Who Are You, Iran? The Collage of Conflicting Powers and Interests

 By Professor Michael Shlomi June 2026

Michael Shlomi is a policy analyst specializing in geopolitical and diplomatic affairs with a focus on the Middle East

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Iran presents the world — and the United States in particular — with a carefully constructed image of unified sovereign authority. A single leadership, a coherent state, a government that speaks and acts with one voice. This image is a strategic fiction. Beneath the surface of the Islamic Republic lies a deeply fractured polity: a collage of competing factions, rival institutions, conflicting ideologies, and irreconcilable agendas — each pulling the country in a different direction. This analysis maps those factions, examines their internal dynamics, and draws the critical policy implication: that any diplomatic agreement reached with Iran’s current negotiating representatives may be structurally incapable of binding the forces that actually govern the country. Understanding who Iran really is may be the single most important prerequisite for any durable engagement with it.

I. The Illusion of Unity

When Iranian representatives sit across the negotiating table — in Geneva, in Vienna, in Muscat, or in Switzerland — they project an image of sovereign coherence. They speak as the voice of the Islamic Republic. They carry mandates. They use the language of state authority. Western diplomats, trained to treat their interlocutors as legitimate representatives of functioning governments, tend to receive them as such.

This is a category error with profound strategic consequences.

Iran is not a unitary actor. It is not a country where decisions flow cleanly from a single center of authority outward to obedient institutions. It is, rather, a contested political arena in which multiple factions — each with its own ideology, its own constituency, its own military or economic power base, and its own vision of the country’s future — compete for dominance in ways that are often invisible to outside observers.

The Islamic Republic has been extraordinarily successful at concealing this internal disorder behind a unified ideological facade. But the facade is precisely that. To negotiate with Iran as though it were a coherent sovereign actor is to misunderstand what Iran actually is — and to guarantee that any agreement reached will be structurally incomplete.

II. The Six Faces of Iran

A rigorous analysis of Iranian political reality reveals not one Iran but six distinct power centers, each operating with its own logic and each pulling the country in a different direction.

Faction One: The Mahdist Bloc — The Apocalyptic Vanguard

At the apex of Iran’s ideological architecture sits a faction for which politics is theology and theology is eschatology. This group — centered around the Supreme Leader’s inner circle and increasingly embodied by Mojtaba Khamenei, the Supreme Leader’s son and presumed heir — does not merely use religious rhetoric as a political instrument. They are true believers operating within a framework in which the return of the Hidden Imam, the Mahdi, is the supreme and organizing purpose of the Islamic Republic’s existence.

In their reading of Shia eschatology, the Mahdi’s return is contingent on cataclysmic confrontation — and the destruction of Israel is understood as a divine precondition, not a political objective. This renders them categorically immune to conventional diplomatic logic. They are not maximalist negotiators seeking a better deal. They are true believers for whom any agreement is inherently provisional: a tactical pause in service of a goal that cannot be publicly declared without destroying Iran’s diplomatic standing.

This faction draws its social power from the vast, deeply conservative, religiously devout communities of Iran’s rural and provincial heartland — populations largely unexposed to secular modernity, for whom the Islamic Republic is not a failed project but a sacred one. Their devotion is not manufactured from above. It is genuinely held from below.

Critically, this bloc controls two instruments of coercive enforcement. The Basij — a paramilitary militia drawn from the same devout communities that form the faction’s social base — functions as the regime’s street-level enforcement apparatus, deployed against the Iranian population itself. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) operates at a higher strategic level: projecting the faction’s agenda regionally and globally through proxy networks from Lebanon to Yemen to Iraq. Together, they give the Mahdist bloc something no other Iranian faction possesses: a monopoly on organized coercion, both inward-facing and outward-facing.

The analytical implication is sobering: statements of moderation, gestures toward compromise, even signed agreements will always be instrumentalized in service of this deeper agenda. Western interlocutors who take Iranian diplomatic language at face value are not engaging with pragmatists. They are engaging with true believers operating on an entirely different temporal and metaphysical horizon.

