As negotiations between Washington and Tehran remain deadlocked, US President Donald Trump convened a high-level meeting Friday with senior US national security officials, including the CIA director, secretary of defense, and vice president, to discuss scenarios for a possible return to military confrontation with the Islamic Republic.

At the same time, Qatar and Pakistan launched last-minute, ultimately fruitless mediation efforts to prevent further escalation.

Sources close to the White House say Trump has grown increasingly frustrated with the stalled diplomacy and is now weighing the option of a “decisive final military operation” as a way to end the crisis.

Although no final decision has yet been made, the confrontation appears to be approaching a potentially dangerous turning point, raising a deeper strategic question: Does the CIA, in coordination with Mossad, now see regime change not as a distant aspiration but as an increasingly realistic objective?

If one moves beyond merely examining the “behavior of the regime” and confronts the larger question, who exactly is the United States truly dealing with in Iran’s regime?, one arrives at a dilemma that America’s intelligence community, particularly the CIA, has wrestled with for decades.

The United States still speaks to the Islamic Republic’s “diplomatic façade,” while real authority remains concentrated within the ideological-security structure of the IRGC and, outwardly, the office of Khamenei.

When the upheaval of 1979 succeeded in Iran, the CIA did not truly understand who Khomeini was, nor did it fully grasp that the ideological engine driving him, the dictatorship of the Shiite cleric and the doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih, would ultimately give birth to a religious dictatorship and a Shiite Islamic caliphate in Tehran.

The CIA also failed to accurately foresee that America’s most loyal and strategically important ally in the Middle East, the late Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, would ultimately lose power. Even after the 1983 bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut, the CIA still appeared unable to fully comprehend the mushroom-like rise of Islamist terrorism across the region. That reality cannot simply be concealed or erased from history.

During the years 1975–1978, whenever SAVAK, one of the CIA and Mossad’s closest intelligence partners during the Cold War, warned the CIA that the KGB stood behind both Marxist terrorist movements and Islamist militant networks, those warnings were frequently dismissed or underestimated.

Khomeini’s inner circle also cultivated the illusion that the CIA had orchestrated a coup in Iran in 1953 and removed a so-called “popular prime minister.” Yet few ever asked a more fundamental question: when exactly had that prime minister been elected by the Iranian people, under what election, and through what constitutional authority?

Under Iran’s constitutional monarchy, the Shah possessed the legal authority to appoint and dismiss prime ministers. That populist prime minister had ruled under martial law, attacked and burned opposition newspapers, and effectively paralyzed the national parliament. Had he succeeded, Iran itself could very likely have fallen into the orbit of the Soviet Union in 1953.

What remains remarkable is that even figures close to Khomeini later acknowledged maintaining contacts with the United States and the CIA between 1953 and 1979. In that sense, the narrative of the so-called “CIA coup” in Iran gradually evolved into a repetitive, mythologized, and politically convenient tale. The late Shah himself later wrote in his memoirs that the CIA neither protected him nor stood by its longtime ally, and that in 1979 it ultimately “stabbed him in the back.”

Creating a ‘new Middle East’

Now, after 47 years, the CIA, in coordination with Mossad, may have assumed responsibility for a campaign against the Islamic Republic in pursuit of what many describe as a “new Middle East.”

On the first day of the attack, Tehran’s dictator, Ali Khamenei, was removed from the scene. Since 2001, following the September 11 attacks and the formal launch of the war on terror, the CIA has gradually removed a series of obstructive figures from its path: from Imad Mughniyeh (2008) and Osama bin Laden (2011) to Qassem Soleimani (2020) and Ali Khamenei (2026).

In each of these historic eliminations, cooperation with Mossad reportedly continued in various forms.

But why did the Tehran regime not collapse after the humiliating death of Ali Khamenei? Because regime change was never Washington’s primary objective. Nor has genuine political will for regime change ever truly existed within Washington’s strategic establishment. Even though, over the past 47 years, with the rise of the radical Khomeinist Shiite caliphate in Tehran, America effectively surrendered the Iranian arena to Soviet influence, while the regime itself increasingly fell under the dominance of Russophile networks and figures.

Under these circumstances, the CIA now confronts several major dilemmas. Iran’s formal government is no longer the true center of power. In practice, the presidency, the foreign ministry, and even parliament have gradually evolved into ceremonial, hollow, and largely ineffective institutions.

