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On August 28, 2026, less than six months into his tenure as supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei issued what amounted to an order to stop a dangerous argument inside his own regime.
In a written message published by Tasnim, Khamenei condemned what he called false binaries, specifically naming “war or negotiation” and “compromise or warmongering”. He also warned officials against publicizing even genuine weaknesses when doing so could encourage Iran’s enemies. His conclusion was categorical: anything damaging social cohesion was forbidden.
The order did not settle the argument. It exposed how difficult it has become for the new supreme leader to settle one.
Within days, both sides were again doing precisely what Khamenei had sought to prohibit.
On August 28, the regime’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, in an interview carried by state media, rejected the contention that sanctions do not seriously damage Iran. After detailing the contraction of trade and the benefits Tehran expected from sanctions relief, Pezeshkian ridiculed those claiming sanctions have no effect: “Reason is a good thing.” He added that continued sanctions would mean continued price increases and defended negotiations as part of Iran’s foreign-policy priorities.
Pezeshkian did not name Mojtaba Khamenei, and it would be inaccurate to claim that the remark was explicitly directed at him. But the logic is difficult to contain at the level of parliamentary rivals. If, as Khamenei’s hardline defenders insist, the leader’s “principled” position is resistance to concessions made for sanctions relief, then Pezeshkian’s argument points upward: those refusing to adjust policy to the economic consequences of sanctions are, by Pezeshkian’s own formulation, refusing reason.
"A leader who merely ratifies is a leader who can be replaced by another ratifier. #Peace would retire the emergency that crowned him; war keeps grinding the economy that could bury him," Farid Mahoutchi writes.https://t.co/30kNzyCW3O
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) August 8, 2026
On August 29, Mahmoud Nabavian of the hardline Paydari current answered from the other direction. Speaking in Borujerd, Nabavian declared that the conflict with Washington was not fundamentally over nuclear enrichment or missiles. The “main dispute,” he said, was over “pure Muhammadan Islam and the Velayate Faqih.” He simultaneously advocated barring ships belonging to sanctioning countries from the Strait of Hormuz.
So much for retiring the “war or negotiation” divide.
The confrontation sharpened further on August 29, when Youssef Pezeshkian, the president’s son and adviser, defended Executive Vice President Mohammad-Jafar Ghaempanah and wrote that Iran’s survival did not depend on enrichment: “If we do not enrich, we will not die.” He added that enrichment was neither an article of religion nor Iran’s honor. On August 30, Kayhan attacked that argument as a “surrenderist” line, warning that a faction prepared to question enrichment under American pressure would eventually question Iran’s missile power as well.
This exchange is more revealing than the nuclear dispute itself. Mojtaba Khamenei is being undermined from both directions.
The Pezeshkian camp is testing whether the supreme leader’s preferences must yield to material reality. The Paydari-Kayhan camp is testing whether even the supreme leader’s decisions can be rejected when those decisions violate what they regard as the authentic doctrine of the supreme leadership.
The record predates the latest clash.
NCRI Editorial: Iran and #Mojtaba_Khamenei: Succession Without Legitimacyhttps://t.co/NPnYW3WEPT
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) March 9, 2026
On June 18, 2026, Khamenei himself disclosed his disagreement with the U.S.-Iran memorandum. “In principle, I held another view,” he wrote. Yet after Pezeshkian, acting as chairman of the Supreme National Security Council, accepted responsibility for the decision, Khamenei authorized the memorandum.
That should have ended the dispute in a system built around velayat-e faqih. Instead, on June 19, Kayhan editor Hossein Shariatmadari argued that five of Khamenei’s red lines had been violated. Hamid Rasaei distinguished between Khamenei “allowing” the memorandum and actually “accepting” it, insisting that the agreement did not represent the leader’s real position. The hardline revolt continued after Khamenei’s authorization.
The implication was extraordinary: Mojtaba Khamenei’s followers were claiming greater authority to define Mojtaba Khamenei’s position than his own public decision possessed.
The competing challenge was even more explicit.
On June 30, Ghaempanah said that if everything the supreme leader said were simply implemented, parliament and the Supreme National Security Council would have no meaning. Khamenei gives an opinion, Ghaempanah argued; that opinion is subjected to expert review and may then be accepted or rejected.