Faction Two: The Revolutionary Guard — A Fractured Leviathan

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps must be understood as categorically distinct from Iran’s conventional armed forces. Where the Iranian Army is a national military — defending borders, following state protocol, operating within recognizable military doctrine — the IRGC is the praetorian guard of the revolution itself, owing its allegiance not to the Iranian state or nation but to the ideological project of the Islamic Republic.

But here the analysis cuts deeper: the IRGC is not itself a monolith. It comprises four distinct functional branches — Ground Forces, Aerospace Force, Navy, and the Quds Force — each commanded by its own general, each with its own operational domain, institutional culture, and vision of what the Islamic Republic should become. These generals are not merely military commanders. They are political actors in uniform, cultivating relationships, building economic fiefdoms, and positioning themselves for influence in the post-Khamenei succession.

The result is a picture of four parallel power centers wearing the same uniform, each answering to the Supreme Leader in theory while protecting its own turf in practice. Even within Iran’s single most powerful coercive institution, there is no unified command of intent. An order from the top may be executed differently — or selectively — depending on which branch is tasked and which general commands it. The IRGC is simultaneously Iran’s most powerful institution and one of its deepest fault lines.

Faction Three: The Technocratic State — Pragmatists in a Theocratic Cage

The civilian government — headed by the president and staffed by ministers, diplomats, economists, engineers, and public health professionals — represents Iran’s administrative reality: the machinery that keeps 90 million people fed, educated, medicated, and connected to the world economy. These are not ideologues. They are credentialed professionals who understand inflation, energy markets, sanctions architecture, and demographic pressures. Their reference points are economic indicators and infrastructure deficits, not theological texts.

This faction’s agenda is essentially nationalist and developmental: a stable, functioning Iran reintegrated into the global economy, capable of offering its young population a viable future. When they sit across a negotiating table, they are genuinely engaging. They speak the language of diplomacy, not eschatology.

Yet here lies their fundamental contradiction — and their tragedy. They operate inside a system they did not design and cannot ultimately control. Their mandate comes from the ballot box, but their authority is circumscribed by the Supreme Leader. They can negotiate a deal, but they cannot guarantee it. They can craft a budget, but the IRGC’s parallel economy operates outside it. They are the most internationally legible face of a system that was not built for them to lead. Mistaking the administration for the state is precisely the analytical error that has repeatedly derailed diplomatic progress. The president can sign. He cannot deliver.

Faction Four: The Iranian Armed Forces — The Forgotten Military

Iran’s conventional military — the Artesh — predates the Islamic Republic entirely. Its institutional identity is rooted in the nation, not the ideology. It answers to the Minister of Defense, who sits within the civilian government, making it structurally the military instrument of the technocratic faction. Its officers are professional soldiers in the conventional sense: trained in military doctrine, oriented toward territorial defense and the state rather than the revolution.

This creates an irreconcilable structural conflict with the IRGC — a competition waged across budget allocations, political access, and operational authority. The IRGC’s sprawling economic empire allows partial self-financing that the Artesh cannot match. The IRGC has direct lines to the Supreme Leader; the conventional military does not. In practice, when Iran projects force, the IRGC acts. The Artesh is increasingly relegated to border defense and ceremonial relevance, producing a deeply resentful professional military sidelined by a rival force that is less a military than a revolutionary political movement with weapons. Iran’s security architecture is itself fractured. There are two armies — one serving the state, one serving the revolution — in permanent competition.

Faction Five: The Iranian People — The Silenced Majority

Beneath the theological declarations, military rivalries, and bureaucratic maneuvering lies an inconvenient truth the Islamic Republic has spent forty-five years suppressing: the majority of the Iranian people do not want the system that rules them.

Iran’s vast and extraordinarily young population is pro-democratic, pro-secular, and increasingly pro-Western in its cultural and political orientation. The Islamic Republic is not their project. It is their prison. Their resistance has been neither passive nor symbolic. In successive waves of uprising — the Green Movement of 2009, the economic protests of 2018 and 2019, and the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution of 2022 — ordinary Iranians have taken to the streets at extraordinary personal cost. The regime’s response has been systematic slaughter: between fifty and seventy thousand people killed across these cycles of uprising, cut down by Basij paramilitaries and IRGC forces deployed not against foreign enemies but against their own citizens.

