Qatar, Pakistan push Iran-US diplomacy as war escalates

The debate has intensified since Iran targeted a vessel near the Strait of Hormuz last week, prompting a renewed US military campaign that has included days of strikes on ports, bridges, airports and military facilities across Iran’s southern provinces.

Even as US Vice President JD Vance and Iranian Parliament Speaker and chief negotiator Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf have continued to defend diplomacy backed by military preparedness, the fighting has persisted and the prospect of a wider conflict has grown.

The criticism has been directed in part at ultrahardline figures such as Qom Seminary Chancellor Alireza Arafi, who has called for further war against the United States and an end to negotiations.

Two recent commentaries—one by former lawmaker and former National Security Committee chairman Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, the other by political analyst Abdolrahman Fathollahi—reflect the growing push to hold hardliners accountable for the costs of confrontation.

While one focuses on political responsibility for failed diplomacy, the other highlights the burden borne by communities on Iran’s southern frontier.

‘Defeating diplomacy’

Writing in the moderate daily Toseh Irani, Falahatpisheh accused hardline factions of using what he called a distorted interpretation of religion to obstruct diplomatic opportunities.

“I believe part of these two major wars against Iran was the result of this very definition of religious beliefs by extremists, who are now turning to distorting religion to defeat diplomacy,” he wrote.

He argued that the same factions had repeatedly promised better outcomes while blocking agreements that could have reduced tensions.

“They are the exact same people who blocked two good agreements during the major periods of 2021 and 2022, claiming they would forge a better deal,” he wrote. “But in practice, not only was no agreement achieved, but two major wars were imposed on Iran.”

Falahatpisheh called for the prosecution of those he said had turned diplomatic opportunities into military conflict.

‘Patriotism from a safe distance’

A second commentary, published Thursday in Shargh, shifted the focus from political responsibility to the human cost of confrontation.

Under the title The Country’s Future and the Triangle of Extremism, Costs, and Responsibility, Fathollahi warned about the toll of intensifying US airstrikes on Iran’s southern coastal provinces.

He pointed to public campaigns calling for outspoken opponents of negotiations to be sent to the front lines, accusing them of practising what he described as “patriotism from a safe distance.”

“One certainly cannot beat the drums of war from the safe margins of the capital behind podiums, while dumping the costs of those decisions onto the people living in the front lines,” Fathollahi wrote, highlighting the plight of communities bearing the brunt of the fighting over the Strait of Hormuz.

The comments come after a week of US strikes on infrastructure across Iran’s Persian Gulf provinces, where dozens have been killed or injured and many more affected by transport disruption, electricity blackouts and water shortages during the height of summer.

For Fathollahi, the question is no longer simply one of military strategy but whether Iran’s leaders are willing to change course before the costs grow even higher.

“Rethinking certain political approaches and utilizing all expert and diplomatic capacities is not a choice,” he concluded, “but a necessity to safeguard national interests and reduce the costs imposed on society.”

Both men appeared to be making the same argument to critics within their own political camps: that diplomacy is most effective when backed by credible military force, not pursued instead of it.

The parallel messaging prompted analysts to suggest that, despite rising tensions, both sides may still view diplomacy as preferable to war.

International relations analyst Amir-Ali Abolfath wrote on X that Ghalibaf's statement, Vance's remarks and Iran's release of an Iranian-American prisoner together offered "a glimmer of hope" that both sides could return to managing tensions within the framework of an agreement "whose fate hangs by a thread."

Reform-leaning news website Rouydad24 likewise described the prisoner's release as evidence of "the opening of an important diplomatic channel amid an exchange of fire."

US President Donald Trump also welcomed the move, writing on Truth Social that "the United States appreciates this gesture of goodwill by Iran."

‘Talking is not compromise’

Ghalibaf issued a public statement on Wednesday defending what he described as the course pursued under Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei's guidance, arguing that negotiations with the United States remain compatible with military preparedness and resistance.

Rather than presenting diplomacy and military readiness as opposing choices, he argued they were complementary tools for safeguarding Iran's national interests.

"War and negotiation are two methods of protecting the national interest," he said, insisting that negotiations are "part of safeguarding national interests, not synonymous with compromise."

He warned that treating either military confrontation or diplomacy as the sole solution would amount to "a strategic mistake," adding that officials have a duty to prepare "for war, diplomacy, or both," depending on the course set by the Supreme Leader.

"We must stand firm on the achievements secured through the MoU until the nation's rights are fully realized," he wrote.

Hours later, Vance struck a remarkably similar tone in an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, rejecting the idea of overthrowing Iran's government through US military force.

