Washington’s memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf represents a flawed strategy: at the moment when the Islamic Republic was militarily weakened and politically exposed, Washington appears to be granting the regime what it values most: time. This arrangement allows the IRGC power structure to move from crisis survival to post-strike consolidation.
The question is whether Washington understands the relationship between coercive pressure and a defined political end-state. The regime was weakened, struck, and forced into a defensive posture nearing collapse, yet Washington has hesitated to define what must replace it.
This is the recurring failure in Washington’s Iran policy. Washington treats factional variation inside the regime as a strategic opportunity, when in reality it is a regime preservation mechanism. The Islamic Republic has long used its manufactured factions to manage external pressure.
Time is the regime’s greatest asset
Ghalibaf is not a moderate, nor is he a figure with a national base inside Iran. The deal with Ghalibaf does not represent a transformation away from the regime. Ghalibaf’s function is precisely to offer Washington a “rational” interlocutor through whom the system can rebrand itself and demonstrate a facade of change.
He is the same IRGC official involved in torturing and murdering university students in July 1999, when the IRGC, Basij, and the police threw students off the rooftops in Tehran University dormitory. At the time, Ghalibaf was the commander of the IRGC’s air force. He later took pride in his involvement in suppressing the students in a 2013 speech.
The regime has correctly identified the center of gravity of Washington’s weakness: the absence of a declared political end-state during the war. Washington has applied pressure, but pressure without an end-state creates exploitable ambiguity.
Ghalibaf’s maneuver must be read through that framework. Dealing with a securitized regime actor means the preservation of the same rogue regime that produced the crisis in the first place. The regime’s objective is survival until US President Donald Trump’s term ends.
Evolutionary adaptation: A harder regime
Credibility is not an abstract moral asset. It is a strategic capability. Allies calculate reliability through demonstrated consistency between declared objectives and operational behavior. Adversaries calculate risk through observed willingness to sustain pressure beyond the first phase of confrontation.
If Washington signals support for regime change, applies force, and then negotiates a pathway that results in regime survival, every hostile state will learn a clear lesson: American escalation can be absorbed if one can survive long enough to exploit Washington’s search for an exit ramp.
The regime, in particular, would not just survive. Its near-death experience would turn into an evolutionary adaptation. A regime that endures sustained American and Israeli strikes but secures a political reprieve would study the experience, harden its institutions, decentralize political and military command nodes, refine internal repression, and immunize itself against future conflict.
The next war would not face the same vulnerable adversary. It would face a regime that has absorbed the lessons of Washington’s hesitation.
It is also a significant risk in alienating Israel, the United States’s combat ally in this confrontation. Israel correctly understands the regime not as a negotiable irritant, but as a systemic and existential threat that cannot be incentivized to normal behavior.
When Washington drifts toward accommodation with a securitized regime insider while Israel remains committed to dismantling the threat in its entirety, alliance cohesion and operational synergy suffer.
Trump’s original strategy was powerful
President Trump’s earlier posture toward Iran was strategically significant because it departed from Washington’s recurring pattern. He told the Iranian nation that help was on the way. He encouraged Iranians to take over their institutions and signaled Washington’s support for their uprising.
Trump’s original strategy followed that declaratory policy: weapons were sent – even though they were stolen by Kurdish militia – and the regime was struck militarily at its highest levels. This signaled Washington’s political resolve: the regime must go.
Once the greatest military power publicly aligns itself with a nation in revolt and applies force against the regime suppressing that nation, credibility becomes inseparable from resolve. Reversing course at the regime’s weakest point – under the influence of advisors favoring de-escalation – is a blow to the image of the United States as the hegemon.
The only explanation that renders this MoU logical is if the Trump administration is pushing for managed surrender under the guise of negotiations. That would mean a strategy ending in regime collapse and transition, not preservation by a regime insider.
Otherwise, if the substance of the arrangement is sanctions relief and the release of billions of dollars, its logic is not transformation but rescue; even the regime officials whom American and Israeli militaries took out would have accepted those terms enthusiastically.
A legacy defining decision
The silence of key administration figures such as Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio is notable because it reflects the political sensitivity of the MoU. Their absence from the public defense of the MoU suggests, at minimum, an unwillingness to publicly own an arrangement that could preserve the regime after American firepower brought it to the edge of defeat.
US Vice President JD Vance, by contrast, appears to be driving this disastrous Iran policy. His approach is presented as de-escalation, but de-escalation is not the same as strategic discipline. Nor is this an America First policy. It is transactional isolationism – and only a caricature of it.
Footage from Switzerland tells the tale, whereas Vance only received the isolation. An America-first policy should not rescue an anti-American regime at the moment of maximum vulnerability. And it should not pressure allies while granting survival space to adversaries. Trump should not allow his legacy to be overshadowed by that misjudgment.
Pahlavi: Legitimacy and governance
Iran is not Venezuela – a Delcy Rodríguez model does not work. Legitimacy cannot be bought with foreign support or diplomatic arrangements.
The correct policy is to support regime change under the leadership of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who has a demonstrated capacity to mobilize Iranians inside Iran and across the diaspora. Pahlavi provides what others cannot: legitimacy beyond the regime, a counterpart to Washington, and a complete framework for regime change that results in a stable transition and governance.
A post-Islamic Republic Iran would become a durable American ally – and even enable the building of a permanent American military base in Iran.
The regime is at its weakest, politically and militarily. The Iranian nation is ready to overthrow the regime under Pahlavi’s leadership. The strategic opportunity exists.
Trump must choose between allowing the regime to rebrand or victory through regime change. Anything but the latter is retreat.
The author holds a PhD in international relations from Queen’s University.