Kayhan erupted. It replied that the government, parliament and judiciary were obliged to obey and implement the supreme leader’s view, not “expertise” it. MP Kamran Ghazanfari accused Pezeshkian and his allies of attempting a “political coup” that would magnify the SNSC while marginalizing the leader. The ensuing hardline attacks explicitly framed the dispute as one over the authority of the leader.
Power Dynamics in Iran and #MojtabaKhamenei’s Inner Circlehttps://t.co/eTfcnFH14Z
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) June 3, 2026
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi supplied another remarkable fact on July 19. In an interview subsequently published on Araghchi’s own official channel, he described a six-person committee chosen to make negotiating decisions “in the moment.” Asked about his relationship with Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s foreign minister said he had never met him, either since his elevation or previously. Araghchi added that during critical periods communicating with the leadership had been difficult.
Iran has not become a committee-governed state. It remains a clerical dictatorship. The significance is almost the reverse: a dictatorship whose institutions, officials, Guards factions and ideological organs were historically forced into alignment by one supreme authority is no longer reliably aligning after that authority speaks.
The nuclear confrontation reveals why.
On August 27, Ghaempanah stated the Pezeshkian camp’s survival doctrine with unusual clarity. Had he known continued enrichment would lead to Ali Khamenei’s death and attacks on Iran’s refineries, electricity system and industries, Ghaempanah said he would have abandoned enrichment. “We are not all supposed to become martyrs; Iran is supposed to survive.”
For this faction, policy serves regime survival. If enrichment, confrontation or resistance becomes more dangerous to the clerical dictatorship than compromise, policy must change.
For the opposing faction, that reasoning reverses cause and effect: retreat is itself what endangers the regime.
This is not a new obsession invented around centrifuges. On August 26, 1982, Ruhollah Khomeini warned that if Iran retreated one step, its enemies would advance one step. On June 4, 2019, Ali Khamenei repeated almost the same doctrine: when an enemy applies pressure, taking one step backward merely brings him forward; resistance forces him to retreat. Tasnim later reproduced Ali Khamenei’s formulation as a standing principle of nuclear strategy.
On the convergence of crises facing the regime, Farid Mahoutchi writes: "Mojtaba Khamenei’s attempt to suppress factional warfare inside Iran’s clerical dictatorship is already producing the opposite effect."
Read more:https://t.co/rKgklqmWlH— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) August 31, 2026
Seen through that doctrine, Kayhan’s August 30 warning is perfectly rational on its own terms. Give up enrichment today and the next demand will concern missiles; concede there and pressure moves elsewhere. The issue is not simply uranium. It is whether external pressure can force the ruler of the regime to say yes after he has said no.
Nabavian virtually said so himself on August 29: the fundamental struggle is not over nuclear technology but velayat-e faqih.
That is what makes the current fracture more consequential than another factional quarrel.
One camp believes the clerical dictatorship can survive only if it bends before accumulated economic, military and social costs become unbearable. The other believes bending proves that pressure works and ultimately puts the supreme leader—and therefore the loyal base and its enforcers—at risk.
And Mojtaba Khamenei cannot fully impose either answer.
Iran’s sanctions, collapsing purchasing power, disrupted trade, energy shortages and accumulated war damage unquestionably matter. But authoritarian regimes have survived astonishing levels of deprivation when their ruling apparatus remained cohesive and the command structure remained clear.
That is why Iran’s underlying condition now matters as much as the pressures placed upon it.
"On the morning of February 28, as events moved toward their decisive rupture, #Khamenei and his inner circle gathered not in retreat, but in confidence—reviewing what they regarded as a successful suppression of the January uprising and deliberating how best to confront the…
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) March 28, 2026
For nearly five decades, the regime could contain fierce internal disputes because, ultimately, its factions were fastened to a single pillar. The supreme leader did not eliminate factional conflict; he placed a ceiling over it.
The revealing question today is therefore not merely what Mojtaba Khamenei says.
It is what happens after he says it.
When the president publicly contradicts the political logic of his guidance, when a senior deputy says the leader’s views can be subjected to expert judgment, when the foreign minister describes decisions being made while contact with the leadership is difficult, and when supposed loyalists continue fighting an agreement after the leader himself authorizes it, socioeconomic pressure is no longer acting upon the same regime that survived earlier crises.
The pressures are intensifying.
But so, increasingly, is the fracture in the pillar that was supposed to absorb them.