeh that later became a fixed part of the girls' uniform.

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That interval did not last. In 1980, as the new state Islamized government offices and institutions, the dress code for schoolgirls changed too. For the 1980-81 school year, the requirement became a long-sleeved smock, loose trousers and a headscarf. In 1983, appearing in public without what the state called "sharia hijab" was made a crime.

The note to Article 638 of the Islamic Penal Code later became the legal basis for action against women who appear in public without the hijab the state requires.

So the history of compulsory hijab cannot be read from the street alone. School and office were among the first places it was enforced, and only later did the requirement settle across public space.

The regulation and the mandatory hood

In schools, much of that structure still stands. Article 85 of the schools' executive regulation, adopted in 2021, says students' clothing should be "simple, beautiful, varied, neat and cheerful," appropriate to Islamic-Iranian culture and identity, social custom, the student's age and the climate. The choice of style and color is left to each school's council, with the participation of the student council.

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But the note to the same article fixes the range for girls. A female student's dress is either "chador, manteau, trousers and maghnaeh" or "manteau, trousers and maghnaeh," the chador being the full-length cloak and the manteau the long coat worn over trousers.

The chador is not compulsory. The maghnaeh is. The regulation provides no option for a girl to attend school with her hair uncovered.

The requirement begins in primary school. A girl of six or seven may walk to the gate hand in hand with a mother whose hair is uncovered, and must then cover her own to go in.

The distance between society and the rules can hardly be seen more clearly than in those few meters.

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The fight reaches the uniform itself

This year the argument over girls' dress did not stop at the hood. The uniform itself made news.

On the eve of the new term, a message circulated about a girls' primary school in Saadat Abad, an affluent district in northwest Tehran, saying pupils would wear a shirt or blouse with trousers in place of the usual smock or manteau. Because the school is state-run, the message spread widely and reached state television.

The education office for Tehran's District 2 denied it, saying the images being shared had nothing to do with that school's uniform.

So the case cannot be treated as a confirmed change to a state school's uniform. But that such a report could circulate about a state school, and that the ministry felt obliged to answer it, shows the argument over girls' dress has reached the definition of the uniform itself.

Official policy has not moved. This year's directives asked schools to avoid unnecessary changes to the design and color of uniforms.

The result is a split. Outside school, the way women dress has changed quickly in recent years. Inside it, the manteau, trousers and maghnaeh of the official regulation remain exactly where they were.

Today's girls are not the girls of 1980

The most important difference between the two identical pictures may be the girls themselves.

The dress rules of 1980 were imposed on a society in which the Islamic Republic was still building its political, educational and cultural institutions. Today the same rules have to be enforced on a generation whose experience of how women around them dress is entirely different.

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The protests of 2022 carried that difference into the schools. Among the most repeated images of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising were teenage girls in school uniform who had taken off their hoods, in the schoolyard, the classroom and the street.

Reports of action against students over hijab followed. Amnesty International recorded the account of a 17-year-old who, after being seen with her hair uncovered on the school's cameras, was suspended and threatened with being reported to the security agencies.

That is a different experience from 1980. A student today may see bareheaded women on her way to school in the morning, be dropped off by a bareheaded mother, put on the hood to enter, and take it off again when school lets out.

For part of this generation, the maghnaeh is no longer a continuation of how they dress outside. It is a rule that applies on entering a controlled space, and stops applying on leaving it.

The law has not moved

None of this social change has become legal change.

The note to Article 638 still makes it a crime for a woman to appear in public without sharia hijab. Article 85 still lists the maghnaeh as part of a girl's dress.

The law known as Protection of the Family through the Promotion of the Culture of Chastity and Hijab, passed in December 2024, which would have widened the punishments and the means of enforcing compulsory hijab considerably, is not being implemented for now. Its suspension did not repeal the laws that came before it.

So what has happened in Iran's streets is not, in law, hijab becoming optional. The law has not recognized a right to choose. Part of society has made a different choice in practice.

