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Over the past few days, the US-Israeli war on Iran has seen yet another escalation that threatens to derail peace talks. Strikes by the United States on Iran have killed at least 18 people and injured dozens. The fate of the memorandum of understanding (MoU), which the US and Iran signed as a framework for peace talks, is now increasingly under question.
As anger grows among the regime’s own base, official rhetoric is increasingly pointing to one individual responsible for the perceived failure: President Masoud Pezeshkian. Blaming the president is not only an attempt to offer the Iranian public a scapegoat but also to cover up internal divisions within the ruling elite.
The architecture of a blame game
Days after the MoU was signed, Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei offered his first public statement on the deal. In it, he wrote that he had “a different view” on the agreement. He had permitted it only because the president, “as head of the Supreme National Security Council”, had made a commitment to safeguard the rights of the Iranian nation and the “Resistance Front” and had “explicitly accepted responsibility for it”.
Importantly, the statement did not name the man who actually negotiated the deal. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament and head of the negotiating team, appears nowhere in the text even though Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Iranian media that “responsibility for the negotiations was entrusted by the ‘nezam’ [the system] to Mr Ghalibaf”.
Thus, the only official the supreme leader holds responsible for the most consequential agreement in the Islamic Republic’s recent history is the one who did not run it.
The omission of Ghalibaf’s name is not an oversight. It is by design.
In Tehran, potential benefits and potential risks of the deal have been deliberately separated. If the MoU delivers, the triumph will belong to Ghalibaf; if it fails, the failure will be blamed on Pezeshkian. This says a lot about where power lies in post-war Iran.
Fractures in Iran’s real ruling bloc
The MoU was engineered by Iran’s true ruling bloc: what I have elsewhere called the military-bonyad complex. This network fuses the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and state security forces with sprawling revolutionary-religious foundations (bonyads) such as the Mostazafan Foundation, Setad and the Imam Reza Shrine Foundation.
Built on asset transfers that masqueraded as privatisation in the 2000s and supercharged by shadow-finance networks that sanctions made indispensable, the complex now controls the lion’s share of Iran’s economy and operates almost entirely beyond civilian oversight. Its heads are appointed directly by the supreme leader while the Guardian Council shields it, tailoring legislation to protect its monopolies and blocking meaningful challengers.
But the complex is not monolithic. The recent war obscured a structural fracture that the MoU has now blown open. On one side stands a technocratic-economic wing personified by Ghalibaf, whose career as head of the IRGC’s Khatam al-Anbiya construction conglomerate, Tehran mayor, parliamentary speaker and now special representative for China is in effect the complex’s institutional biography compressed into a single man.
On the other side is the ideological-maximalist wing organised around the Paydari Front, which views any engagement with the US as a betrayal and Western investment as a threat to the regime’s survival.
One of the clearest dividing lines runs through the proposed $300bn private Reconstruction and Development Fund, a key economic pillar of the MoU.
For Ghalibaf’s camp, the fund is necessary because stability requires economic recovery and measured integration with global capital rather than perpetual isolation. For Paydari, foreign investment on these terms is not recovery but penetration. Its leading voices argue that the fund would give Washington and its regional partners a role in deciding where reconstruction money goes, which they read as sovereignty exchanged for capital.
Ghalibaf’s wing won the internal debate and moved to secure a deal. Now that the ceasefire and MoU are faltering, it is unlikely to be held to account for its failure. Ghalibaf has long been close to Khamenei’s circle and carries the IRGC lineage and institutional backing that Pezeshkian entirely lacks.
A presidential circuit breaker
Pezeshkian was seen as suitable for the role of president by the ruling bloc precisely because of what he lacks. Previous presidents brought their own weight to the office: Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was a pillar of the revolution with a deep political and security network; Mohammad Khatami had a mobilised social constituency; Hassan Rouhani had factional leverage and a national security legacy. Pezeshkian has none of the three.
He was elevated in 2024 because a manageable moderate face could rebuild public acquiescence after successive uprisings without threatening the complex’s authority. His weakness is not an accident of his presidency; it is the logic of his elevation and what makes him the ideal signatory of other men’s risks.
The Iranian presidency, in short, has been rewired as a circuit breaker: installed to absorb the surge if the deal fails, bypassed entirely if it succeeds.
Interestingly, IRGC-linked and Ghalibaf-adjacent media have lately extended limited protection to Pezeshkian against Paydari’s harshest attacks. This is maintenance, not sympathy. Implementation requires a functioning presidency and a functioning repository of blame. The protection will extend exactly as far as the deal’s survival requires and will vanish the moment the MoU collapses.
This set-up is far from improvised. Khamenei is running his father’s playbook. Ali Khamenei approved successive rounds of nuclear diplomacy while publicly insisting that the US could never be trusted, preserving his standing with the ideological base whatever the outcome. The son has adopted the same approach with one refinement: Where the father hedged in generalities, the son has attached the hedge to a named officeholder who “explicitly accepted responsibility”.
For now, scapegoating Pezeshkian is doing its job. By channelling anger over the faltering MoU towards the presidency, it spares the military-bonyad complex an open confrontation between its two wings. But this is deferral, not resolution. The fracture between a faction whose survival strategy rests on economic recovery and one whose standing depends on permanent confrontation looks increasingly structural, and no scapegoat can absorb it indefinitely. When this one is spent, the real contest over the Islamic Republic’s direction will be fought inside the ruling bloc itself.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
