Hussein Bastani

BBC

Masoud Pezeshkian recently pointed to a "six-member team" in the Iranian government that "has the authority to make decisions and the decisions are implemented in coordination with each other" regarding the current crisis with the United States.

Following the publication of these statements in an interview with CBS, Iran's official media published reports on the composition of the six-member team, which were mostly identical for five of the members and different for the sixth member. The fixed part of the narratives often focused on the president, the parliament speaker, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, the chief of staff of the armed forces, and the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, although some considered the sixth person to be the head of the judiciary and some the foreign minister.

Masoud Pezeshkian's reference to the existence of this team was, of course, important, but this reference was not the first time, nor a sign of a major change in the macro decision-making structure, or, for example, the establishment of an institution of equal importance to the Supreme National Security Council.