The funeral of Ayatollah Khamenei in Tehran drew massive crowds waving red flags of revenge and chanting no compromise, no surrender, only revenge. IRGC Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani declared that Americans should know their place and avoid confronting Muslims, that Trump is trembling, and that the United States should fear not only Hormuz but many other locations as well. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, whose government is serving as a principal mediator between the United States and Iran, eulogized Khamenei as a great scholar and leader of resilience, courage, and vision, and declared that Pakistan and Iran are brotherly countries whose hearts beat together and who will march together under all circumstances. Several American citizens also attended, including a former Elizabeth Warren staffer now working with Islamists in Lebanon, a social studies teacher and elected official from Orange County, Vermont who is a senior figure in the American Communist Party, and Moscow-backed journalist Jackson Hinkle, all of whom delivered statements rejecting American sovereignty and expressing solidarity with the Iranian revolution.
Steven Bucci, who served three decades as an Army Special Forces officer and senior Pentagon official and is now a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess what the funeral spectacle reveals about the state of negotiations and the reliability of America’s supposed partners.
On Pakistan’s role as mediator, Bucci said the Pakistanis have a long and storied history of playing both sides against the middle and cannot be treated as an honest broker for anyone but themselves. He noted that Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, was actively supporting the Taliban at the same time Pakistan’s military and political leadership was supposedly assisting the United States in the war on terror. Pakistan maintains close ties with China because both nations share hostility toward India. It maintains ties with radical Islamist movements because it has a substantial radical element within its own borders. He said nothing the Pakistanis arrange should be automatically rejected, as it might occasionally prove useful, but treating Pakistani-brokered agreements as trustworthy simply because the Pakistanis are nominally allied with the United States reflects a dangerous naivete.
On the funeral turnout and what it signals about prospects for internal Iranian revolution, Bucci cautioned against reading too much into the crowds. He compared it to public mourning displays in the Soviet Union and North Korea, where citizens who privately despised their leadership nevertheless performed grief on cue because the alternative was personal risk. He said a small percentage of attendees may genuinely believe the propaganda they have been fed since birth, but most adults in Iran have figured out that their situation is not enviable. He said the Iranian people should not be written off as regime loyalists based on performative public displays staged under coercive conditions.
On reports that Iran is planning to impose tolls on the Strait of Hormuz with the timing as the only open question, Bucci said the Trump administration will never accept Iranian tolling of the strait regardless of when it is attempted. He said if a presidential election rather than a midterm were approaching, he would be more concerned about a future Democratic administration accepting the arrangement as reasonable, but under Trump he does not expect tolling to be permitted to stand. He acknowledged the administration has been reluctant to offer significant military responses to date, but said the administration is likely still sorting out which Iranian voices represent actual decision-making authority versus which are provocative public statements designed to test American reactions while the real negotiating positions are communicated through different channels.
On the reported establishment by the Iranian Quds Force of a unit called Mokhtar that is working with Mexican drug cartels and elements of the Iranian diaspora to plan assassinations of US officials, potentially including the president, Bucci said he would have been very surprised if anyone could have told him with certainty that this was not already happening. He said the Quds Force and the drug cartels are natural allies united by hatred of the United States, that the cartels are well-armed, well-funded, and highly motivated, and that any Iranian diaspora member without firmly established anti-regime credentials is almost certainly already under surveillance by American intelligence services. He said the danger is real and significant but expressed confidence that intelligence agencies are actively monitoring the threat.
On the proposal to sell F-35 fighter jets to Turkey, Bucci said it is a bad bet. He said Erdogan is a Muslim Brotherhood adherent who wants to reconstitute Ottoman-era Turkish dominance over the Middle East, that he cannot be trusted, and that he talks out of both sides of his face on every issue. He said Turkey under Erdogan has not earned the kind of proprietary technology-sharing arrangements that NATO membership is supposed to entail, and that Erdogan’s ideological orientation alone should give sufficient pause regardless of whatever cash Turkey brings to the table. He noted that while he does not believe selling F-35s to Turkey would result in the technology being transferred to Iran, and that the United States retains the ability to neutralize those aircraft if necessary, the fundamental question is whether a NATO ally led by an Islamist with imperial ambitions should be given access to America’s most advanced military platform. His answer is no.
On JD Vance’s claim that Iranian leaders expressed interest in turning over a new leaf and acknowledged that forty-seven years of hostility toward the United States was a mistake, Bucci called it aspirational at best and embarrassing at worst. He said making such statements to the Iranians does not inspire compliance but rather encourages additional bad behavior, and that Vance is smart enough to know this. He said unless there is some deeper signal being sent to an audience he is not aware of, the statement makes no sense, and he suspects Vance will eventually have to recast it the same way he recast his earlier characterization of Trump as a Nazi when he joined the ticket.