Strategic decisions, regarding nuclear activity, chemical and biological capabilities, regional terrorism, military structures, and security networks, are ultimately made by the regime’s core power structure.

In reality, the Trump-Netanyahu strikes accelerated the emergence of a military junta in Iran, making any future negotiations significantly more difficult because power no longer hides solely behind the façade of the Shiite clerical establishment.

To put it differently: America negotiates with the state Iran presents, not the system that actually rules it. It has not been long since Trump correctly designated the IRGC as a terrorist organization.

Many of Khomeini’s followers, who had received military and terrorist training in Yasser Arafat’s camps in Palestine, later became founders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an institution that, notably, does not even contain the word “Iran” in its name.

Over the course of this 40-day war, America’s security establishment gradually came to realize that Iran increasingly resembled a military garrison disguised as a nation-state.

IRGC has ‘become the system’

The IRGC is no longer merely a military force; it has evolved into an ideological army, an economic empire, a vast network of intelligence organizations, an internal security apparatus, and the mafia-like engine driving regional terrorism. Even during the ceasefire period, the IRGC effectively emerged as the de facto actor shaping the succession to Khamenei.

One particularly striking detail was that individuals affiliated with the IRGC, some of whom reportedly appeared on CIA watchlists, continued to participate openly within Iran’s diplomatic delegations in Pakistan, while the CIA observed the situation without any meaningful response.

And this is the crucial point: the IRGC no longer protects the system. It has become the system.

Throughout 1,400 years of Islamic caliphates, succession crises have repeatedly shaped the destiny of regimes and ruling structures. Following Khamenei’s death, Iran entered that same historical pattern. Yet after 37 years of dictatorship, the removal of Khamenei did not lead to the collapse of the structure itself.

Although the power structure became increasingly fragmented, the IRGC steadily absorbed authority into its own hands. They raised cardboard images of Mojtaba Khamenei and claimed he remained alive, hoping to preserve the regime’s security cohesion, maintain internal control, and ensure institutional survival.

The IRGC did not merely manufacture a symbolic leader. It reconstructed command centers, intelligence networks, financial structures, and security command systems while simultaneously shaping the broader architecture of Iran’s future order.

The CIA likely understands this transformation. Washington’s politicians do not.

Certainly, elements within the American intelligence community understand that “civilian diplomacy” in Iran is deeply constrained and that the real nucleus of power prioritizes regime survival above all else. The elimination of individual commanders or officials means little to the system itself. Amid economic collapse and the broader destruction of Iran, survival remains the regime’s overriding objective.

Yet Washington still feels compelled to pretend that Iran’s foreign ministry remains the regime’s principal actor — even though its leadership itself emerges from the broader IRGC structure. This contradiction becomes increasingly visible when Iran’s foreign minister resembles little more than a puppet figure with virtually no authority over the regime’s actual strategic direction.

What exists in Washington today is an ongoing conflict between intelligence realism and diplomatic theater, a taboo contradiction that major media institutions continue to reinforce and reproduce.

One must also openly acknowledge another deeply uncomfortable reality: the United States fears the collapse of the Islamic Republic as much as it fears its survival. Washington simultaneously fears a nuclear-armed Iran and an uncontrolled Iranian collapse that could destabilize the Persian Gulf and the broader region. This dual fear has produced a state of strategic paralysis.

Many in Washington fear the collapse of the Islamic Republic more than the consequences of its continued survival. Meanwhile, the demands and aspirations of the Iranian people themselves were neither prioritized nor meaningfully represented in negotiations between Washington and Tehran.

The central problem is no longer Iran’s diplomacy. The deeper problem is that America may still be negotiating with institutions that no longer truly govern Iran. Washington does not negotiate with Ahmad Vahidi or with the real nucleus of power directing events inside the country. Instead, it continues wasting time speaking to political puppets.

Washington still speaks to the façade of the Iranian state while the security apparatus quietly absorbs the state itself. For these reasons, the CIA’s dilemma in dealing with Iran’s hardline power structure has not been successful, and likely will not be.

The central challenge facing Washington is no longer Iran’s nuclear program alone. It is whether the United States is ultimately prepared to acknowledge that the institutions it negotiates with may no longer be the institutions that truly govern Iran.