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A woman without a headscarf in Iran today is not uncovered because the law gave her that right. The law can still treat what she is doing as a crime, even if it is not enforced at every time and in every place.

The administrative structure behind hijab policy has not gone either. The budget for the Iranian year that began in March 2025 set aside 2.592 trillion rials, about $1.1 million at market rates, for the Headquarters for Enjoining Good and Forbidding Evil, the state body charged with policing public morality, for which hijab has been a principal concern. That is roughly the annual minimum wage of 1,300 workers.

In the budget for the year that began this March, the line was written differently: 6.284 trillion rials, about $2.7 million, in a single shared allocation for three bodies, the headquarters, Soureh University, which is run by the state's Islamic propaganda organization, and the Islamic Propagation Coordination Council, which organizes official rallies. Because the shares are not separated, the full figure cannot be described as the headquarters' budget, still less as a hijab budget.

The education ministry and other state bodies also retain duties under the existing law on dress. The retreat of enforcement in parts of public space has not removed the law, the institutions or the money behind it.

In 1980, the bareheaded mother was walking her daughter toward a rule that would soon reach her too. In 2026 she walks her daughter toward the last place the rule still holds. The picture has not changed. Its direction has. The few meters between her uncovered hair and her daughter's hood are no longer the distance between two generations, but between a society that has changed and a law that still says it hasn't.

The emerging pattern is one of horizontal escalation: rather than confining its response to the point of pressure, Iranian officials are increasingly warning that action in one arena could produce retaliation elsewhere.

IRGC spokesman Hossein Mohebbi made that logic explicit on September 23, declaring that “Iran will certainly change the geography of the war” and adding that “our targets will no longer necessarily be the same as before”.

A day later, Yahya Rahim Safavi, military adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, gave the clearest indication yet of how far that geography might extend.

In a video released by the IRGC-linked Fars News Agency, Safavi said the front could expand further in response to continued warfare, “reaching the Indian Ocean and perhaps beyond”.

He added that linking Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb “will change the battlefield”.

Fars noted that it was the first time an adviser to Khamenei had explicitly mentioned the Indian Ocean, home to the US-British base at Diego Garcia, nearly 4,000 kilometres from Iran.

In an earlier interview reported by Fararu, Safavi said Houthi advances mean the United States now faces a new challenge at Bab el-Mandeb and in the Red Sea.

IRGC Aerospace Force commander Majid Mousavi warned that “if you make the sacred Strait of Hormuz unsafe, we will turn the entire region into hell for you from across Iran”.

From shipping to aviation

The same logic has increasingly appeared outside the maritime arena.

Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council Mohsen Rezaei addressed Iran’s neighbouring Arab states in an interview with state broadcaster IRINN on September 23, saying: “If you stand with America, we will not just watch you.”

He warned that if Iranian flights were banned with their cooperation, “their airports will have no flights”. He did not specify any country, airport or method of disruption.

Rezaei linked the warning to the Hormuz standoff.

He also said Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was due to convey Iran’s seven conditions through mediators and that, until they were met, neither the strait would reopen nor negotiations resume.

Tehran had given the Americans “four to five days” to meet the conditions, he asserted.

A widening map of pressure

The statements suggest Tehran is increasingly answering different elements of Washington’s pressure campaign with threats or measures in corresponding domains.

Safavi’s framing of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb as a connected theatre suggests Tehran increasingly sees pressure around the two strategic chokepoints as interconnected.

The most immediate audience for many of these warnings is Iran’s Arab neighbours, whose airports, ports and territory are exposed to the consequences of US-Iran escalation.

Rezaei’s remarks appear designed to raise the potential cost for those states of cooperating with Washington’s pressure campaign.

Iran has already demonstrated a willingness during the conflict to target regional aviation infrastructure, repeatedly striking Kuwait International Airport and damaging terminals and a radar system.