The movement’s international focal point is Reza Pahlavi, son of the last Shah of Iran, who has emerged as the most visible voice of the Iranian opposition — engaging Western governments, building diaspora coalitions, and articulating a vision of a post-theocratic Iran that is secular, democratic, and reintegrated into the international community. This faction is simultaneously the largest and the least powerful within Iran. It has no army, no budget, no institutional foothold. Its leaders are in exile or in prison. Yet it cannot be ignored — because it poses the ultimate legitimacy question: if no faction within the Iranian system actually represents the Iranian people, then on whose behalf are Western governments negotiating?

Faction Six: The Ethnic Minorities — The Periphery Pushes Back

Iran is frequently imagined as a Persian nation. This is a profound oversimplification. The Islamic Republic governs a multiethnic empire — a patchwork of peoples, languages, and religious traditions that the Farsi-speaking, Twelver Shia establishment has never fully absorbed and has often actively suppressed.

The Kurds of the northwest carry a distinct language, culture, and political consciousness that predates the Islamic Republic — and armed groups like PJAK have waged persistent insurgency along the Iraqi border. The Arab population of oil-rich Khuzestan remains among Iran’s most economically marginalized communities, generating recurring unrest fueled by a sense that their land’s resources are extracted while they themselves live in poverty. The Azeris, Iran’s largest ethnic minority, maintain strong cultural ties to the Republic of Azerbaijan, whose flourishing independence provides an increasingly potent point of national comparison. The Baloch of Sistan and Baluchestan are predominantly Sunni Muslim — placing them in double opposition to the Shia theocracy — and inhabit Iran’s poorest and most neglected province.

What unites these communities — despite their profound differences from one another — is a shared experience of marginalization under Persian-Shia hegemony. Collectively, they raise a question the Tehran establishment fears deeply: the possibility that Iran’s internal fractures are not merely political but territorial — that the Islamic Republic is not governing a nation so much as holding one together by force.

III. The Negotiation Problem: Who Is in the Room?

With this landscape in view, the question of diplomatic engagement with Iran requires fundamental reframing. The critical issue is not whether the United States and Iran can find common ground on the nuclear file. It is whether the Iranians sitting across the table in Switzerland have the authority, the independence, and the personal safety to honor whatever they agree to.

American policymakers must ask a series of hard questions before treating any Iranian signature as meaningful. Do the negotiators represent a genuine consensus within Iran’s fractured power structure — or are they merely its most internationally presentable face? Can they deliver compliance from the IRGC, whose parallel command structure answers to a different master? Can they withstand the Mahdist bloc’s theological veto? And perhaps most sobering of all: are they themselves at personal risk for what they are negotiating? A diplomat who fears for his life upon returning to Tehran is not a free negotiating partner. He is a man performing within the limits of what the Supreme Leader’s inner circle and the IRGC will tolerate. That is not diplomacy. That is theater.

Even setting aside the question of personal authority, there remains the irreducible theological obstacle. The eschatological imperative of the Mahdist faction — the belief that the Mahdi’s return requires the destruction of Israel — cannot be negotiated away. It is not a policy position. It is a cosmological conviction. As long as that conviction drives the faction that controls Iran’s ultimate decision-making authority, no agreement on the nuclear file can be treated as a strategic settlement. It will be, at best, a tactical pause. The nuclear question is inseparable from this theology — because in the Mahdist vision, nuclear capability is not a security deterrent. It is a messianic instrument.

IV. A Strategy for the West: Divide, Pressure, and Empower

If the West concludes that the current Iranian negotiating representatives lack the authority to deliver a binding and durable agreement — and if the eschatological imperative of the Mahdist bloc renders any nuclear arrangement structurally unreliable — then the logical conclusion is that the problem is not the negotiation. The problem is the regime.

