Israel has for more than two decades and several US presidencies worked to draw the United States into a full-scale war with Iran.
Having finally achieved that, the last thing it wants is Trump declaring victory and going home, as he is prone to do.
Ali Larijani was the figure most capable of handing Trump a negotiated exit with something to show for it.
Without Larijani, the road to an exit gets considerably narrower.
Prem Panicker continues his must read daily blog on the Gulf War.
Ali Larijani wrote his doctoral thesis on Immanuel Kant.
He had been an IRGC commander, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, speaker of parliament for a decade, and in the weeks since the war began, the de facto leader of a country whose supreme leader had been killed on the first day of battle.
Key Points
- Ali Larijani played a central role in building consensus across factions and enabling potential negotiations to end the war.
- Analysts suggest his killing may have been deliberate to prevent a negotiated exit and prolong the conflict.
- His absence strengthens hardliners in Iran, reducing chances of compromise and narrowing diplomatic pathways.
Larijani was, by any measure, the Islamic Republic's most complete political animal.
The only position missing from his resume, as one analyst noted, was the presidency itself.
He was also, it now appears, the last Iranian leader with whom a deal aimed at a quick end to the war was possible.
Israel killed him overnight. His son died alongside him. Iran confirmed it on Tuesday.
The IRGC Aerospace Force commander announced a 'rapid strike' in retaliation within hours: 'Tonight, the enemy's sky will become more spectacular for you.'
The significance of this killing is not primarily military. Larijani was not running missile batteries.
What he was running, quietly, carefully, across decades of accumulated credibility, was the possibility of an exit.
As Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute writes, Larijani was not so much a decision-maker as a consensus-maker: The one figure who could bring Iran's fractious factions to a negotiating table and make an agreement stick.
He had been in quiet contact with senior Trump administration officials as recently as December, working to prevent the war.
He was the back channel.
Iran Backchannel to Trump
CNN reports that as recently as September last year, he was the US and Israel's preferred transitional candidate for post-war Iran.
One day after the war broke out, he hardened his public posture.
'We will burn their hearts,' he wrote on social media.
'We will make the Zionist criminals and the shameless Americans regret their actions.'
From that day on, vowing that Iran would 'deliver an unforgettable lesson' to the aggressors, he took a front seat in the war's political management, walked through crowds in Tehran at the Al-Quds Day rally last Friday in a visible act of defiance.
The question that hangs over this killing is the one Parsi asks directly: Was this deliberate?
Israel has for more than two decades and several US presidencies worked to draw the United States into a full-scale war with Iran.
Having finally achieved that, the last thing it wants is Trump declaring victory and going home, as he is prone to do.
Larijani was the figure most capable of handing Trump a negotiated exit with something to show for it.
Without him, the road to an exit gets considerably narrower.
Was Killing Strategically Deliberate?
What or who replaces him?
We have seen this pattern each time a moderate or pragmatist has been removed from the Iranian system: A younger, more hardline leader emerges; one who has no institutional memory of compromise and no incentive to seek one.
In yesterday's blog, I had written of the IRGC inner circle around new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.
Taeb, Vahidi, Jafari, Ghalibaf constitute an inner core of the hardest of the hardliners.
Larijani was the counterweight. He is gone now.
- The New Fog of War
- Has US Repeated Its Iraq Mistake?
- Hormuz Crisis Threatens Global Economy
- Iran War Exposes Washington's Strategic Chaos
- Iran Plays Hardball With India's Hormuz Requests
- Trump Is Caught Between Two Bad Options
- Iran Rewrites Rules of War
Hardliners Rise After Larijani
President Masoud Pezeshkian, another moderate who has been largely sidelined since the war began, is simply not of sufficient stature to build the coalition an Iranian off-ramp would require.
Wars end when both sides can find a face-saving path out. Israel has just killed the man who knew where that path was.
ON LARIJANI: FURTHER READING
Trita Parsi writes the essential piece on Larijani.
Parsi, one of the most clear-eyed analysts of US-Iran relations, lays out three possible Israeli motivations for the killing, and argues that the most consequential is the deliberate elimination of Trump's off-ramps.
'The Israelis have fought so hard to get the United States to go into a full-scale war with Iran for more than 20 years. It is in their interest to prolong this war as long as they can.'
The detail about Larijani's quiet outreach to Trump officials in December is critical. [Trita Parsi, Responsible Statecraft (external link)]
CNN's analysis is good on who Larijani actually was inside the system: A 'true insider who spent decades at the centre, which gave him credibility across different parts of the elite.'
The revelation that he was Washington and Israel's own preferred transitional candidate as recently as September 2025 gives this killing an almost Shakespearean irony. [CNN (external link)]
In its profile, Al Jazeera provides the biographical backstory.