He argued that diplomacy, backed by military pressure, remained the preferred way to manage the crisis, and criticized "warmongers" pushing for conflict.

A well-funded covert campaign, Vance claimed, was seeking to derail negotiations and any agreement with Tehran.

Hardliners push back

The renewed defense of diplomacy triggered an immediate backlash from Iran's hardline camp, where many have argued since the recent military confrontation that the Tehran-Washington understanding should be formally declared dead.

Kamran Ghazanfari, a member of parliament, accused President Masoud Pezeshkian and Ghalibaf of lacking the courage to acknowledge that the agreement had collapsed.

"Whether they call it war or not, the third war has effectively begun," he said, arguing that the negotiating team should publicly admit that talks had reached a dead end.

Hardline journalist Davood Modarresian likewise criticized Ghalibaf's statement, saying it contained "no sign of change or apology" and faulting him for continuing to advocate negotiations despite what he described as Washington's abandonment of the agreement.

Hardline political activist Masoud Barati challenged Ghalibaf's description of negotiations as a form of struggle.

"Calling negotiations a form of struggle gives primacy to negotiations," Barati wrote. "If negotiations have failed to secure Iran's achievements, why insist on continuing this approach?"

Conservative rivalry deepens

The latest dispute reflects a long-running rivalry between Ghalibaf and former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, both prominent figures within Iran's conservative establishment.

In recent months, lawmakers aligned with Jalili and members of the ultraconservative Paydari Front have intensified criticism of Ghalibaf, arguing that negotiations with Washington should be abandoned altogether.

Their influence, however, appears to have weakened after losing two key leadership positions on parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Committee.

Adding to signs of growing pressure on the hardline faction, lawmaker Majid Nasrpour told Khabar Online in comments published Thursday that "some hardline members of parliament have been summoned by the relevant authorities and seriously warned over their remarks."

The document, titled "What Iran Wants" and obtained by IranWire, was written by Ali Rabiei, a former intelligence ministry official and government spokesman who now advises President Masoud Pezeshkian on social affairs. It is built on a survey conducted in April and May by the ARA research center and was circulated among senior officials in June.

Its timing matters. The survey was taken in the aftermath of the January protests, in which security forces killed tens of thousands of demonstrators within days, and during a war with the United States that has already claimed the life of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Through all of it, state television has filled its evenings with images of packed squares and chants of revenge.

The report is the government's private mirror, and it shows something else entirely. Given four options for the country's future, only nine percent of respondents chose keeping things as they are; the rest split between reform, deep reform, and changing the system outright.

The document discloses no methodology, and official polling in Iran is conducted among respondents who have every reason to fear giving an honest answer to a state questionnaire.

Sociologist Saeed Paivandi, who reviewed the full report for IranWire, called its findings broadly plausible despite those gaps. In practice, that means each figure below is best read as a floor, not a ceiling. Whatever the government's own instrument records, the reality is unlikely to be milder.

The angriest country ever measured

The report's starkest finding is a number without precedent. Gallup's global emotions index has never recorded a national anger rate above 47 percent, a figure that belonged to Chad. Rabiei's survey puts Iran at 63.6 percent, up twelve points since December, the month before the massacre.

The document itself acknowledges the record, placing Iran above every country Gallup has measured for both anger and grief.

Iran had appeared in those global rankings before, alongside war-scarred states like Iraq and Afghanistan. It has now left them behind.

No war, no surrender

On the confrontation with Washington, the surveyed public fits neither of the stories told about it: the nation baying for battle that state television broadcasts, or the one ready to capitulate that some in Washington count on.

Asked the best course in the current crisis, 44.3 percent chose preserving the ceasefire and continuing negotiations, roughly double the share that favored ending the talks and preparing for war.

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  As Tehran debates, Iran's south lives the war

Barely one in ten would accept all American conditions, and about two-thirds oppose a complete shutdown of uranium enrichment.

Yet this is not trust in the men at the table. Fewer than a third of respondents expressed high confidence in Iran's new negotiating team, and nearly half the country reports serious fear of another round of war.

What emerges is a population that rejects both another war and a capitulation, and trusts neither the diplomats nor the generals conducting either.

A society in freefall, and the myth of the rallying nation

The emotional data reads like a casualty report. Half the country reports hopelessness, up eight points since December.

Nearly 48 percent report sadness and depression, 45 percent chronic fear and anxiety. Despair runs highest among the young and the educated, the very people a state would need to rebuild anything.