The Indian Ocean references extend this widening map further.

For now, the shift is clearest at the level of rhetoric: none of the statements reviewed sets out a specific Iranian plan for operations there.

But combined with threats against regional airports and repeated references to Bab el-Mandeb, they point to an increasingly explicit message from Tehran that further US pressure could carry risks well beyond the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran’s Statistical Center reported that gross domestic product contracted 10.1% year on year in the spring, with almost every major sector shrinking except agriculture.

The value added of the oil and gas extraction sector, measured at constant 2021 prices, fell 26.4%. Its share of Iran’s economy also declined from 26% in the spring of last year to 21% in the same period this year.

International Energy Agency data show that Iran produced an average of about 2.6 million barrels of crude oil per day between April and June, roughly corresponding to the spring quarter. That was more than 20% below the same period last year.

Average daily oil production fell further to around 2.3 million barrels in the summer. With the United States imposing a naval blockade on Iran from mid-July, the contraction in GDP is expected to be significantly sharper in the summer than in the spring.

Gas distribution

Statistical Center data show that the value added of the gas distribution sector, measured at constant 2021 prices, fell by more than 21% in the spring from a year earlier.

Israel targeted gas-processing facilities at South Pars, the field that accounts for around 70% of Iran’s gas production, on March 18. Since then, Iranian officials have given varying estimates of the decline in gas production, ranging from 100 million to 230 million cubic meters per day.

The International Energy Agency’s initial estimates, published in May, suggested that Iran’s daily gas production may have fallen by around 100 million cubic meters.

The Statistical Center did not specify the exact daily volume of gas distributed during the spring. However, an earlier report showed that Iran produced and injected around 726 million cubic meters per day of processed gas into the distribution network in the spring of last year.

Given the 21% decline in the sector’s value added at constant prices, this suggests that gas supplied to the domestic network fell by roughly 152 million cubic meters per day this spring, to around 573 million cubic meters.

The decline is particularly significant ahead of winter. Iran faces a severe natural gas deficit during the cold months, with the daily shortfall reaching as much as 250 million cubic meters during periods of peak demand.

The government has consequently been forced to restrict supplies to industries, power plants and the petrochemical sector to meet rising residential demand.

The gas export puzzle

Despite the decline in gas supplied to the domestic network, Iran increased exports to one of its two gas customers.

Data from Turkey’s energy market regulator (EMRA) show that Iranian gas exports to Turkey increased 27% between April and June to 30 million cubic meters per day. Iran also exports gas to Iraq, although comparable data for the same period have not been published.

The increase in exports to Turkey may have two main explanations.

First, domestic gas demand is lower during the warmer months than in autumn and winter. Second, Iran’s industrial and petrochemical sectors may have experienced a significant decline in gas consumption because of the war.

According to earlier Statistical Center data, Iran’s petrochemical sector and industries consumed about 82 million and 397 million cubic meters of gas per day, respectively, in the spring of last year.

Combined, that represented roughly 75% of domestic gas sales, excluding exports, transmission and distribution losses, and gas used to operate the network itself. The combined figure was equivalent to about 66% of the total processed gas injected into the network that spring.

Israel targeted parts of Iran’s petrochemical complexes in Asaluyeh and Mahshahr during the spring. Together, those facilities account for around 70% of Iran’s petrochemical production. Israel also targeted the Mobarakeh and Khuzestan steel complexes, which together account for about half of Iran’s steel production.

It is therefore likely that gas consumption by these industries fell sharply during and after the attacks, freeing up some gas for exports.

But the situation could change rapidly as temperatures fall.

Household gas consumption rises to roughly twice its spring and summer levels in autumn and more than three times the warm-season level in winter. Households accounted for 49% of Iran’s total gas consumption last winter, according to the Statistical Center.

It remains unclear whether Iran will be able to maintain gas exports to Turkey and Iraq once domestic demand surges in the coming months.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian devoted both the opening and closing sections of his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday to rejecting President Donald Trump's accusations against Tehran.

