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As the world welcomes a fragile ceasefire and the prospect of ending bloodshed in Gaza, Iran’s clerical regime—battered by overlapping domestic unrest, regional setbacks, and renewed international pressure—has lashed out in defiance. From Friday pulpits to diplomatic briefings, Tehran’s leaders are dismissing the peace initiative as a “devilish plot” even as they retreat from nuclear cooperation and shut the door on missile talks, revealing a leadership trapped between isolation abroad and instability at home.
Pulpit as policy: branding peace “devilish”
On October 3, 2025, Tehran’s Friday prayer leader Ahmad Khatami—a close associate of the regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—cast the U.S. president’s peace plan as satanic politics, urging rejection and tying it to threats of “snapback” sanctions. “This is a devilish plan by Trump… the Palestinian people did not accept it and will not accept it… 47 years the U.S. could do nothing—you will not be able to do anything by activating the snap-back,” he declared from the pulpit in Tehran. The sermon fused ritual slogans with policy lines designed to delegitimize talks before they begin.
The same day in Birjand, Qassem Shahriari, also Khamenei’s representative, warned Gazans that any ceasefire arrangement resembles “our JCPOA”—the 2015 nuclear agreement he said the West never honored. “Tell the people of Gaza: this is like our JCPOA—there is no difference. We fulfilled our commitments; they did not. They are not trustworthy,” he said on October 3. By reframing a ceasefire as a repetition of alleged betrayal, the rhetoric seeks to inoculate the regime’s base against diplomatic compromise and to cast peace as a trap.
Behind such rhetoric lies a deeper fear: genuine calm in the region would strip Tehran of the chaos that sustains its leverage. A Middle East moving toward de-escalation threatens the regime’s proxy networks, ideological narrative, and ability to externalize domestic crises.
MUST-READ: Crisis and War in the Middle East: The Roots and Solutions https://t.co/xIuzIGj6gz#AppeasementInvitesTerrorism
— Ali Safavi (@amsafavi) January 2, 2024
From denunciation to dismantling
Two days later, Tehran’s diplomatic track tightened rather than softened. On October 5, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the Cairo agreement could “no longer serve as the basis” for cooperation with the IAEA after the snapback move. “The snap-back has changed all conditions… the Cairo agreement can no longer serve as the basis for cooperation with the Agency,” he stated, adding that any future talks would be “harder.”
Days earlier, the Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf made a televised acknowledgment of past missile transfers to Lebanon, which he termed a “gangster-style” operation in the 1990s when he served in the IRGC Air Force. He justified it on regime-security grounds: “If we do not stand and fight in the Golan… we will have to fight at our borders… we had to defend there.” In the same breath, he mourned the loss of senior commanders and stressed the need to preserve “social cohesion” at home despite inflation and hardship.
That confession, framed as nostalgia, amounts to strategic doctrine—the export of war as insurance against unrest at home.
#Iran’s Regime Feels Besieged Amid #MiddleEast Crises and Internal Discontenthttps://t.co/QYriNI9qqU
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) December 1, 2024
Negotiation theater vs. red lines: Larijani’s account
Ali Larijani, now at the Supreme National Security Council, described a diplomatic carousel that never stops but rarely lands. In a September 25 TV interview, he said Moscow proposed a six-month delay to snapback—“we accepted”—and that European ideas required coordination with the IAEA and talks involving the U.S., which he also said “we accepted” in a 5+1 format. Then came the kicker: Western insistence on missile issues. “They said long-range missiles must not exist… sometimes under 300km, sometimes under 500km… they want to take your only significant offensive or defensive factor. Certainly, Iran will stand and will strike back at them,” Larijani warned.
The account lays bare the regime’s negotiating geometry: appear flexible on process while keeping missiles off limits and redefining “cooperation” in ways that preserve escalation options. If the other side insists on curbing those options, Tehran reverts to maximalist posture and blames the impasse on Western excess. In practical terms, this is structured obstruction—not a misunderstanding.
It also reveals the regime’s existential calculus: weapons and proxy leverage are not bargaining chips—they are survival tools. Disarmament, even rhetorical, would mean political disintegration.
Watch and judge why the regime in #Iran celebrates amidst the grave human rights crisis in the #GazaConflict pic.twitter.com/gzeyqP0LAp
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) November 28, 2023
A two-language strategy, again
Set together—Khatami’s “devilish plan,” Shahriari’s “JCPOA repeat,” Araghchi’s Cairo rollback, Ghalibaf’s “gangster” pipeline, Larijani’s missile red lines—the regime speaks two languages to one purpose. At home, the Friday prayer circuit mobilizes base instincts and grievance, equating peace with humiliation and betrayal. Abroad, officials narrate procedural openness while placing the real currency of power—missiles and proxy posture—beyond reach. The contradiction is only surface-deep: both tongues sustain a single strategy that treats perpetual crisis as governance.
The fear, stated plainly in the sermons, is that a ceasefire pathway would normalize regional dynamics, reduce the premium on “resistance,” and expose the cost of the state’s choices to a society already straining under inflation and high prices—concerns Ghalibaf himself acknowledged when he said the current economic hardship is “unacceptable” and that officials must act.
In the end, peace is not merely undesirable to Tehran—it is existentially dangerous. Stability drains the fuel of the regime’s propaganda, curtails its proxies’ relevance, and reminds Iranians that the terrorist state is much weaker than it pretends.