There’s one big reason the Iran war hasn’t ended: Iran doesn’t want it to.
The fact of the matter is that war currently serves the purposes of the regime in Tehran far better than peace would. The expiration this week of the 60-day deadline for a peace deal, set down in a now worthless memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran, is no cause for regret for hardline Iranian leaders who are lashed to the mast of war.
At first glance that might be surprising. The war has killed thousands of Iranians, wounded tens of thousands more, and wrought hundreds of billions of dollars in damage to bridges, highways, railroads, and airports. The country’s military and political leadership has been decimated, with one supreme leader dead and his replacement invisible. Oil sales have ground to a halt, devastating Iran’s economy.
In the face of such losses, any model of rational behavior would suggest that Tehran sue for peace. But peace would critically weaken the pillars propping up the regime, stripping the newly strengthened Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of the wartime emergency that has allowed it to run roughshod over the country’s president, parliament, and foreign ministry.
Imagine the alternative. In peacetime, a weak Mojtaba Khamenei, widely thought to be diminished by injury, would eventually have to emerge from hiding. A state of relative normalcy would expose the parlous state of the Iranian economy and its root causes in mismanagement and corruption rather than war. Every path to negotiation threatens the regime’s wartime model of control.
The regime has every reason to keep this war going. Here are three reasons why:
Power: The Military State’s Institutional Survival
The IRGC is now a state within a state. With tentacles reaching deep into every aspect of the Iranian economy and people’s daily existence, it controls oil and gas production, construction projects, telecommunications, financial institutions, and myriad other sectors.
This development, long in the making, has accelerated in recent years. Then-Foreign Minister Javad Zarif complained in 2021 that the IRGC held more influence over Iran’s foreign policy than the Foreign Ministry did.
All the more so now that the war has created a succession crisis that the IRGC exploited. Following the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei at the outset of the war, his son Mojtaba was installed as a figurehead successor by IRGC commanders led by Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi.
As I reported last week, Vahidi, the founding commander of the Quds Force and a former interior minister, has been appointed IRGC commander-in-chief, part of a regime reshuffle that put a half-dozen long-standing IRGC heavies into top positions. Mohsen Rezaei, a former Revolutionary Guard commander, has been named the new secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei’s personal representative on the body.
Even if he were in good health, Mojtaba would lack his father’s revolutionary credentials and independent authority. He continues nominally in the country’s most powerful role, a mysterious figure whose face and voice have remained hidden from the public since he acceded to the position, only because IRGC commanders back him in the context of a wartime crisis. Without an external threat, others might vie for influence and challenge Mojtaba’s legitimacy.
With the IRGC’s rise, President Masoud Pezeshkian’s power has cratered. Before hostilities commenced, he exercised genuine executive authority over cabinet appointments and civilian governance. Since the war’s start the IRGC has blocked his appointments and curtailed his authority. Neither Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf nor Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi can act without IRGC approval either.
Essentially the IRGC now answers only to an invisible supreme leader. It has the war to thank for receiving an allocation of over 3.11 quadrillion rials ($6 billion) in the current budget, almost twice that of the regular army’s 1.77 quadrillion rials ($3.4 billion).
Without an active external threat, the IRGC’s total control might well falter. Pezeshkian could try to reclaim executive authority and other institutions could press for a return to constitutional processes.
Combat: The Proxy Network and Regional Leverage
With this war, Iran stays strategically relevant. Although the Islamic Republic cannot defeat the United States or Israel in conventional military terms, it can remain a regional force to be reckoned with through its proxies, cross-border attacks, and a demonstrated willingness to go to the mat. As Mona Yacoubian, the director of CSIS’s Middle East Program, succinctly put it: “Iran’s War Strategy: Don’t Calibrate – Escalate.”
Continued conflict permits Iran to amplify its decades-long spoiler role, rendering the Middle East even more of a “no-go zone” for its adversaries. The IRGC now gleefully wields its ability to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, holding veto power over one fifth of global oil transit and offering massive disruptive capability over the global economy.
The MOU that mediators brokered on June 14 offered Iran a path to end the war. Taking it, though, would have required Tehran to relinquish its wartime leverage of Hormuz. Tehran refused, driving that home with attacks on shipping in July to collapse the talks entirely.