The Larijanis were so embedded in the revolutionary establishment that in 2009, Time used the phrase the 'Kennedys of Iran' to refer to them in a profile written by Robin Wright (external link).
Larijani married into Khomeini's inner circle; understanding who he was makes the loss, and the deliberateness of targeting him, clearer. [Al Jazeera (external link)]
The National frames Larijani as the power behind the throne who became the throne itself, and captures the essential contradiction of his character: the philosopher who was also an enforcer. [The National (external link)]
Haaretz has a character study of Larijani that explores his intellectual life, which most reportage tends to ignore (outside of pointing out that he wrote his PhD thesis on Kant. Haaretz suggests that Larijani's philosophical training shaped his strategic training. [Haaretz (external link)]
IranWire's piece is more pointed, and politically sharper, casting Larijani as a figure engineered for times of crisis.
Unlike other pieces, this one frames him as an outcome of regime design. [The National (external link)]
A Reuters piece tracks Larijani's pragmatism within Iran's hardline structure, and shows how he bridges clerical authority, military power, and diplomacy.
It is also good on his dual reputation: abroad, he is seen as the pragmatic negotiator and within Iran, as the suppressor. [Reuters (external link)]
In a more analytic, structural essay, Political Society argues that the Iranian regime cultivates shadow figures for times of crisis and thus uses him as a case study in institutional resilience. [Political Society (external link)]
In more immediate obituaries, the ones worth reading are from Reuters, which frames him as the ultimate backroom powerbroker, and The Guardian, which suggests that his loss could well prove to be more destabilising than that of Ali Khamenei. [Reuters (external link), Guardian (external link)]
The most practical question in the aftermath of Larijani's killing comes from Bloomberg.
Golnar Motivali asks, who is left in Tehran that Washington can actually talk to?
The answer, in this short and unsentimental piece, is not reassuring. [Bloomberg, paywalled (external link)] Related, an NYT news analysis asks whether Israel's targeted assassinations of key Iranian leaders will work. 'Decapitation has its limits' is the core of this piece. [New York Times (external link), paywalled]
India Feels War Shockwaves
THE RIPPLE
While diplomats and analysts in Washington and Tel Aviv parse the strategic implications of Larijani's killing, in Kolkata's Shyambazar neighborhood a sweet shop manager named Netai Dholey is calculating how many days of gas he has left. The answer is, two.
After that, he says, he will shut shop and go back to his village.
CarbonCopy has done something this week that most English-language war coverage has not: sent reporters to the Malur industrial area outside Bengaluru, to Howrah and Kolkata, to Delhi's Amar Colony and Jaipur's Vishwakarma Industrial Area, to ask what Operation Epic Fury actually costs at street level in India.
The portrait that emerges is of an economy being stressed from multiple directions simultaneously, and of an already fragile country walking into this quagmire.
India gets roughly 85 per cent of its LPG, 55 per cent of its crude, and 60 per cent of its LNG from the Persian Gulf.
When the Strait of Hormuz becomes a war zone, those numbers become concrete: They are the gas cylinder that a street food vendor in Amar Colony needs to open tomorrow morning, the LPG that an autorickshaw driver in Bangur has been queuing four hours a day to obtain and paying Rs 4,500 for a cylinder that cost Rs 1,500 a month ago.
The Indian government, in the first week of the conflict, diverted LPG supplies from commercial users to households.
The logic was defensible. Both politically and otherwise. Equally, the consequences were immediate.
Eateries, sweet shops, auto drivers, the base of India's informal economy, found themselves scrambling.
Black markets emerged within days. In Howrah, a gas dealer confirms the going rate is Rs 4,500 a cylinder.
In Delhi, the manufacturing federation reports that factories that once ran all day now struggle to run twelve hours.
In Jaipur, an industry association representing 5,000 units says its members have stopped accepting new orders.
Plastic granules, petrochemicals, inputs for soaps and detergents: the supply chains are tightening across sectors that most people do not think of as energy-dependent at all.
The CarbonCopy piece ends on a note that deserves to be read slowly: Families, hostels and eateries have begun switching to firewood after just two weeks.
If the conflict continues, India's already-stressed forests enter what the reporters call 'a perilous new era'.
This is what it looks like when a war in West Asia lands in an economy that never finished recovering from demonetisation, GST disruption, and Covid, one after another, each eating into working capital that was never fully rebuilt.
This is not India's war, but its costs are arriving in India's kitchens, workshops, and auto queues, one cylinder at a time.
[Read the full CarbonCopy report (external link)]
And that is not all...
If Carbon Copy captures the first tremors inside the kitchen, the rest of the reporting over the past day suggests how quickly those tremors are travelling outward into systems, sectors, and livelihoods that are less visible, but no less vulnerable.
A Reuters piece sketches the underlying architecture of the crisis.
Tankers are delayed, supplies are tightening, and the state has moved into a familiar mode of triage: shield households, squeeze industrial users.
What sits beneath this is a structural fragility: India's overwhelming dependence on LPG flows through a narrow geopolitical corridor, with little in the way of strategic reserves.
The disruption, in other words, is baked into the system. [Reuters (external link)]
From there, the story fragments into a series of localised shocks.
The Times of India reports that in Kerala, a small but telling signal is beginning to manifest.
Many hotels, including five-stars, have suspended their lunch and dinner buffets and drastically cut down on the breakfast buffet. [Times of India (external link)]
A companion piece talks of how staples like dosas, pooris and rotis are disappearing from menus across India. [Economic Times (external link)]
In parts of Karnataka, the crisis is pushing into the domain of welfare.
From Koppal comes a report that the midday meal scheme has been disrupted for 5,000 children, that medical college kitchens have been shut, and restaurants are switching to firewood for cooking. [Times of India (external link)].
ToI also has a story that reminds us that the kitchen is also an economic node, and that its disruptions can cascade into employment.
Restaurant staff are facing salary cuts and layoffs, the report says. [Times of India (external link)]
The Economic Times report says that the fuel shortage is mutating into a supply-chain problem.
Stresses are building in sectors far removed from cooking: Air-conditioners, plastics, manufacturing inputs. And this is happening just as India heads toward peak summer demand, in an El Nino year. [Economic Times (external link)]
And at the macro level, there are signs that a wider drag on the economy is beginning to manifest, with inflationary pressures not far behind. [Economic Times (external link)]
Taken together, says Businessworld, these fragments resolve into a pattern.
The crisis is moving along predictable lines: from chokepoint to fuel, from fuel to kitchen, from kitchen to labour, and from there into industry and the wider economy.
What makes this moment distinct is the speed of that transmission.
What would once have taken weeks is now visible within days. [Businessworld (external link)]
And thus the ramifications expand, through the kitchen into the networks that sustain it, and the systems that depends on it.
From inside Trump's coalition:
Joe Kent, Trump's director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned this week over the Iran war, becoming the first senior administration figure to do so.
The resignation has cracked open a fissure in the MAGA movement.
Candace Owens and Megyn Kelly, both of whom have broken with Trump on other issues, posted publicly in support of Kent.
Joe Rogan, who endorsed Trump in 2024 and says he still texts with him occasionally, called the war 'crazy', 'insane', and said Americans feel 'betrayed'.
Trump, Rogan said, 'ran on no more wars; end these stupid, senseless wars'.
The White House's response has been to call Kent's resignation 'a good thing'.
That is the sound of an administration that has not yet felt enough political pain to change course but is beginning to hear the rumblings. Here are some essential reads:
Kent's resignation letter is embedded within this NYT piece, and is worth reading in full. [New York Times (external link), paywalled]
The Washington Post paints Kent as a decorated war veteran, a CIA hand, and an anti-interventionist, and frames the resignation as the first high-level rupture over the Iran war. [Washington Post (external link), paywalled]
The Guardian has a clear-eyed 'who is this man?' piece that talks not merely of his war record, but also of his ties to far-right networks and conspiracy ecosystems.
What this piece does is it prevents us from reading the resignation as a clear moral stand, and situates it in the realm of far-right populism. [The Guardian (external link)]
The Atlantic dissects the core claim of Kent's letter, which is, that Trump did not so much chose the war as he was manipulated into it.
The piece also identifies a contradiction in MAGA (and by extension, all authoritarian) thinking: The leader must at the same time be seen as strong, but also not responsible for failures. [The Atlantic (external link), paywalled]
Semafor details the fissures inside the MAGA movement and frames Kent's resignation not as a one-off, but as a stress test of the movement. [Semafor (external link)]
In passing...
Larijani's last public message, posted Monday, was addressed to Muslim-majority nations watching from the sidelines: 'You know that America has no loyalty to you, and that Israel is your enemy. Which side are you on?'
Twenty-four hours later, he was assassinated.
The war that both sides were, however tentatively, beginning to feel their way out of has just become harder to end. The off-ramps are narrowing. The hardliners on both sides are getting stronger.
And in Shyambazar, a sweet shop has just two days of gas left.
- The New Fog of War
- Has US Repeated Its Iraq Mistake?
- Hormuz Crisis Threatens Global Economy
- Iran War Exposes Washington's Strategic Chaos
- Iran Plays Hardball With India's Hormuz Requests
- Trump Is Caught Between Two Bad Options
- Iran Rewrites Rules of War
Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff
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