Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has blocked President Masoud Pezeshkian's key appointments and erected a security cordon around Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, according to a report from Iran International that Fox News Digital detailed this week. The report describes a regime in which the military wing now calls the shots, and the elected president cannot even get the supreme leader on the phone.
Sources told Iran International that Pezeshkian has reached a "complete political deadlock." His effort to appoint a new intelligence minister collapsed after IRGC commander Ahmad Vahidi directly pressured the rejection of proposed candidates, including former Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan. Vahidi reportedly insisted that under wartime conditions, all critical and sensitive positions must be chosen and managed directly by the Revolutionary Guard until further notice.
That is not a subtle bureaucratic maneuver. It is a military organization telling an elected head of state to stand down.
Under Iran's system, the president traditionally nominates an intelligence minister only after securing approval from the supreme leader. But Fox News Digital reported that Pezeshkian repeatedly sought an urgent meeting with Mojtaba Khamenei and was unable to establish contact. The condition and whereabouts of the supreme leader have been unclear in recent weeks, and a "military council" now controls access to the center of power.
That detail alone should alarm anyone tracking the regime's internal stability. A sitting president, unable to reach the man who theoretically outranks him, while a military body decides who gets through the door. As we have previously reported, questions about Mojtaba Khamenei's capacity and the IRGC's role as puppet master have been building for months.
Iran International's report also stated that some of Mojtaba Khamenei's own associates are trying to push out Ali Asghar Hejazi, a powerful security official inside the office of the supreme leader. Hejazi had warned members of the Assembly of Experts that Mojtaba lacked the qualifications to become supreme leader. He argued that hereditary succession would violate principles laid out by his father, Ali Khamenei, and that installing Mojtaba would hand the country to the Revolutionary Guard while sidelining civilian institutions.
That warning now looks prophetic.
Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Fox News Digital that the IRGC's consolidation was a long time coming:
"It was always a matter of when, not if, the IRGC was going to step forward even more than it has in the last three decades."
Ben Taleblu cautioned against reading the situation as a sudden seizure of power. He pushed back on the idea that what's unfolding amounts to a military coup:
"But it's a mistake to assume this is some sort of coup. This has been the process in Iran for years now, as the regime has chosen conflict over cooperation and emboldened its security forces at every juncture."
In other words, the IRGC didn't storm the presidential palace. It didn't need to. The regime built this outcome over decades, conflict by conflict, appointment by appointment, until the military wing became the only institution that mattered. The Guard was created after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. It now controls major sections of Iran's economy. The U.S. State Department has designated it a foreign terrorist organization.
The regime's use of AI-doctored images to conceal the supreme leader's condition only deepens the picture of a government where appearances are manufactured and the real power operates behind a curtain of military secrecy.
Foreign policy analyst and journalist Lisa Daftari offered a blunt assessment of what Vahidi's expanded authority means for the regime's direction. She told Fox News Digital:
"By any standard, Vahidi is considered a radical even within the regime's hardline elite, and his rise is a warning that Tehran's war machine now calls the shots."
Pezeshkian was elected in 2025 on promises of moderation and reform. Those promises now look hollow, not because Pezeshkian necessarily lied, but because the system never intended to let him deliver. The IRGC has made clear that the president's job description does not include choosing who runs intelligence, and possibly much else.
Ben Taleblu made the point sharply when asked about concerns over Pezeshkian being sidelined:
"Those who worry about Pezeshkian's potential sidelining need to consider what he realistically was or wasn't able to do mere months ago when the regime slaughtered 40,000 Iranians in the streets."
That figure, 40,000, is Ben Taleblu's characterization of the regime's brutality against its own people. It is a reminder that the IRGC's dominance is not merely a matter of internal bureaucratic jockeying. It is enforced through violence against Iranian citizens who dare to dissent.
All of this is unfolding against rising tensions between Washington and Tehran. President Donald Trump has issued stern warnings, threatening to "take out their bridges and power plants" if ongoing peace talks fail. A U.S. Navy destroyer recently intercepted an Iranian-flagged cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz, a move that underscored the military dimension of the standoff.
The diplomatic track has been active as well, with the administration pushing hard for a ceasefire while keeping military options visible. The question is whether anyone on the Iranian side has the authority to negotiate, or whether the IRGC has made that decision for everyone.
Iran's mission to the United Nations declined to comment on the Iran International report.
That silence is telling. When a government's diplomatic arm won't address reports that its military has sidelined its elected president, the silence functions as confirmation, or at least as an admission that no one in Tehran's civilian government is authorized to push back.
Several questions hang over the situation. Beyond the intelligence minister post, which specific presidential appointments did the IRGC block? What evidence supports the claim that a military council now controls access to the supreme leader? And what is Mojtaba Khamenei's actual condition? Reports that government communications are being prevented from reaching him suggest a leader who is either incapacitated, isolated, or both. As we have covered extensively, the external military pressure from Washington adds another variable to an already unstable equation.
A banner featuring Mojtaba Khamenei alongside senior IRGC commanders was displayed in Tehran as recently as March 14, 2026. The imagery tells you everything about who the regime wants the public to see as the real power. It is not the president.
For years, Western diplomats and credulous foreign-policy commentators treated Iran's presidential elections as meaningful indicators of the regime's direction. Every so-called "moderate" president was greeted as a potential partner for engagement. Pezeshkian was the latest in that line, elected on reform promises, now unable to appoint his own cabinet without permission from a military commander who answers to no voter.
The IRGC's dominance over Tehran's decision-making has consequences far beyond Iran's borders. A regime run by its military wing, designated by the United States as a terrorist organization, is not a regime that moderates. It is a regime that escalates, until someone makes escalation too costly.
The fiction of civilian governance in Iran has been thinning for decades. What's left now is barely a pretense.
