The hardest party to manage in the Iran talks isn’t Iran
Sometime this spring, at the height of Washington’s most delicate Middle East negotiations in a generation, American officials did something for which the US-Israel relationship
Sometime this spring, at the height of Washington’s most delicate Middle East negotiations in a generation, American officials did something for which the US-Israel relationship offers scarcely any precedent: they quietly asked other governments to warn Iran of a possible Israeli plot to assassinate Tehran’s two chief negotiators. That is the substance of a New York Times report published earlier this month; two US officials have confirmed the warnings to CNN, while Israel has dismissed the report as a fabrication. Washington feared Israel was plotting to kill Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the men leading Iran’s side of the talks. Unable to order its ally to stand down, Washington warned its adversary about its friend. Whether or not a plot existed, the decisive fact is the conduct: Washington judged the danger real enough to act on, and acted. In this phase, Washington’s most difficult task is not simply keeping Iran at the table; it is preventing its closest ally from removing the table altogether. The hardest party to manage is not the one Washington spent two decades treating as an implacable enemy. It is the one it arms. A pattern, not a hypothetical According to the Times, Israeli strikes earlier in the war killed Ali Larijani, then secretary of Iran’s Supreme Security Council, and Kamal Kharazi, a former foreign minister and foreign policy adviser to the supreme leader—both pragmatic figures involved in the talks and people Washington had hoped to negotiate with. The channel today runs through Araghchi and Ghalibaf partly because the men who might otherwise have led it are dead. Ghalibaf himself has reportedly survived two Israeli assassination attempts, one in the 12-day war of June 2025 and one this year, when Israel struck a bunker where senior officials were meeting. The spoiler playbook fails when the spoiler is a friend Conflict-resolution scholarship calls actors who see a peace process as a threat and act to destroy it “spoilers”. Political scientist Stephen Stedman’s foundational work observed that spoilers outside a process are the more dangerous kind, bearing no cost when talks collapse and gaining what they want when they do. The literature is also precise about timing: spoilers strike when a process nears real achievement, or when a charged symbolic moment can turn an incident into a rupture.
By that standard, the funeral period created almost textbook conditions for spoiling. The US-Iran track had just produced an interim agreement to halt the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. At the same time, Iran was holding days of public mourning for the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, killed on the war’s first day, with the processions overlapping with US Independence Day. Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz had declared Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, marked for death, while Araghchi had promised a forceful response and demanded that Washington restrain its ally. So acute was the danger that Mojtaba Khamenei stayed away from the public funeral ceremonies for his own father. A diplomatic process nearing a breakthrough had collided with a moment of maximum political and symbolic exposure: precisely the kind of opening the spoiler literature warns about. Everything the literature prescribes for managing spoilers, including inducement, socialisation and coercion, was designed for adversaries. None of it fits the distinctive and under-examined configuration Washington now faces, in which the suspected spoiler is the ally at the centre of its regional strategy. Coercing Israel is politically unthinkable in Washington. Inducing it is redundant; it already receives the full package. Socialising it into a process that its officials regard as a strategic disaster because it forecloses regime change and releases funds to Tehran is a contradiction in terms. Israeli reporting explains why. An investigation recently published by Israeli news site Ynet documented how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office pressured its own intelligence establishment to certify inflated assessments of the war’s achievements, over objections from officers and scientists; the investigation described the agreement as a very bad one for Israel. If the war’s declared achievements outran its actual ones, a durable agreement is not merely unwelcome to Israel; it is narratively dangerous, because every month the process survives is an audit of the victory Israelis were told they won. Israel is not the only spoiler pressing on the process; Iran’s system has produced internal ones. Days after the memorandum was signed, strikes on Gulf targets continued, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) threatened to abandon the talks, even as the government that signed it defended the negotiating process.
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