Peace under the terms suggested in the MOU would hand the Hormuz card back for nothing, as Iran sees it. The moment the strait reopens freely under peacetime conditions, Iran cedes the disruptive leverage it now holds over the U.S., Gulf producers, and Asian buyers.
For the first time in its history, the Islamic Republic has attacked all six Gulf Cooperation Council states: Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman. Iran launched an unprecedented barrage of missiles and drones, targeting oil refineries and military installations across the region. It has demonstrated it can neutralize every major economic and military target across the Gulf simultaneously. Ongoing war keeps that threat hovering over the region.
War also keeps the IRGC’s regional proxies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, militias in Syria and Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Palestine, dependent on Tehran for weapons, funding, and coordination. In wartime, Tehran has even more incentive to fund the proxies to attack its foes.
As recently as last November, the Middle East was in fourth place – after the Western Hemisphere, Asia, and Europe – in the Trump administration’s regional priorities as outlined in the White House national security strategy. “Iran – the region’s chief destabilizing force – has been greatly weakened by Israeli actions since October 7, 2023 and President Trump’s June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer, which significantly degraded Iran’s nuclear program,” according to that document.
In wartime, the U.S. has increased its troop commitment in the Middle East to 50,000, and two of America’s aircraft carrier strike groups have been moved to the region.
Tehran likely didn’t want to see this concentration of U.S. military might in the region, but now that it is there, it may well have an interest in the U.S. staying. Each additional day of war keeps a concentrated, exposed U.S. force within range of Iranian and proxy missiles and drones. Tehran has what in military parlance is referred to as “interior lines” – the advantage of operating close to its own territory, supply chains, and reinforcements.
Arguably, Tehran just needs to make the U.S. deployment expensive, and it has been. U.S. inventories of Patriot interceptors have dropped to just over a third of what they were before the war. In early June, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics put the cost of the war to the U.S. at $100 billion, and those costs have only grown since then.
Peace would also hamper Iran’s nuclear program even more than bombs have. Every week without a settlement is a week without IAEA inspectors. Tehran has used the vacuum brought about by wartime conditions to keep building at such sites as Pickaxe Mountain. Any peace agreement would entail ramping up inspections the regime would rather avoid.
Control: Domestic Oppression
History provides us with plenty of precedents of an external threat, whether real or fabricated, justifying a preeminent role for military-style institutions in an authoritarian state: Hitler, Stalin, and Franco come to mind. We can find echoes of this state of affairs in present-day Egypt, Myanmar, and Pakistan.
External conflict enables the regime to blame economic hardship on sanctions rather than on the mismanagement and corruption that have plagued the Islamic Republic since it was founded. The war lets the regime avoid accountability for almost five decades of a failed economy.
The war began just seven weeks after Iranian security forces killed thousands of their own citizens on Jan. 8 and 9. Yet less than two months later, global attention shifted to Iran’s slain leaders and the Strait of Hormuz.
In wartime, heightened security restrictions can be justified, nationalist sentiment can be rallied, and opposition cast as unpatriotic and treasonous. In the first three months of the war alone, more than 6,000 people were arbitrarily arrested, including protesters, journalists, and human rights defenders. The authorities used foreign threats as an excuse to engage in mass arrests, enforce disappearances, and accelerate trials.
Why Tehran Fears Peace: Lessons from the 12-Day War
Following last year’s brief conflict between Israel and the U.S. on the one hand and Iran on the other, the regime was faced with picking up the pieces while facing no immediate external threat. The path forward was not clear. Within months, the internal pressure became unbearable. Iran’s currency entered a freefall. The economic spiral led to the outbreak of protests in late December, which swiftly spread across the country.
The regime responded with arrests and executions to maintain control. This is what peace looks like to Tehran: uncontrolled dissent, currency collapse, internal factional conflict, and the need for mass killings to suppress opposition.
In that context, war is preferable, and the longer the better. “One way is to prolong this war until we get to the next term of the presidency and cause attrition,” an IRGC officer said in a PBS interview last week. “Rest assured, even if this war lasts for years, until the last day, Iran’s rockets will be launched.”
The flame was lit on February 28. Nearly half a year in, the IRGC has less incentive to extinguish it than to fan the flame, keep its enemies overextended, and stay in power.
