In an October 14 editorial titled "America has no embassy in Iran, but it has dozens of ambassadors," Kayhan editor Hossein Shariatmadari, the supreme leader's representative at the paper, argued that Iranians who advance positions favorable to Washington are effectively serving as its envoys. He singled out former foreign minister Javad Zarif, accusing him of selling "surrender" as "honorable peace."

Former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili pressed the same line, saying those who spent years arguing that negotiations would solve Iran's problems should now "be ashamed."

Why it matters

The dispute over whether to negotiate is not new. What has changed is the vocabulary. Advocates of talks are no longer described as naive or mistaken but as agents of the enemy. That is the language the security apparatus uses for protesters it calls "mercenaries" and uprisings it calls "coups."

When that framing is applied to former senior officials, it narrows the room for disagreement inside the system to almost nothing, at the moment the leadership most needs to decide how to respond to war and economic collapse. Infighting of this kind rarely produces better decisions. It produces fewer people willing to propose them.