According to the Trump administration’s latest messaging, talks between the United States and Iran are deadlocked because of infighting in Tehran. The military hard-liners of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps must be stopping the civilian diplomats from making a deal. Or, to put it in President Trump’s words, “Iran is having a very hard time figuring out who their leader is!” (This supposition conveniently makes sense of the president’s claim that Iran has “agreed to everything” alongside Iran’s denial that this is so.)The explanation, which has gained some currency in U.S. media, is at best half-true. Quite a bit of infighting is indeed happening within the Iranian regime. However, it does not map neatly onto a military-versus-civilian divide, and it does not suggest that Iran’s negotiating team is disempowered to speak for the country. Such theories reflect a misunderstanding of Iran’s complex system and do little to advance American diplomatic aims.Consider the role of Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the man who led the Islamabad talks with Vice President Vance. His American interlocutors can’t quite decide where to place him in their schema of Iran’s internal politics. That might be because the sources of, and limits on, his authority range across the military-civilian binary.[Nancy A. Youssef and Jonathan Lemire: The Iran war’s ramifications have only just begun]Qalibaf is the speaker of Iran’s Parliament, but he has amassed power mostly through his membership on the Supreme National Security Council and its smaller subsidiary, the Defense Council. The Defense Council was founded last summer to consolidate Iran’s military leadership, and though it has nine members, Qalibaf is effectively the first among equals, which means he is all but running the war effort. He owes this to the broad authority he carries within the IRGC: He was one of its top regional commanders during the war with Iraq in the 1980s, and he later headed its construction wing and air force and helped build up its missile program.Qaibaf is also a power-hungry technocrat. He is known to be competent but brutal. He was national police chief in the early 2000s, during which time he played a part in imprisoning dissident writers and intellectuals, and he has bragged about his role in suppressing protests in 1999 and 2003, among other occasions. He has a reputation for corruption, having been accused of using his three terms as Tehran mayor to enrich himself, his acolytes, and his family.Iran’s newly minted supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is reportedly in a medically precarious position, and has thus remained outside public view. The extent of Mojtaba’s ability to direct decision making is therefore in question. But Qalibaf is known to have well-established ties to the security circles around the new leader, and some speculate that he is acting either with Mojtaba’s blessing or without need of it.Under these conditions, Qalibaf has become the face of diplomacy with the United States. This has historically been a controversial role in Iran, where conservative Islamist hard-liners have long opposed and sought to sabotage dealings with the United States. But “conservative Islamist hard-liners” is in no way synonymous with the IRGC. That organization is now so sprawling and decentralized—it controls much of Iran’s economy, as well as its political, military, and security institutions—that the whole of it is not likely to take any single position.Still, Qalibaf is thought to have considerable sway within the force. No IRGC commander has publicly come out against his handling of the talks—in fact, the IRGC’s main media outlet, Tasnim, has criticized the hard-liners who have tried to undercut diplomacy.That said, some of Iran’s political elites do oppose talks with the United States. Chief among them is Saeed Jalili, a senior member of the National Security Council who took a similarly hard-line position against the talks that led to the 2015 nuclear deal. Jalili counts as his allies two prominent members of Parliament, Ali Khezrian and Mahmoud Nabavian. Khezrian has declared that “all kinds of exchanging messages with the U.S. must stop.” Nabavian took part in the Islamabad talks but called them “unsuccessful and undesirable” and accused his own negotiating team of making “strategic mistakes in setting the agenda.” These men appear to have limited influence even in the legislature, where their hard-line faction is dominant: On Monday, 261 of 290 members of Parliament published a statement in support of Qalibaf and the negotiating team. Khezrian signed it, though Nabavian did not.The idea that the IRGC has set itself against the negotiating team stems from a misinterpretation of a single incident. On April 17, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, declared the Strait of Hormuz “completely open for the remaining period of cease-fire, on the coordinated route as already announced.” The IRGC’s media outlets rushed to clarify that this didn’t mean a full-on opening of the strait. That’s when Trump made his pronouncements on infighting in Tehran, but in truth the Iranian statements were in accord with each other. The hubbub in Iranian circles had less to do with Araghchi’s tweet than with Trump’s presentation of it as a more serious concession than it really was—part of a flurry of celebratory statements from the U.S. president, to which the Iranians took exception. Qalibaf accused Trump of having “made seven claims in one hour, all of which are false.”Since then, the regime has tried hard to project an image of unity. Qalibaf gave an extensive television interview in which he insisted that he would not trade away anything the regime held sacrosanct. He joined officials from an array of political factions in publishing a joint message on X: “In our Iran we don’t have extremists and moderates,” the post said. Rather, all Iranians were revolutionaries united behind “one god, one leader, one nation and one path.” The supreme leader himself published a short message on X warning against the “media operations aimed at disrupting national unity and security.”[Arash Azizi: The Iranian opposition’s urgent task]Iran’s hard-liners seem to lack the institutional leverage to thwart diplomacy. But if they are determined to do so, they can always try to mobilize their grassroots base. For weeks now, the Iranian regime has been calling on its backers to throng the streets by the thousands every night, as part of an effort to rally support for the war and intimidate the opposition. These advocates are a minority in a country that has largely soured on its regime. But they are real—when Jalili ran for president in 2024, he got 13.5 million votes—and many of them oppose diplomacy. When a former Iranian foreign minister published a piece in Foreign Affairs calling for a new deal with America, demonstrators burned his picture in the streets.But negotiations, too, have a base of popular support. The Iranian Reformists Front, which has faced repression in recent months, has signaled backing for talks with the U.S. So has the centrist former president Hassan Rouhani. Even some opponents of the Islamic Republic have come out in favor of diplomacy. Maulavi Abdulhamid, Iran’s top Sunni cleric, has called for “a just agreement” and protested against “extremists who are standing in the way with their obstinacy.” Those behind former Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi and some other opposition groups are against talks with the United States, but others in the non-monarchist opposition have declared support for them.So yes, there is infighting in Tehran. Competition and compromise will undoubtedly affect the nature and extent of the concessions negotiators are able to accept. The same is probably true on the other side of the negotiating table. But that doesn’t mean that hard-liners who oppose talks altogether are likely to sink them. If anything, the momentum and institutional power appear to lie on the side of diplomacy.