No Face Left to Save: The Endgame of Iran’s Khomeinist Regime

In a recent exclusive with IranWire, a high-ranking Iranian diplomat confessed what the world has long suspected but rarely heard from the mouth of the regime itself: the Islamic Republic is willing to abandon uranium enrichment—not out of moral reckoning or diplomatic enlightenment, but because it is cornered. The regime is out of options, out of time, and, most damningly, out of credibility. “The real priority of the Supreme Leader and our government is survival,” the diplomat admitted. Not dignity, not sovereignty, not peace—just raw, naked survival.

But survival at what cost? And for whom?

This sudden desperation to appear “reasonable,” to feign humanity and practicality, comes 46 years too late. Forty-six years of repression, executions, economic ruin, institutionalized misogyny, destruction of art, press, culture, and civil society. Forty-six years of torturing its best and brightest, looting the nation’s wealth, turning Iran from a respected member of the international community into a pariah state ruled by clerics who answered to no one but themselves.

And now, in the ruins of Tehran’s skyline, scarred by Israeli airstrikes that targeted both military installations and regime propaganda centers, the same architects of this national catastrophe come forward and ask for a "face-saving solution."

There is no face left to save.

The Islamic regime in Iran chose war over peace, proxy terror over diplomacy, and control over compassion. Instead of striking a deal with the millions of Iranians who took to the streets—chanting for freedom, dignity, and a chance at a normal life—it crushed them. It chose bullets over ballots. It chose to enrich uranium instead of the lives of its people, plunging the country into cyclical poverty, exile, and fear.

The diplomat, formerly of the intelligence services, pleads now not as a representative of the regime, but as a “concerned citizen.” He speaks of “new realities” and “the priority to save the system.” The system. Not the people. Not the country. Not the soul of Iran, which has been trampled for generations by those who wore turbans of authority and cloaks of deceit.

And now that same regime is looking abroad—toward the very West it has demonized for decades—for a savior. The diplomat places his last hope in Donald Trump, suggesting that he alone might be able to end this escalating war with Israel. “Let’s put an end to this death and destruction quickly,” he says.

But the destruction did not begin last Friday when Israeli missiles rained down on Tehran’s military and IRGC strongholds. It began in 1979, when the Islamic Republic hijacked a revolution and installed a theocracy masquerading as liberation.

They want to “negotiate a real deal now”? Where were the real deals when Iranian youth were hanged for dancing, when journalists were exiled or murdered, when women were beaten for showing their hair, when ethnic minorities were imprisoned or massacred, and when protesters—children included—were gunned down in cold blood?

This regime spent over a trillion dollars funding terror networks in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. It siphoned off public funds to enrich cronies and clerics while ordinary Iranians queued for meat, medicine, and a semblance of hope. That money—Iran's money—could have built hospitals, schools, scientific institutes, and cultural centers. Instead, it bought missiles, militias, and death.

Now, as Israeli strikes shake the foundations of their power, as smoke curls up from the shattered remains of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting building—whose reporters were still spewing anti-Israel propaganda as it burned—the regime's faithful mouthpieces stand in front of the rubble and recite the same tired scripts. They call this defiance. But it’s not courage. It’s delusion. Even as their city crumbles and their regime buckles, they cling to the fiction that loyalty to the Supreme Leader will somehow bring salvation.

Instead of joining their people—millions who long for an end to theocratic rule—they stand by the very regime that has doomed them.

The world should not be fooled. The Islamic regime in Iran is not suddenly negotiating in good faith. It is grasping at straws, hoping that the West will offer it a golden parachute, a path to redemption that spares its leaders from the fate they have earned. But any deal struck now would be a deal not with Iran, but with a decaying system built on repression and ruin.

There is only one legitimate deal left to make: a deal with the people of Iran—those who have lived in want and fear, who have been jailed, exiled, silenced, and shot. They are the ones who deserve a future, not the clerics in Qom or the generals in the IRGC.

History will not remember the Khomeinist regime for its defiance. It will remember it for its cruelty, its cowardice, and its final, futile groveling at the altar of survival.

A few million lives too late.