Roger Boyes
Roger Boyes argues that Donald Trump, eager for a victory, may have found a way to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and turn the remaining issues from the war into direct bargaining with Iran. But the warning is sharper: Tehran may play that process to its advantage, and the real question is not who stopped the war, but who emerged stronger from it.
In Boyes’s reading, Hamas did not win. Israel did not win. Hezbollah did not win. The Iranian people certainly did not win. The clearest beneficiary is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, because the war did not break the system. It strengthened the institution built to survive pressure. The idea that the regime could be changed by bombing barracks or assassinating its leader, the article argues, misunderstood how power in Iran works.
The IRGC was born out of the Iran-Iraq war. It began as a force of mobilization and combat, then evolved into a structure designed to protect the clerical regime from the regular army and from society itself. Over time, it expanded into the economy, energy, construction, telecoms, ports, regional proxies, intelligence, prisons and the nuclear file.
After the latest war, almost all those roles remain in its hands. But there is a new problem: Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is injured, isolated and possibly detached from the internal debates among Guard commanders. Boyes suggests that the “glue” holding Iran’s secret state together may begin to come unstuck.
The ceasefire, in this sense, is not the end of the crisis. It is a test of the IRGC. Will it present itself as the force that imposed calm and defied Trump, or will it slide into factional fighting inside Iran’s ruling class? Boyes argues that Iranian negotiators are counting on time being on their side, especially if Trump is reluctant to restart the war before the midterm elections.
But Iran’s internal rift is deeper than diplomacy. There is public anger over the cost of subsidizing Hezbollah, and there are divisions inside the IRGC itself. Some factions may seek the release of frozen funds and a share of reconstruction spending, especially if Gulf money is involved. Hard-liners, meanwhile, may treat any concession as betrayal.
Boyes focuses on General Ahmad Vahidi as the likely dominant voice inside the Guards, because he is the only officer said to communicate directly with Mojtaba Khamenei. His message, as Boyes reads it, is that Iran’s mere survival against a superpower attack is itself a victory. That logic allows the Guards to redefine defeat as endurance, retreat as tactics, and negotiation as a phase rather than a concession.
The greater danger, in the article, is that the ceasefire may radicalize the hard-liners further. The Paydari Front is already accusing negotiators of selling out, while field commanders in the Quds Force speak of betrayal by the political class. If President Masoud Pezeshkian is pushed out of office, that would signal that resentful generals have gained the upper hand.
Boyes ends with a warning drawn from the anger of German generals after 1918: military men convinced they were not defeated on the battlefield, but stabbed in the back by politicians at home. In that scenario, peace is not the start of stability. It is a charged truce looking for the next war.
The conclusion is that Trump may eventually get a form of “regime change” in Iran, but not the one he wants. Instead of a harsh clerical system open to bargaining, he may face a harsher garrison state, more convinced that survival alone gives it the legitimacy to endure.
Source: The Times.