As Iran signals its willingness to pursue fighting, one of the most important power struggles to watch in the Middle East today is not between Iran and the United States, nor between Iran and Israel. It is unfolding inside the Iranian state itself if emerging reports concerning the growing divide between the government and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are even partially accurate. Assessments suggest significant differences between elements of the IRGC and President Masoud Pezeshkian’s government regarding the management of war, negotiations, economic recovery, and relations with neighboring Gulf states. Reports said Pezeshkian has criticized military escalation actions not coordinated by the government and supported diplomacy and economic stability, in contrast to the more confrontational stance of influential security hardliners in the IRGC.  

For many years, Iran has tried to frame itself as a highly centralized and unified actor. The supreme leadership, presidency, parliament, clerical bodies, Supreme National Security Council, Basij forces, official army, and IRGC all play roles in shaping Iranian policy, including the current course of the war. What is likely to change is not the existence of disagreements, but their intensity and growing visibility. Pezeshkian’s statement that decisions on the war and negotiations with the United States rest with Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and the Supreme National Security Council further suggests the limited role of Iran’s president.  

At the core of the tensions between the government and the IRGC are two competing assumptions about Iran’s current strategic environment. The first is that Iran’s long-term strength depends on economic recovery, sanctions relief, and reducing regional tensions. Supporters of this view recognize that Iran has demonstrated resilience under pressure, but they also understand that resilience alone is not enough for economic growth or relief felt by citizens. Years of sanctions, inflation, and currency depreciation have created structural challenges that cannot be solved through military actions alone.  

The second assumption is aligned with the strategic thinking traditionally associated with the IRGC and hardline security circles within the Supreme National Security Council. Under this view, Iran remains an ongoing target of military pressure, sanctions, intelligence operations, and efforts to limit its regional influence. The IRGC believes that any compromise carries risks. This approach reflects a key element of the IRGC doctrine: security must come before prosperity. The IRGC spokesperson similarly emphasized readiness for confrontation and warned that the types of weaponry utilized would be “completely different.”  

Understanding these distinctions is essential for anticipating how Iran is likely to act. Too often, analyses reduce Iranian actions to ideology alone. However, even policies that appear hostile from abroad are usually justified internally through an intertwined framework of deterrence and strategic depth aimed at regime survival following the campaign to counter the Iranian threat. Even if reports of internal political tensions are inaccurate, they still show the limited ability of elected government institutions to shape strategic decisions against the IRGC.  

The implications of this internal power struggle extend well beyond Tehran. For the United States and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, a visible divide inside Iran presents both opportunities and challenges. Pragmatic voices within the Iranian government indicate an interest in diplomatic normalization, economic engagement, and regional stability. These  potentially allow for confidence-building measures and dialogue on their nuclear and ballistic missile programs and facilitate a full opening of the Hormuz Strait. However, this remains highly unlikely given that power and control lie with hardliners in the IRGC.  

On the other hand, it would be wrong to assume that internal debates lead to moderation. The IRGC and Basij continue to wield significant influence, especially in times of crisis. The Basij’s ability to suppress civilian protests remains critical to the regime’s survival. Recent conflicts have further reinforced the importance of deterrence in Iran’s strategic thinking, and there are no indications that the IRGC intends to retreat from its central role in Iran’s national security affairs and external security agenda.  

For the United States and GCC policymakers, the takeaway is not to choose between diplomatic engagement and deterrence, but to pursue both while emphasizing a continuous military deterrence posture given Iran’s history of hostile and regionally destabilizing actions. This is particularly important because negotiations over the Hormuz Strait, nuclear program, and ballistic missile capabilities remain unsettled.  

Regardless of any growing divide in Iran’s internal power structure, the main question now is what these developments tell us about the future trajectory of military and diplomatic engagement with Iran. Since the 1979 revolution, Iran has sought to balance overarching clerical power, revolutionary institutions, and elected bodies. But this balance has never been firmly established, and the ongoing conflict shows the IRGC playing a more visible role than before. Whether this is a temporary wartime adjustment or a deeper structural consolidation of power remains to be seen. This is why the current debate inside Iran deserves close attention. 

