Nobody's Got A Plan

Time to walk across the room to the other side. Who's in charge in Iran? Are we about to get a coup?

Uh, I don't think so.  The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have a tight lid on dissent. The Iranian military is in charge in Iran.

I've been watching the IRGC operate for two months now and I haven't given them the serious treatment they deserve. The decapitation strikes. The new Supreme Leader mostly absent. The Strait closed. I watched all of it from the outside but what is the view from inside Tehran right now?

It's stranger than I assumed.

Start with what happened to Iran on day one.

Epic Fury killed or incapacitated most of the senior leadership of the Islamic Republic in a matter of hours. The precision was extraordinary. Khamenei — the new one, Mojtaba, elevated only recently — went dark almost immediately. Possibly injured. Possibly moved. Certainly absent from any public function. In forty-five years of the Islamic Republic, nothing like this had happened. The system had absorbed assassinations, wars, sanctions, protests, and internal purges. It had never absorbed this.

The assumption built into Epic Fury — unstated but structurally present — was that decapitation would produce collapse or capitulation. Remove the head, the body falters. The Venezuela model. You've heard me say this before.

Only Iran is not Venezuela. Ooops.

After the Shah fell in 1979, Khomeini built something deliberately resistant to exactly this kind of strike. Not one center of power. Several. The Supreme Leader. The IRGC. The regular military. The Basij. The Guardian Council. The presidency. The clergy networks. Each with its own chain of command, its own finances, its own institutional loyalty. Redundant by design. The whole architecture assumes the top can be disrupted and the system continues.

Epic Fury hit the top and most of its advanced weapons systems. The structure fractured. The IRGC arose out of the smoldering remains, probably with more weight than it had before.  An unintended consequence? Karma.

But, everyone seems to talk about the IRGC like it's a single actor with a unified will. It isn't. It's a massive, layered institution with its own internal factions, its own competing ambitions, its own version of the civilian-versus-hardliner tension that runs through the whole Iranian state. The Quds Force operates semi-independently from the ground forces. The aerospace division — the people controlling the missile and drone arsenal — has its own command culture. There are figures inside the IRGC who have spent careers building toward political power in a post-war Iran. They do not all want the same thing.

We are witnessing a historic opportunity for the IRGC.

The civilian leadership is sidelined and the Supreme Leader is mysteriously absent. Is he unwell?  What's up with this guy? The pragmatist faction — the people who might have moved toward negotiation, who understood what prolonged Strait closure would do to Iran's own economy, who had relationships with the foreign ministry — got marginalized. The hardliners didn't need to win an argument. The argument disappeared when the people on the other side of it got bombed.

Ahmad Vahidi and figures like him moved to the center. The IRGC became, effectively, the Iranian state.  And they know how to put on a show just like Trump.

Iran's Foreign Minister declares the Strait of Hormuz open. Oil prices drop eleven percent in an hour. Trump posts on Truth Social that it's a brilliant day. Ships attempt transit.

Ships turn back.

Iranian state TV quotes a military spokesperson: the waterway has returned to "strict management and control." The reason given: the United States continued what Iran called piracy and maritime robbery under the blockade.

The Foreign Minister and the IRGC issued contradictory statements about the most important military and economic asset Iran controls. On the same day. In public.

That is not chaos. That is two power centers fighting over who runs the Islamic Republic.

It makes Trump look almost competent.

The Foreign Minister represents whatever survives of the civilian-diplomatic structure. He had reasons to open the Strait. Iranian businesses are hemorrhaging. The Iranian rial has collapsed further. Ordinary Iranians are paying extraordinary prices for fuel, food, and basic goods. The sanctions that were already crushing the economy before Epic Fury are being felt at a different order of magnitude now. Someone in Tehran understands this. Someone wants a deal.

The IRGC doesn't want a deal. Or more precisely — the hardliner faction controlling the IRGC right now doesn't want a deal on any terms that would require them to relinquish the Strait. Because the Strait is the only thing keeping them relevant. It's the only leverage they have. The moment it opens, Iran has surrendered its primary response asset without getting anything durable in return. 

So control of the Strait isn't just about Iran winning the war (they aren't). Safe navigation is about internal Iranian politics. Every oil tanker the IRGC freezes (about 200 as of this post and 1,000 ships overall) is a message to the Foreign Ministry: we decide when this ends. Not you. To prove it, the IRGC has seized a couple of ships. Trump "obliterated" their Navy — his word — and they're still able to do this. The asymmetry is a bitch.

