Iran’s Top Diplomat Is the Face of a Defiant Regime
Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi is a regime loyalist and relentless negotiator
Updated March 23, 2026 8:51 am ET
BERLIN—After strikes that decimated much of Iran’s leadership, the country’s top diplomat has become the chief messenger of a defiant regime.
Abbas Araghchi, 63 years old, has long been known in Western diplomatic circles as the lead negotiator, resisting pressure to accept strict limitations on Iran’s nuclear program. Now, with much of Iran’s leadership in hiding or dead, he is the most prominent voice of a government refusing to be cowed by the U.S. and Israeli military campaign.
President Trump said on Friday that he was considering winding down the war. On Monday, he said his administration had started talks with Iran and that Washington was postponing for five days his threat late Saturday to strike Iranian power stations. Iranian state media said Monday the country’s Foreign Ministry had denied any talks with Washington.
Araghchi, a veteran regime loyalist, publicly rejected talking to the U.S. in a recent interview with CBS News. In a bevy of TV interviews and social-media comments, he portrays Iran as a defiant victim fully capable of retaliating against unprovoked Israeli and American aggression.
In recent days, Araghchi has been threatening to escalate the war if Israel continues striking its energy infrastructure. “ZERO restraint if our infrastructure is attacked,” Araghchi said on X on Friday. A day earlier he said, “Our response to Israel’s attack on our infrastructure employed FRACTION of our power.”
Araghchi declined to comment for this article.
Araghchi’s prominence could translate into a greater role in Iran’s future. Those who know him say he’s ambitious, with an eye toward the presidency. He has been adept at building bridges across Iran’s rival factions, says Ali Vaez, Iran project director at conflict resolution organization International Crisis Group. Yet he lacks charisma and doesn’t have powerful blocs of political or popular support behind him like Ali Larijani, Iran’s security chief who was killed by Israel last week.
“He’s always been an implementer,” said Vaez. “Not somebody who was used to shaping policy.”
President Trump said on Friday that he is considering winding down the war. He said it isn’t clear that there are any leaders left alive who Washington could negotiate with.
Former U.S. officials who negotiated with Araghchi said he came off in meetings as professional, calm and pragmatic much of the time. But he also had a dark side. U.S., European and Gulf officials said he would sometimes make brash threats and revisit concessions he had appeared to accept, frustrating progress toward an agreement.
On the one hand, he could “do human,” said Wendy Sherman, a U.S. official who led negotiations with Iran in 2015, recalling times the two exchanged pictures of their grandchildren. Yet Araghchi’s trench-warfare negotiation tactics drove her to angry tears in the final hours of the nuclear talks, when he reopened a settled issue.
Araghchi laid out his own approach to diplomacy in one of his books, “The Power of Negotiation.” The grandson of a carpet merchant, he likened negotiations to bargaining in the Iranian bazaar, where endless haggling using different arguments brings results.
In the months leading up to the U.S. and Israeli campaign, senior Arab officials say Araghchi flitted between openness, at times joining friendly dinners, and menacing by appearing to imply Iran might attack its neighbors. At one point, he told Saudi officials that Iran would target the United Arab Emirates, which has an open split with Riyadh, if war broke out. At other moments, he suggested the kingdom was also in Iran’s sights if it didn’t prod Washington away from war, the officials said. Tehran eventually attacked both.
White House special envoy Steve Witkoff claimed that Araghchi proudly bragged that Iran had enough highly enriched uranium to produce 11 nuclear weapons in an attempt to menace the Americans. Araghchi denied the claim, noting that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium—and therefore the number of atomic bombs it could theoretically fuel—had been a matter of public record for years.
Once hostilities began, Araghchi struck a defiant tone over missile and drone attacks on Iran’s neighbors, even while he insisted he had no influence to stop them, the Arab officials say.
“We didn’t start this war,” he said in his CBS News interview. “It was an unprovoked, unwarranted, illegal act of aggression against us, and we continue to defend ourselves as much as it takes, and as long as it takes, in order to end this war in a way that it won’t be repeated in the future.”
Born in 1962 in Tehran to an affluent conservative merchant family, Araghchi was in the streets backing the Islamic Revolution in 1979. By the early 1980s, he volunteered in the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for the Iran-Iraq war. His worldview flows from those days, he was quoted saying in 2024.
“He has revolutionary bona fides,” said Sherman. “He is of tremendous use right now for the regime as the public face in America and I think internationally.”
Inside Iran, his deep knowledge of nuclear issues helped him become a hardline-linked figure who moved comfortably in the more moderate circles that forged the 2015 nuclear agreement under President Barack Obama. It was a marriage of convenience. Araghchi’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps links added political cover to the U.S.-educated former Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. Araghchi helped keep Zarif anchored to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s red lines.
“He didn’t much like the United States but he believed that it was in Iran’s national interest to reach a credible agreement,” said Richard Nephew, who negotiated with Araghchi on the nuclear deal and later under Joe Biden.
Araghchi worked on the nuclear file under three Iranian presidents, most recently Masoud Pezeshkian who took office in 2024. Pezeshkian turned to Araghchi to help deliver his promise of sanctions relief for the ailing economy.
While Araghchi has long agreed that Iran needed to engage with the West to relieve sanctions, some Iranian critics charge he has less of a grip on American politics than someone such as Zarif. That challenge might have hampered talks with the Trump administration, whose volatile foreign policy has unnerved even allies.
Araghchi has never given any indication of supporting political or social reform at home. He has publicly defended Tehran’s regular crackdowns on protesters.
“The one overarching objective for him was to remove sanctions to improve the economy of the Islamic Republic,” said Enrique Mora, the Spanish diplomat who chaired talks on reviving the nuclear deal from 2021.
Mora said Araghchi had deep knowledge of the nuclear file and a cultivated intellect. The two sat to discuss quantum physics and religion, he said. Yet Araghchi could deploy acid humor, anger and threats in talks, too.
“He can be merciless in getting his objectives in negotiations,” Mora said.