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  Hardline rallies turn Iran’s streets into pressure front against US talks

The same pages quietly dismantle the leadership's central wartime claim: that the nation has closed ranks behind it.

By the government's own count, 47 percent of Iranians never attended a single one of the nightly wartime rallies that state television presents as proof of unity. In Tehran, 61 percent stayed away.

Rabiei concedes that a much-promoted volunteer registration drive for national defense underperformed, and attributes the reluctance to people's fear of being judged.

It is an official admission that even gestures of patriotism have become politically fraught. The report's own data explains why: Iranians overwhelmingly separate defending their country, which a majority say they would do if attacked again, from defending the Islamic Republic.

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  Iran faces region’s harshest mix of wartime contraction and inflation

Proud, secular, and packing

The most quietly radical section concerns who Iranians say they are. National pride is rising. More than 85 percent express pride in being Iranian, and the share who identify first as "Iranian" rather than "Iranian Muslim" has grown since the war, most sharply among the young.

Religious observance, the Islamic Republic's ideological foundation, is collapsing under the same roof.

In 1975, four years before the revolution, 79 percent of Iranians said they fasted through Ramadan. By 2023 it was 42 percent. This year it is roughly 30.

And the pride does not translate into staying. A third of Iranians say they would emigrate if they could, including nearly half of everyone under thirty and half of the university-educated. People are not leaving Iran, the report effectively concludes; they are leaving its future.

A manual for management

What makes the document remarkable is less its data than its purpose. Rabiei's recommendations to the leadership contain no political change at all.

Officials should do a better job convincing people that sanctions, not mismanagement, caused their misery; state television should show a more inclusive face; the ration cards should continue. This, even as the report's own respondents name official incompetence, ahead of sanctions, as the main cause of their problems.

One recommendation stands out: state bodies should avoid policies that put them in confrontation with society.

That instruction has a visible form on Iran's streets, where enforcement of the small rules of daily life has gone relatively quiet. Many Iranians read the leniency less as tolerance than as triage, a state conserving its strength for a collision it can see coming.

Independent surveys suggest the private picture is, if anything, generous. The Netherlands-based GAMAAN institute, polling Iranians beyond the reach of official questionnaires, has found large majorities opposed to the Islamic Republic's continuation altogether.

Rabiei reaches for an older vocabulary to describe what his numbers show: a society trapped in the present, unable to desire its past or picture its future. The term he borrows, "presentism," was coined by an Iranian scholar to describe the national mood in 1975.

Four years later, that society produced a revolution.

Iran's parliament had not held regular public sessions since the outbreak of the recent war, with the suspension reportedly ordered by the Supreme National Security Council.

The legislature reconvened on Monday after briefly meeting in late May to elect its presiding board, when Ghalibaf secured a seventh consecutive term as speaker.

During the committee's internal leadership election on Monday, Mahmoud Nabavian lost his position as first deputy chairman, while Ebrahim Rezaei was removed as spokesperson.

Both are among parliament's most outspoken opponents of engagement with Washington and frequent critics of Ghalibaf.

The outcome shifted the committee's balance toward lawmakers seen as more supportive of diplomacy, triggering an angry reaction from the hardline camp.

The IRGC-affiliated Fars News Agency questioned the legitimacy of the vote on Tuesday, describing the election as "shrouded in ambiguity." It quoted an unnamed committee member as saying a fresh ballot would be held to determine whether Alaeddin Boroujerdi or Ebrahim Azizi would chair the committee.

The reform-leaning Rouydad24 news website described the result as "a sign of a shift in the balance of power in one of parliament's most important committees," saying it was likely to influence parliament's approach to foreign policy and national security in the coming months.

It added that parliament's reopening had restored an important platform for critics of President Masoud Pezeshkian's government and opponents of negotiations with Washington, allowing them once again to use speeches, questioning sessions, impeachment motions and legislative initiatives to challenge government policy.

‘A coup’

Hardline activists have portrayed the parliamentary suspension and committee reshuffle as part of Ghalibaf's effort to sideline the ultraconservative Paydari Front.

Despite its vocal presence, the Paydari Front remains a minority even within the conservative-dominated parliament. In May's election for parliament's presiding board, the faction's candidate received just 29 votes against Ghalibaf's 235.

International relations researcher Abolfazl Bazargan criticized the reshuffle, writing that the committee changes were "not a strategic disaster but a soft coup against the country's security."

The vote also prompted a wave of criticism on social media. One user on X wrote: "Parliament reopened twice—once for him to become speaker again, and once to remove his opponents. You're the dictator."

