Israel’s killings of Ali Larijani and Kamal Kharazi were meant to do more than remove two senior figures from the Islamic Republic’s political landscape. Within Tehran’s political and analytical circles, they were interpreted as an attempt to erase something less visible but more consequential: the regime’s ability to speak the language of compromise. They were also part of a broader pattern: the disappearance of the men who once helped Tehran speak to the outside world.
Larijani had long served as a translator between Iran’s hard power and the diplomatic idiom required to manage it abroad. Kharazi, a former foreign minister with decades of experience, acted as a gatekeeper of strategic signalling. Both men had, for years, served as top foreign policy advisors to the late Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Their killing, at first glance, appeared to confirm a shift toward a narrower, more rigid order, one in which diplomacy would be eclipsed by the logic of the battlefield.
And yet the regime did not break.
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