Will economic recovery and regional integration become the primary pillars of Iran’s national power and ongoing negotiations following the end of the current 60-day ceasefire? Or will security considerations and regional hegemony ambitions embedded in the IRGC doctrine continue to dominate decision-making at the highest levels of the state? The answer will shape not only Iran’s future but also the future security landscape of the region.  

For military strategists, the growing differences between Iran’s civilian leadership and the IRGC reinforce an enduring lesson: degrading military capabilities does not immediately produce political outcomes. If the IRGC continues to expand its influence over strategic decision-making, the United States would have to confront a more centralized, security-driven adversary that will likely be less responsive to economic incentives and more willing to absorb costs in pursuit of regime survival.  

Military campaigns against Iran must therefore be reassessed not just in terms of their operational outcome, but in terms of how they impact and reshape internal power dynamics within the Iranian state. Tactical gains that empower hardline actors may ultimately undermine broader Western strategic objectives.  

Dr. Mohamed ELDoh is a business development and consulting professional in the defence and security sector. Mohamed holds a Doctorate from Grenoble École de Management, France, an MBA from the EU Business School, Spain, and an Advanced Certificate in Counterterrorism Studies from the University of St Andrews, UK. He regularly authors articles addressing defence cooperation, counterterrorism, geopolitics, and emerging security threats in the Middle East and Africa. The views of the author are his own.

The Political Power Battle in Tehran was originally published on Global Security Review.

A nation does not need to lose a battle to look weak. Sometimes it only needs to miss a paycheck.

Washington often treats budget shutdowns as partisan spectacle, but America’s adversaries see something far more useful: a live demonstration of self-inflicted fragility. When the federal government allows frontline security personnel to work unpaid it interrupts critical security and health functions and publicly advertises institutional dysfunction. It weakens more than morale, it weakens deterrence. That is the real national security cost of a prolonged budget lapse.

Deterrence rests on more than missiles, submarines, and strategic doctrine. It also depends on the visible reliability of state capacity. Allies and adversaries alike measure whether the U.S. can sustain operations under pressure, protect its population, and maintain continuity during disruption. A shutdown tells them the opposite. It signals that even absent enemy action; the U.S. is willing to degrade its own readiness through political dysfunction. Even short lapses in appropriations disrupt defense planning, contract execution, and the broader machinery that underwrites operational readiness.

The most immediate damage appears in aviation security. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is not simply a travel inconvenience buffer. It is part of the nation’s daily homeland defense posture. Every checkpoint, screening lane, and visible officer contributes to deterrence by signaling that attacks or probes are likely to be detected and disrupted. That visible consistency matters because deterrence at the tactical level often begins with routine friction imposed on hostile actors.

Friction weakens when the workforce begins to crack. More than 460 TSA officers have already quit during the current standoff, while absentee rates have climbed to 10 to 11 percent nationally. Repeated funding disruptions are damaging morale, retention, and long-term staffing stability across the Department of Homeland Security. That is not merely a workforce problem. It is a deterrence problem.

Fatigue measurably degrades visual search performance, which is directly relevant to screening-intensive environments such as aviation security. TSA screening is not just procedural. It is cognitive work performed under repetitive, high-stakes conditions. When officers are exhausted, financially strained, or distracted by uncertainty, the quality of that work can decline even if the checkpoint remains technically operational.

Equally important, deterrence at the checkpoint depends not only on actual performance but on what potential attackers believe about the system. Airport security screening is perceived as a stronger deterrent when it appears visible, universal, and credible. That matters because deterrence is partly psychological. A security system that appears chaotic, understaffed, and politically neglected may still function, but it no longer projects the same confidence.

This erosion has consequences beyond the checkpoint itself. Long lines spilling into terminal lobbies and pre-screening corridors create soft-target conditions that sophisticated attackers have historically exploited overseas. U.S. airports have warned Congress that the current operational strain is serious, worsening, and potentially long-lasting. In practical terms, a shutdown does not just reduce security throughput. It redistributes risk into large, dense, unsecured public spaces and creates opportunity.

More troubling still is that recurring shutdowns create patterns. Adversaries watch for patterns. If hostile actors can reliably anticipate periods when U.S. aviation security is underpaid, understaffed, and politically distracted, then Washington has unintentionally handed them a calendar of vulnerability. Strategic competitors, transnational terrorist networks, and opportunistic lone actors all benefit when a defender repeatedly broadcasts when its systems are under stress.

