Mohammad Khatami

I don't want to be super conspiratorial, but you know, we've been, you've been talking about this.

We've been watching this, this big split in between the IRGC stuff and the, um, and the political class, right? So you have Pezeshkian, now, um, Khatami, and Rafsanjani, all of them very publicly saying, "Well, dude, this is killing us.

We, we need to find an honorable off-ramp here." These, all three have used the word honorable.

Mm-hmm.

In Lebanon, the eighth round of talks in Rome between Israeli and Lebanese officials remains postponed until October, with Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz continuing to insist Israel will not withdraw from its southern Lebanon security zone until Hizballah disarms nationwide, a demand Hizballah continues to reject as tantamount to surrender.

And inside Iran, the political rift triggered by Kayhan editor Hossein Sheri Atmederi's accusations against former presidents Hassan Rouhani and Mohammad Khatami remains where it stood last week, with no formal action from the Assembly of Experts or the Supreme Leader's Office, though pro-regime rally participants have continued calling for consequences against the two former presidents.

Diplomatically, the Gulf remains split on how to handle Tehran even as the shipping crisis deepens, and China's role continues to draw attention as well.

At last week's BRICS summit in New Delhi, the United Arab Emirates held preliminary side conversations with Iranian officials, continuing a pattern of quiet engagement Abu Dhabi has pursued for years, even as Bahrain refuses any contact at all.

Also unresolved is the domestic political rift inside Iran itself, which has nothing to do with Washington directly but continues to shape how much room Iran's leadership has to make concessions at a table like the one that was supposed to convene in Salalah.

The Kayhan newspaper's editor has continued to describe former presidents Hassan Rouhani and Mohammad Khatami's calls for peace as dishonorable, and pro-regime rally participants have continued to call for Rouhani's prosecution, though no formal statement from the Assembly of Experts or the Supreme Leader's Office and no confirmed legal action has followed.

A leadership under that kind of internal pressure has less room to be seen making concessions to Gulf neighbors, which is part of the broader context behind Monday's postponed meeting.

The most significant piece of world reaction this weekend did not come from a single government, but from a summit.

Iran's promised restricted maritime zone near the Strait of Hormuz, first previewed by Supreme National Security Council Secretary Mohsen Rezaei using the phrase coming days, has now gone unfulfilled across eight consecutive episodes of this program and remains worth tracking closely.

We are also watching for any firmer day to emerge for the rescheduled Israel-Lebanon talks in Rome, for further developments in the standoff between Iran's hardline establishment and former Presidents Rouhani and Khatami over calls for a negotiated end to the war, and for any movement toward a first Chinese bank sanctions designation ahead of the Xi-Washington summit later this month.

Two additional items remain on our list from prior episodes.

There has been no fresh update on the investigation into the August attack near Erbil in Iraq's Kurdistan region, and the dispute over Qatari pilots' first raise in mid-August has seen no new movement since Doha's initial denial.

And finally, whether the Trump administration's decision to decline direct strikes on the Houthis holds if the situation along Yemen's Red Sea coast continues to deteriorate, particularly if Saudi oil exports themselves come under sustained rather than episodic threat in the weeks ahead – Beyond this week's developments, two longer-running stories remain unresolved and worth tracking.

Whether the domestic Iranian rift between hardline media figures and former Presidents Rouhani and Khatami over calls for peace moves from rhetoric into any formal investigation.

And whether Washington designates its first major Chinese bank for facilitating Iranian oil sales ahead of the September 24th meeting between President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Something that has.

And one of the interesting things about the reaction to 9/11 and what-- And you're correct, this understanding that we now have of this adversary that, uh, sees a civilizational conflict, was that you had the beginnings, the, the sort of beginnings of what ultimately became the Iran nuclear deal, which was the f- the first meetings of, uh, Jessica Matthews and others, uh, kind of in the foreign policy establishment that began crafting a new approach to a policy that said- our natural ally would be the Shia against those Sunnis.

And this is a, I think a fascinating kind of thing because one of the th- i- it's, it's a forgotten story at this point, but one of the things that was going on was that as the US was preparing for both Afghanistan and Iraq, there was a lot of intelligence that was coming in that the Iranians were actually targeting our forces [clears throat] while the official government of someone named Mohammad Khatami, who was, you know, I guess in theory a reformer, had been largely kind of, uh, kind of denuded at that point, um, I don't-- we don't need to kind of go down that road, was kind of giving...

There were, you know, there were, after 9/11, there were signs from the Iranian people that they were in solidarity, they thought it was a terrible crime, and that there were some things that the Iranians were willing to do in terms of rebuilding a post-Taliban Afghanistan.

And this was touted by, um, say the, um, the realist wing or the, the, the Richard Haass wing of the Bush administration as signs that there was this future alliance with Iran against its n- its natural confessional enemy in the Sunni.