He also made clear that while Iran welcomed negotiations, it would not yield to coercion or what he described as Trump's “bullying.”

The tension between those two messages reflects the difficult political terrain surrounding the latest diplomatic opening. Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi have signaled a willingness to pursue talks, but criticism from hardliners has raised questions about how much room they have to negotiate.

Those divisions surfaced after Araghchi's contact with US envoy Steve Witkoff in New York on Tuesday.

The IRGC-affiliated Tasnim News Agency reported Wednesday that the contact had taken place without authorization from Iran's policymaking bodies, including the Supreme National Security Council.

Citing Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of the council, Tasnim said the approved plan had been limited to conveying Iran's seven conditions through mediators. It described Araghchi's reported interaction with Witkoff as a “major error” and called on the foreign minister to explain his actions.

The criticism points to a potentially important fault line in Tehran: not necessarily over whether diplomacy should continue, but over how direct that diplomacy is permitted to become.

Accounts of Tuesday's discussions have themselves differed. US officials have described a three-hour diplomatic exchange positively, while Iranian accounts have emphasized the role of mediators and said Tehran's conditions were conveyed to Washington.

An Iranian diplomat told Reuters before Pezeshkian's speech that discussions on ending hostilities could continue in New York and described the General Assembly as “a golden opportunity for America to return to diplomacy.”

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said any agreement would require sustained work over time and that Trump retained military options.

Rubio also pointed to divisions within Tehran, saying potential agreements had repeatedly faltered after being referred back to the country's revolutionary establishment. He blamed the IRGC for the collapse of an earlier US-Iran understanding after it attacked ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

Hardliners test the limits

Despite Tasnim's criticism of Araghchi, some hardline messaging immediately before and during the New York talks appeared to leave room for diplomacy.

Before opposition to the talks became more vocal, even the hardline Kayhan newspaper sounded unusually supportive of Pezeshkian on Wednesday morning.

IRGC spokesman Hossein Mohebbi also delivered a dual message following reports of the talks.

“We don't reject diplomacy, but we impose our own conditions. Our defensive power will be proven in the field,” he was quoted as saying.

The formulation suggested that the IRGC was not rejecting negotiations outright, even while insisting that diplomacy take place on Tehran's terms and alongside continued military pressure.

The dispute over Araghchi's contact with Witkoff suggests the argument may therefore be less about whether Iran should negotiate than about the format, limits and authorization of those negotiations.

Pezeshkian's own language at the United Nations appeared designed to preserve that room while demonstrating that negotiations would not amount to capitulation.

Responding to Trump's rhetoric, he warned the United States, Israel and regional actors that Iran would respond forcefully to threats, while insisting that Tehran still believed in diplomacy.

Major General Ali Abdollahi, chief of staff of Iran's Armed Forces, similarly argued that “rhetoric doesn't change the power calculus” and described Trump's remarks as “a sign of desperation” on the US side.

The sequencing problem

The mediation channel has so far allowed the two sides to exchange complex proposals without requiring the politically riskier spectacle of a meeting between Trump and Pezeshkian.

But even if Tehran's internal disagreements can be contained, substantial differences remain over what each side must do first.

Washington is reportedly insisting on the clearance of maritime choke points and assurances related to Iran's nuclear program before easing its naval blockade.

Tehran, by contrast, is demanding an immediate end to US interdictions and the release of $24 billion in frozen foreign assets as conditions for further progress, according to a source close to the Iranian diplomatic team.

Iran has also linked progress in negotiations to reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

The diplomatic opening in New York therefore leaves two related questions unresolved: whether Washington and Tehran can agree on the sequence of steps needed to end the conflict, and whether Iran's diplomats have sufficient authority at home to deliver whatever they negotiate.

The reaction from the IRGC and other hardline institutions in the coming days may provide an early indication of the answer.