The US and Iran have returned to the brink of conflict after an exchange of strikes on July 7, just three weeks after the two sides had signed a framework deal to end their hostilities. In comments made ahead of the Nato summit in Turkey, Donald Trump declared the ceasefire “over” and added that further talks would be “a waste of time”.

This development will be welcomed by some members of the Iranian political system who have resisted the agreement. The vice-chairman of the Iranian parliament’s National Security Commission, Mahmoud Nabavian, for example, warned in June that the deal would turn Iran into a “colony of the United States”.

Iranian MP Kamran Ghazanfari, meanwhile, referred to government claims that Iran had won the war as a “blatant lie”. He accused the Iranian parliament speaker and chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, of keeping parliament closed to protect the government and negotiators from criticism.

Nabavian and Ghazanfari are part of what is known in the west as the “hardline” faction of Iranian politics.

Hardliners are usually defined as members of the Iranian elite who defend the religious principles of the 1979 revolution and reject social liberalisation and diplomatic engagement with western nations. However, in reality, the stance of hardliners is more varied than the label suggests.

The hardliners are a loose alignment of several constituencies. These include the Paydari Front in parliament, to which Nabavian and Ghazanfari belong, as well as sections of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the economic conglomerates linked to it.

They also include the........

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