Ghalibaf, the liquidator

A communication victory, a systemic defeat

Tehran on the verge of winning a communication battle? Perhaps, but also its regime.

The photograph of Islamabad: an involuntary admission
There is a photograph of Islamabad that has escaped official propaganda. It has been circulating for two days on the accounts of Iranian embassies abroad: Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf at the center of the frame, animated, hand raised in a demonstrative gesture — and next to him Abbas Araghchi, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, busy stirring tea cups AL-Monitor. This image should be displayed in all Iranian studies centers. It says what communiqués exhaust themselves trying to conceal: the head of the Iranian delegation was not the diplomat in charge of the nuclear file for the past three years. It was the Speaker of Parliament. A former IRGC commander who came to plead for a regime of which he is the last major standing face.

The survivor and the vacuum of power
Because one must begin there: Ghalibaf survived more than five weeks of American-Israeli strikes that killed the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the former head of the Supreme National Security Council Ali Larijani, and a number of senior officials AL-Monitor. He is one of the few of his rank still breathing. Mojtaba Khamenei has indeed been designated as his father’s successor, but he has not appeared publicly since Wikipedia, reportedly injured according to some sources. In this vacuum, Ghalibaf moves forward — and he moves forward with the exact profile of the involuntary liquidator that History reserves for aging revolutions.

The law of revolutions: liquidators come from within
Revolutions are never liquidated by their declared enemies. They are liquidated by their most decorated loyalists. Nixon alone could go to Beijing; a Democrat would have been lynched. Gorbachev came promising to save socialism through discipline and anti-alcohol measures, and he buried the USSR in six years. The liquidator of a system is always a man of the inner circle, because only he has sufficient decorations for his capitulation to pass as wisdom. Ghalibaf ticks the boxes with almost caricatural precision. Brigadier general of the Guards at 22, commander of the IRGC air force from 1997 to 2000, head of the national police from 2000 to 2005, mayor of Tehran for twelve years, Speaker of Parliament since 2020 Wikipedia. During the student repression of 1999, he supervised the massacre in which security forces threw students from the rooftops of dormitories. He himself later claimed: “I was among those who were beating in the streets, and I am proud of it.” FDD

The credibility of the hardliner as a condition of capitulation
This curriculum is not an obstacle to the thesis of capitulation. It is its condition of possibility. A soft Ghalibaf would have no right to sign anything at all; it is his reputation as a hardliner, built on the bodies of students in 1999 and protesters in 2009, that gives him the political mandate to accept the unacceptable. And the unacceptable must be named, because the regime does everything so that it is not named: abandoning 60% enriched uranium, opening Hormuz without counterpart, letting go of Hezbollah, capping the ballistic program. Three pillars, and behind each pillar, tens of thousands of men whose careers, identities, and sometimes faith do not survive the fall. The scientists of Natanz to whom it is announced that their forty years of work were a negotiable waste. The IRGC sailors to whom it is explained that their existence is a nuisance to be traded for the unfreezing of bank assets. The regional cadres of the Guards to whom the founding narrative of the Axis of Resistance is taken away. These are not diplomatic concessions. It is a collective layoff disguised as a treaty.

Outsourced firmness
The martial tweets that followed the failure of Islamabad — “we will yield to no threat,” “let them test us” — do not contradict this trajectory. They mask it. A revealing detail: Ghalibaf’s posts on X are written in idiomatic American English that fascinates and raises questions at the same time, since Ghalibaf is not known to be an English speaker AL-Monitor. The site IranWire believes it has identified the author: a former advisor based in the United States AL-Monitor. In other words, the verbal hardening of the Iranian Speaker of Parliament is outsourced to a contractor based in the country he threatens. The pure hardliner writes in Persian from Tehran; Ghalibaf, for his part, communicates his firmness in American English from a Californian subcontractor. The formula has something devastating about it: it describes a regime that no longer knows how to speak to its enemies except by borrowing their language.

The illusion of the North Korean option
Here it will be necessary to defuse the lazy objection, the one heard in all think tanks: what if Tehran truly refused, and chose the North Korean path? This option is a TV panel fantasy. Pyongyang survives because it never had anything to lose. Tehran has spent forty years building exactly what makes the North Korean path impossible. Its youth is connected, even under internet shutdown — seven weeks of blackout did not produce fear, they produced the cold anger of societies that have stopped expecting anything from their state. The figures from the protests of January 2026 allow no approximation: from January 25 onward, estimates exceeded 30,000 dead, one of the largest massacres in modern Iranian history Wikipedia. An intelligence report from the Revolutionary Guards — therefore from the regime itself — estimated that more than 36,500 Iranians had been killed Le Grand Continent. No state crushes its own youth like this without something breaking durably in the relationship to constraint. Its energy rent, the regime’s only lever, is in the process of being liquidated by the blockade that Trump has just ordered. Its Chinese patron buys discounted oil; it does not finance clients: Beijing is already negotiating directly with Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, and has no reason to burden itself with a diminished Iran. Moscow is elsewhere. The North Korean path presupposes an Iran that no longer exists; it is the rhetorical alibi of the Guards, not their plan.

Who really governs?
One question remains that analysts avoid, because it requires looking at the regime from the inside rather than from its borders. Does Ghalibaf even govern? Former reformist parliamentarian Ali Akbar Mousavi Khoeini, now at George Mason University, put it unambiguously: “Power is in the hands of the Revolutionary Guards, and of the most radical faction of the Guards. Vahidi is in charge of the country. Ghalibaf does not have the strength to confront him.” NBC News If this reading is correct — and it is plausible — then Ghalibaf is not Gorbachev. He is worse: he is Kerensky, the moderate who believes he is managing a transition and whom the military apparatus will let speak until the day it no longer needs him. The alternative between the involuntary Gorbachev and the expendable Kerensky is itself deadly for the regime, because neither scenario allows the system to reproduce itself.

The inevitable signature
So yes, Ghalibaf will sign, or someone will sign in his place, because the alternative no longer exists except in discourse. And that day, we will not witness a revolution. We will have something more prosaic and more terminal: a silence. The day when regional commanders of the Guards will cease relaying the official line. The day when Friday sermons, in medium-sized cities, will introduce small doctrinal variations. The day when ambassadors will discreetly extend their postings abroad and enroll their children in Western universities. None of these signals will make headlines. Their accumulation will make the era.

The tragedy of the involuntary liquidator
Does Ghalibaf know it? In part, surely. Gorbachev also knew, in part. The tragic specificity of the involuntary liquidator, the one that makes him a Shakespearean character rather than an ordinary traitor, is that he believes until the very last moment that he can himself control the speed at which he opens the window. It is always at that moment that the wall collapses.