The same logic applies beyond airports. Health security is often treated separately from deterrence, but that is a categorical error. In an era defined by pandemics, synthetic biology, fragile supply chains, and the weaponization of disruption, public health capacity is national security capacity. A country that cannot sustain surveillance, biodefense coordination, and health system continuity under fiscal pressure is not demonstrating resilience. It demonstrates exploitable weaknesses.

That is precisely why the shutdown’s impact on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) should concern strategists as much as its effect on TSA. HHS’s own FY 2026 contingency staffing plan states that 23,128 employees, roughly 31 percent of its workforce, would be furloughed during a lapse in appropriations. The plan further notes that numerous non-excepted functions would be paused or curtailed, including elements of grant oversight, data collection, validation, analysis, and portions of public communication. That may sound bureaucratic, but it is not.

Health system functions form the connective tissue of national preparedness. Surveillance, analytics, research oversight, and continuity of clinical and administrative operations are what allow the U.S. to detect biological threats early, understand cascading risks, and sustain resilience under stress. Public health emergency management is foundational to biodefense capacity, particularly in areas such as interagency coordination, situational awareness, testing, surveillance, and surge resilience. When those systems are interrupted, the country does not simply lose paperwork, it loses awareness, agility, and recovery capacity.

This point is reinforced by broader preparedness of scholarship. Public health emergency preparedness in the U.S. has long suffered from uneven and declining support, leaving critical state and local response systems more vulnerable to disruption. In deterrence terms, disruptions lower the cost for an adversary seeking to exploit a biological event, amplify public panic, or overload institutional response capacity.

System disruption and deterrence is where budget shutdowns become strategically self-defeating. The U.S. invests heavily in advanced military capability, but periodically undermining the civilian systems that make that capability credible is defeatist. No adversary needs to destroy American resilience if Washington is willing to suspend parts of it on its own. That contradiction sends a damaging signal to both allies and competitors.

For adversaries such as China and Russia, recurring shutdowns offer a useful strategic readout. They reveal domestic political brittleness, weak continuity discipline, and a governing system vulnerable to self-imposed paralysis. That does not automatically invite direct confrontation, but it does encourage gray-zone opportunism. Cyber probing, disinformation, infrastructure stress campaigns, and strategic influence operations all become more attractive when the target appears distracted and internally divided. Shutdowns are self-inflicted wounds. In a deterrence environment, self-inflicted wounds are still wounds.

For U.S. allies, the signal is quieter but equally corrosive. Extended deterrence relies not only on military capability but also in the confidence of American competence and continuity. Partners want to know that the U.S. can manage crises at home while sustaining commitments abroad. A federal government that struggles to keep airport screening and health preparedness stable during a budget fight risk is undermining that confidence at exactly the wrong moment.

For these reasons, shutdowns should no longer be treated as routine political leverage when they affect core homeland security and resilience institutions. Congress should establish automatic continuing resolution mechanisms for agencies and functions that are central to deterrence. This includes transportation security, emergency preparedness, biodefense, and public health surveillance. Political disagreement is unavoidable; however, institutional self-sabotage is not.

Deterrence is often discussed in the language of force posture, strategic messaging, and escalation dominance. This all matters. Yet, deterrence lives in the ordinary machinery of a functioning state: an airport screening lane that stays open, a health surveillance system that keeps collecting data, and a workforce that knows the government will not ask it to defend the nation for free. When that machinery stalls, deterrence does not collapse overnight. It thins. It flickers. It becomes easier to stress. That is the danger of a shutdown. It does not merely interrupt government. It advertises vulnerability.

Brandon Toliver is a Senior Fellow at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies. The views of the author are his own.

Deterrence on Layaway: A Shutdown’s Quiet Assault on American Security was originally published on Global Security Review.

Chris McInnes is Executive Director at the Air Power Institute. He is an air power and national security expert with 25 years of experience in the military, government, and industry and is also a frequent commentator and speaker at defence seminars here in Australia.

Deterrence Down Under Podcast: Australian Air Power and Deterrence with Chris McInnes was originally published on Global Security Review.