Which brings me to where both sides are right now.

Trump has declared there is "no timeframe" for the war. Only a couple of weeks ago he was telling us he expects it to end "soon." These words change the nature of the war. Not in a military sense. In a structural one. "No timeframe" means the campaign is no longer just a campaign. It's a living condition, like much of the rest of the Middle East itself. Nobody seems to be able to end a condition. You manage it.

The IRGC surprised me, but I didn't know that much about Iran's internal politics.  They are effectively drawing this out — keeping the Strait unstable, blocking negotiation, seizing ships, preventing any clean resolution. Inadvertently, this is granting Trump time he needs. By preventing talks, negotiations, and a "fast" resolution, they're giving the US military something it needs after two months of sustained operations: time to replenish stockpiles, reposition assets, reassess the next phase.

There is not a US military supply asset on this planet right now that isn't either dealing with the Middle East or pointed toward it. These units need more missiles and drones!

Two adversaries, each preventing the other from winning, each accidentally giving the other what they need to keep going. That's the situation. Neither side has a plan.

I said last month that Trump had no plan. That was the correct diagnosis then. What I didn't fully reckon with was the possibility that Iran's plan — such as it was — would get killed in the same strikes that killed its leadership.

The civilians who might have had an endgame in mind are sidelined. The upshot IRGC faction now running things has a tactic — control the Strait — and a goal of institutional survival. That's not a plan for how this ends. It's a plan for not losing today.

Nobody's got a plan.

Trump is managing a situation his thrill launched and his psychology won't let him honestly assess. The IRGC is consolidating internal power while calling it righteous. The civilian Iranian government is issuing statements the military ignores. The ceasefire exists on paper. The war continues in practice. 

But nothing planned is taking place. Which means whatever happens next is unplanned. Both sides are reacting to themselves. The war lost its shape.

Hang on.

Late Note: This excellent YouTube video published a detailed breakdown of Iran's internal power struggle that confirms and extends everything above. The details are worth having.

Mojtaba Khamenei's condition is worse than originally reported. His leg was operated on three times. His face and lips burned severely enough to require future plastic surgery. He cannot record video or audio. He issues written statements delivered by motorcycle courier through back roads to an undisclosed location. Government officials won't visit him for fear Israel traces them there. He is running the country, per one Iranian adviser, "like the director of a board." The board is the IRGC generals. He is subservient to them because he owes his position and the survival of the system to them.

The negotiator-called-an-idiot story is even better than I knew. On April 17th, Foreign Minister Aragchi posted on X that the Strait was open for the remainder of the ceasefire. Trump confirmed it. Ships moved. Within hours the Iranian Navy broadcast a message calling Aragchi an idiot, declared the Strait closed, and said it would only reopen by order of Khamenei. The IRGC's Tasnim News described Aragchi's post as "a bad and incomplete tweet." The Institute for the Study of War confirmed what I argued above: the IRGC used the Strait contradiction specifically to slap down civilian rivals. Every time they contradict a civilian official on Hormuz, they are sending a message to Tehran, not Washington.

The negotiators are, per multiple sources, glorified messengers. They cannot commit to anything. When Aragchi showed flexibility in Islamabad — specifically on Iran's proxy network — an IRGC general filed a report saying he had deviated from his mandate and the delegation was ordered home immediately. The second round of talks collapsed before it started when a message arrived from Khamenei's inner circle ruling out nuclear discussion and reprimanding the foreign ministry team. Ghalibaf, the parliament speaker, has reportedly resigned as negotiator in frustration. Unconfirmed. If true, the question becomes who replaces him — because it can't be an IRGC hardliner, and with most of the senior leadership dead, the bench is short.

Vahidi — the IRGC commander now at the center of everything — is wanted by Interpol for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people. He spent a decade building the Quds Force into what it became. One analyst described his predecessors as school teachers by comparison.

According to the video, this war may have replaced one regime with a more extreme version of itself. Lenin to Stalin. The moderates who might have checked the hardliners are dead, sidelined, or publicly humiliated into irrelevance. The IRGC that emerges from this — if a deal is reached — will hold more power than at any point in the history of the Islamic Republic, backed by a Basij now broken into tens of thousands of mobile cells already reportedly attacking civilians who supported the war.

Epic Fury. Just watch what it "stimulated."