Revolutionary Guard demands transit fees, explicit U.S. sanctions relief
Arab mediators working on a deal with Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz said they fear the country’s diplomats, who are under pressure from hard-liners in Tehran, lack the clout to guarantee compliance even if an agreement is reached.
The concerns, based on a pattern of faltering diplomatic efforts and conversations with Iran’s negotiators, come as top Iranian representatives in the talks are increasingly under fire at home from hard-line officials and commentators who argue they are cutting deals that sell the country short.
Mediators said the main negotiators, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, quickly embraced a plan presented this weekend to divide traffic through the Strait of Hormuz into an inbound lane near Iran and an outbound lane near Oman. They viewed the plan as an acknowledgment of Iran’s influence over the waterway.
Talks became complicated when the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps demanded more explicit references to Iran’s role and clearer benefits, the mediators said. Even after mediators circulated a draft agreement midweek, the Revolutionary Guard, which exerts control over the waterway, continued to press for the right to charge fees for transits and to seek more explicit assurances that the United States will lift its blockade and sanctions on oil sales.
Iran’s negotiators are speaking more frankly about the limits of their ability to shape the outcome of the talks and have said they are under heavy pressure to deliver immediate financial benefits from their deals, the mediators said. The Revolutionary Guard is winning praise internally for attacks that have kept the United States off balance and could again ramp up its strikes on ships if a deal isn’t lucrative enough, mediators said they were told by their Iranian counterparts.
The pressure has led mediators to expand the scope of the talks from a narrow temporary deal to facilitate crossings through the Strait of Hormuz to financial relief measures included in the now-suspended June memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran, including sanctions waivers allowing Tehran to sell oil and the release of frozen funds.
The dynamic helps explain the difficulty of getting deals to stick more than five months into the war. While Iran balances its desire to avenge its losses and deter future U.S. attacks with the need to stem a deepening economic crisis through negotiated relief, hard-line factions in the government appear to be holding sway.
“The Revolutionary Guard are setting the agenda and the pace,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Their threat of escalation is designed to extract concessions and humiliate Trump. But their hubris also risks reigniting conflict.”
Iran’s top negotiators and perceived moderates are openly under attack in the country’s media. On Thursday, Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the hard-line Kayhan newspaper, wrote that a deal to restore traffic through the Strait of Hormuz would be akin to “opening an escape route for the enemy.” Hossein-Ali Haji Deligani, a senior Iranian lawmaker, said he was gathering documentation to impeach Araghchi, arguing he should have put any Hormuz pact to a parliamentary vote and accusing him of acting out of fear and surrender. Mohammad Bagher Kharrazi, who is related to Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei by marriage, called for a march on Tehran in a social-media video Wednesday to finish off the government of moderate President Masoud Pezeshkian; Khamenei’s office later repudiated the comments as divisive.
Analysts and Arab diplomats say the open divisions have been exacerbated by Khamenei’s complete public absence and his hard-line bent. His father, Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the opening shots of the war, saw himself as an arbiter between factions. The younger Khamenei, isolated by tight security measures, injuries from the initial U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, and his own less outgoing personality, hasn’t played that role effectively even though he has the final word on diplomatic and security matters. He hasn’t appeared in public since he succeeded his father in March, and Araghchi said in a July interview with Iranian conservative outlet Majara Media that he had never met the supreme leader. “He is much more radical than his father, but he has no friends,” Kharrazi said on social media Wednesday.
Pezeshkian, meanwhile, threatened to quit to secure a meeting with Khamenei to tell him Iran’s economic situation was so dire that a diplomatic understanding was urgent, Arab diplomats and an adviser to the Revolutionary Guard said. Khamenei agreed to the meeting. Pezeshkian told Iran’s state broadcaster IRIB on Wednesday that communicating with the supreme leader is “very difficult.” In June, the supreme leader said on social media that he initially leaned against talks with the United States but agreed to move ahead after Pezeshkian took responsibility for protecting the country’s interests, a rare direct comment on negotiations with the United States.
Iran’s hard-liners appear to have a freer hand. Shortly after signing a deal in June to open the Strait of Hormuz and begin talks to wind down the war, Iranian forces began firing at ships using a U.S.-backed route through the strait along the coast of Oman. The attacks led to days of back-and-forth strikes with the United States and a widening of the war, including attacks on Saudi Arabian tankers by the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen and a drone attack on an Egyptian port that set fire to two ships. Repeated Iranian attacks also marred an earlier truce in April, though none of the incidents provoked a return to all-out war.
Many of Iran’s attacks have been aimed at cementing its sway over the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway that is critical for global energy flows. Tehran’s hard-liners want to deny the United States and Israel any hint of victory and land a tough enough blow to deter future military action, and squeezing the strait while dragging out an end to the war advances both goals. “Why should the Islamic Republic give up one of its main and most effective means of defending the country?” Shariatmadari wrote Thursday. The strategy, however, risks alienating Iran’s Arab neighbors and is delaying delivery of the economic relief badly needed by its economy.
Iranian advocates of talks have said repeatedly on state media that they are needed to keep an economic crisis from undoing the country’s wartime achievements. Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister and a top negotiator, told IRIB on Wednesday that the economy desperately needs the sanctions relief that could come with a diplomatic deal. “When I read some of the opposition to negotiations, I honestly wonder what world these people are living in,” he said.