Trump claims Iran’s regime is fractured. The reality is more complicated. | CNN

“Seriously fractured” is how President Donald Trump described the Iranian government when he extended a ceasefire to give it time to come up with a “unified” proposal. Iran’s failure to show up in Pakistan for a second round of talks with Vice President JD Vance showed just how disjointed the leadership had become, the White House argued. Observers of Iran see things differently. Iran has insisted that the United States must end its blockade of Iranian ports before talks can resume, and many analysts say the leadership is more cohesive than is being portrayed. “I think that’s a serious misreading of the Iranian leadership,” Mehrat Kamrava, a professor of government at Georgetown University Qatar, told CNN’s Becky Anderson. “The leadership has been quite cohesive, and we’ve seen this in the conduct of the war and the negotiation.” Governance in Iran has become far more complicated since the United States and Israel eliminated most of the regime’s top military and political leaders, including Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A group of once-competing officials from across the Islamic Republic’s political spectrum is now deciding the country