More say on Hormuz

The committee reshuffle came as lawmakers sought to assert parliament's role in negotiations with Washington and policy toward the Strait of Hormuz.

On Tuesday, parliament received a bill titled the Strategic Action for Ensuring Security and Sustainable Development of the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf. Backed by 180 of the 290 lawmakers, it would tighten parliamentary oversight of the government's diplomatic decisions.

Lawmakers also called for the immediate establishment of a special committee to review negotiations with the United States and oversee implementation of conditions set by Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.

Committee chairman Ebrahim Azizi, who retained his post and is regarded as close to Ghalibaf and the traditional conservative camp, defended the initiative on X.

"The Islamic Consultative Assembly stands firm on the country's red lines, especially the management of the Strait of Hormuz," he wrote. "This is only the first step. The next measures will keep our enemies awake at night."

Foreign policy analyst Fereydoun Majles told the Fararu news website that the proposal should be viewed primarily as a political signal.

"The parliamentary initiative should be analysed mainly as a political message," he said. "It seeks to demonstrate that Iran still possesses important geopolitical tools and that regional equations cannot be designed without taking Tehran's interests into account."

"Hard power and soft power complement one another; they are not substitutes," he concluded.

Watching explosions on television and social media from hundreds of kilometers away, many see the confrontation with the United States as another familiar cycle of pressure that may yet give way to negotiations.

Fatemeh Rajabi, the news anchor who first reported the U.S. strikes on ports and military sites in southern Iran on the YouTube program Hasht-e Shab, says many in the capital find it difficult to grasp that a war is unfolding along the northern shores of the Persian Gulf — the region they casually refer to as “down under.”

Reporter Ali Pakzad, who visited the area during the strikes, says missiles hit targets from Abadan near the Iraqi border to Chabahar and Saravan near Pakistan.

He described damaged fishing vessels, battered ports and communities whose livelihoods have been shattered by attacks documented in the program’s footage.

That contrast lies at the heart of an investigative report by journalist Mira Ghorbanifar in Toseh Irani, titled The South in the Fire of War and Ashes of Ceasefire.

Ghorbanifar writes that explosions now puncture the dawn along Iran’s southern coast. Smoke rises from damaged docks, charred dhows lie abandoned, and fish markets once full of noise now speak only of “a war for which no one has yet chosen a definite name.”

While officials speak of “understandings,” “ceasefires” and “crisis management,” she argues, people in Iran’s south are grappling with damaged infrastructure and disrupted shipping, trying to adapt to what increasingly resembles a war of attrition.

She also asks whether the so-called Islamabad Understanding still exists. Is the fighting along Iran’s southern coast part of the same hundred-day conflict, or the start of a new phase of controlled escalation? And can both sides return to negotiations before crossing a point of no return?

The concerns extend well beyond independent journalists.

Government-aligned newspapers have increasingly questioned whether Iran can sustain a prolonged confrontation while struggling to protect civilians and critical infrastructure.

Moderate daily Sharq describes the country’s predicament as “structural and accumulated,” arguing that damaged infrastructure, naval disruption and collapsing logistics have left even minor shocks capable of triggering major crises.

Centrist Etemad warns that public trust has eroded while the state remains unprepared for cascading emergencies.

Economic newspapers have echoed those warnings.

Jahan Sanat argues that Iran’s deterrence is steadily weakening under sustained pressure, while Donya-ye Eghtesad says military decisions are increasingly driven by political necessity rather than strategic advantage, leaving the country more vulnerable in a prolonged conflict.

Washington-based analysts Mohammad Ghaedi and Farzin Nadimi have voiced similar concerns in interviews with Persian-language media abroad.

Ghaedi argues that Iran’s governing system “has repeatedly refused to learn from past mistakes,” pointing to what he sees as a widening disconnect between insulated decision-makers and citizens bearing the costs of conflict.

Nadimi says Iran is confronting the United States at “a moment of maximum structural fragility,” with deterrence eroding and escalation driven more by political necessity than strategic advantage.

“Iran is not in a position to manage a prolonged conflict,” he warns, adding that every new attack “burns away another part of Iran’s deterrent capability.”

Even hardline media have shown hints of concern. Resalat recently urged Iran to “rebuild its defensive capacity” after recent military losses — a rare acknowledgement from a conservative newspaper that the country’s deterrence has been weakened.

For now, the divide remains striking. In Tehran, politicians and commentators continue to debate negotiations, ceasefires and diplomatic understandings.

Along the southern coast, many residents have already stopped asking what to call the conflict. They are simply living through it.