No agreement with the current power structure can be trusted to hold indefinitely. Therefore, alongside any diplomatic track, the strategic objective must include accelerating the conditions for internal transformation. The instrument is ancient and has been validated repeatedly by history: divide and conquer. Rome understood it. So must Washington.

The tactical toolkit for this strategy encompasses several mutually reinforcing lines of effort:

• Deepening institutional rivalries: Intelligence operations designed to heighten mutual suspicion between the IRGC’s competing generals, between the Revolutionary Guard and the conventional Artesh, and between the technocratic civilian government and the Mahdist clergy. A leadership consumed by internal paranoia has diminished capacity for external adventurism.

• Empowering the democratic opposition: Providing material, political, and diplomatic support to the exile leadership around Reza Pahlavi and the broader democratic movement. Elevating their international standing, facilitating their organizational capacity, and ensuring that when the regime fractures, a credible and prepared alternative exists to fill the vacuum.

• Activating the ethnic periphery: Supporting the political aspirations of Kurdish, Arab, Azeri, and Baloch communities — not necessarily toward separatism, but toward a federalist vision of Iran that fundamentally undermines the centralized theocratic model. A Tehran consumed by internal ethnic unrest cannot simultaneously pursue regional hegemony and nuclear ambition.

• Economic strangulation of the IRGC: Targeting the Revolutionary Guard’s financial networks, construction empire, smuggling operations, and access to international markets with precision sanctions designed not to punish the Iranian people but to hollow out the IRGC’s resource base and deepen its conflict with the civilian economy.

• Sustained information operations: Supporting internal dissent, amplifying the voices of civil society, and making the regime feel perpetually besieged from within — not through military pressure, but through the steady erosion of its legitimacy among the very populations it claims to represent.

The history of overextended, internally fractured authoritarian regimes suggests a recognizable pattern. When internal rivalries are sufficiently inflamed, when economic pressure becomes unsustainable, when the security apparatus turns its violence inward, and when a credible alternative exists — regimes collapse with surprising speed. This is not regime change imposed from outside by military force. It is strategic acceleration of an internal process already underway — one the Iranian people themselves have been fighting and dying for across decades of uprising.

V. Conclusion: From Ashes, A New Iran

The question “Who are you, Iran?” does not have a single answer. That is precisely the point. Iran is the Mahdist cleric awaiting divine cataclysm. It is the IRGC general protecting his budget and his position. It is the technocrat who understands the world but cannot control his own system. It is the professional soldier resenting the revolutionary force that has displaced him. It is the young woman in Tehran who risked her life for the right to exist freely. It is the Kurdish fighter in the mountains and the Arab laborer in Khuzestan whose resources enrich a government that does not see him.

All of these Irans are real. None of them speaks for the others. And none of the people currently sitting across the negotiating table in Switzerland has the authority to bind them all.

The United States and its Western partners must enter any engagement with Iran with clear eyes about this reality. A signed agreement is not a delivered agreement. A moderate interlocutor is not a sovereign decision-maker. And a theology that views the destruction of Israel as a divine precondition for redemption cannot be bargained out of existence with sanctions relief and diplomatic normalization.

The durable resolution to the Iranian challenge lies not in managing the Islamic Republic but in creating the conditions for its internal transformation — empowering the Iranian people who have already demonstrated, at enormous cost, that they want a different future. From the ashes of the current order, a new Iran is possible: secular, democratic, prosperous, and at peace with its neighbors and the world. That Iran already exists. It lives in the streets of Tehran, in the mountains of Kurdistan, in the exile communities of Los Angeles and London and Berlin. The task of Western strategy is not to negotiate with the Iran that exists today, but to accelerate the arrival of the Iran that is struggling to be born.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Professor Michael Shlomi is a scholar and policy analyst specializing in geopolitical and diplomatic affairs with a focus on the Middle East. His work engages academic and policy audiences through external publications and think tank platforms.

https://jcfa.org/why-the-united-states-is-losing-to-iran-at-the-negotiating-table/