Iran’s Supreme National Security Council summed up the Muscat talks in one sentence: “The main game is being played at the level of signals, not agreements.” Not an admission of failure. A statement of purpose. For Tehran, the talks themselves were an achievement: proof of diplomatic intent, a shield against military action, time bought at low cost.
For Washington, the talks were a vehicle for a deal US President Donald Trump could brand as a victory, the kind that lets a president claim he achieved what Obama could not. Both sides sat at the same table. They were not negotiating the same thing.
Everyone knows former supreme leader Ali Khamenei did not want war. He wanted a deal that would rescue the economy, calm the streets, and preserve what remained of the regime. The question worth asking is different: why couldn’t he stop the war he feared? The answer lies in four failures that grew from the machine he built.
Failure one: A structure that could not surrender
Since 1989, Khamenei constructed a governing architecture with one purpose: no one could replace him, and no one could make a consequential decision without him. His parallel offices, embedded in every ministry, hired, monitored, and suppressed. The Revolutionary Guards became an economic and military empire with its own institutional interest in continuity. Any meaningful nuclear concession required consent from bodies he had deliberately designed to be incapable of conceding.
This was not a management failure; it was the design. You build institutions that cannot capitulate because you trust no one. Then, when capitulation is the only path to survival, those institutions cannot act. There is a difference between being unwilling to concede and being structurally incapable of it. Khamenei was on the wrong side of that line.
Failure two: The envoy he erased
On February 17, while Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was leaving Geneva describing “serious progress,” Khamenei stepped in front of cameras. He warned that aircraft carriers could be sent to the bottom of the sea. Iranian state television broadcast an AI-generated video simulating the sinking of a US warship, synchronized with his voice.
Senior regime figures called this managed ambiguity. The hard line strengthens the hand, while the soft line prevents a strike. But you cannot send two messages when you are the supreme leader. Everything you say is state policy. Araghchi left Geneva with diplomatic capital; Khamenei erased it within hours. An envoy you cannot back is not an envoy. He is a prop .
Failure three: The channel that ended in a gut feeling
For decades, Iran negotiated with an American system built to convert nuance into policy. State Department lawyers, NSC analysts, career diplomats trained to package “maybe, if we reframe Clause D” into something a president can act on.
In February 2026, the channel ran from Araghchi through an Omani intermediary to US Envoy Steve Witkoff, and from Witkoff directly to Trump. Not analysis. Instinct. Between deal-closers, there is one question: yes or no.
Witkoff did not know how to package maybe. When he reported that Iran’s proposal was, according to Channel 12, “bullshit designed to buy time,” he was not describing a bridgeable gap. He was describing a feeling. A career diplomat would have found maneuvering room in that same conversation. Witkoff did not know that room existed.
Araghchi believed he was still negotiating. He was already inside the debrief that ended it.
Failure four: A general fighting the last war
Trump set a deadline of 10-15 days. It passed February 26 without a strike. Geneva continued. Khamenei watched and reinforced his read: Trump wants a deal more than a confrontation. The pressure is tactical, not intentional.
That read was empirical, not ideological. Khamenei had wa tched every American president since Carter arrive loud and leave with a compromise. Trump himself pulled back from a strike in 2019 with planes already airborne. The experience that was supposed to teach Khamenei to read the room taught him the wrong lesson. What he missed was a president who went to war on February 28 without congressional authorization, notifying only the Gang of Eight hours before the strikes began. Khamenei was analyzing a general who had fought a different war.
The tragedy that is not irony
It is tempting to read this as irony: a man who entered negotiations to survive dies because they failed. But irony implies something else was possible. It was not.
Khamenei almost certainly did not understand that the proverbial door was closing.
The expired deadline and continued talks told him there was still time. But if you had asked him which ending he preferred, the answer was clear.
A man who built his legitimacy on the Karbala narrative understands that some deaths strengthen and some deaths erase. Surrender on American terms would have destroyed everything he built.
Regime collapse from within, as his advisors warned in January, would have been the most ignoble end possible. Death in an American-Israeli airstrike is exactly the story he spent his life constructing. He did not seek it. But he would have accepted it.
This is not ironic. It is structural determinism. Two mechanisms met in Geneva without knowing the other existed. Khamenei brought one that prevented him from signing – a narrative in which any real concession ends legitimacy. Witkoff and Kushner brought one that prevented them from hearing maybe: the instinct of deal-closers, not the patience of negotiators. Neither side planned for failure. But when the person holding the button sees no room to close, the next move is not another round.
Who pays?
Khamenei’s fate was sealed, even if he didn’t know it. Trump will declare victory and go home. The people of Iran did not choose any of this.
January 2026 proved the street is ready. What is missing is not courage. Trump spoke directly to Iranians in his pre-recorded message: “When we are finished, take over your government. It is yours to take.” The opportunity has been declared. But there stands the question no one has answered: who helps translate that will into governance? There is no prepared network, no recognized alternative leadership, no visible commitment from Washington to the day after.
“The main game is being played at the level of signals,” Nour News said before the strikes. Now that the signals have become bombs, a question is being asked that no one prepared an answer for: what comes next?■
Aviram Bellaishe, a leading expert in regional geopolitics, Middle Eastern affairs, and Arabic language and culture, who served for 27 years in Israel’s security apparatus, is the vice president of the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs.