Iran has not yet announced who will represent it in this weekend’s talks with the United States, which will be led by Vice President J.D. Vance, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.
Many senior regime officials have been killed in U.S. and Israeli attacks, including those who played key roles in previous negotiations and the country’s former supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei.
The three officials who may represent Tehran at the talks in Pakistan are:
Mohammad Berger Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament and former mayor of Tehran, has emerged as a key interlocutor with the Trump administration throughout the war, and some Iranian media reports have suggested that he could be the one to lead this round of negotiations.
Ghalibaf, a regime insider with a reputation for suppressing dissent, joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a teenager and has dedicated his life to the Islamic Republic. He once boasted of hitting a protester with a “wooden stick.”
Ali Baez, director of the International Crisis Group’s Iran project, told CNN that Ghalibaf has “qualities that are important to Tehran: his Revolutionary Guards pedigree, his ties to the regime, his pragmatic instincts for maintaining power.” But he is allied with the regime, not the United States, Baez said.
“If he rises further, Iran is likely to become even more militarized than moderate.”
Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister since 2024, is a career diplomat who travels around the world negotiating on behalf of the Iranian government, making him one of its main international spokespeople. He spent three years in the UK in the 1990s, where he completed a PhD in political thought. His supervisor told the London Times that Araguchi felt “safe in this country” and got along well with other students.
Araghchi is known for being tough but pragmatic in a wide range of engagements with the West, including during the talks that led to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Despite negotiations with the United States, Araghchi has been a staunch defender of the regime and publicly supported the violent crackdown on protesters earlier this year.
Iranian President Massoud Pezeshkian is Iran’s second-highest official and head of government, but his presidential authority has eroded in recent years in a country where the clerical and military elites hold the real reins of power. Pezeshkian, a former surgeon, advocates modest political and social reforms in Iran but remains loyal to the regime.
Earlier this month, he wrote an open letter to the American people asking whether the war was truly in their interests.
