Iran's new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is governing without public speeches or released audio. Since succeeding his father in March he has worked through written decrees and a sequence of reported meetings with senior officials, a style shaped in part by security advice after he was injured in the February strike that killed Ali Khamenei.

Early meetings in May and August mainly reassured Iranians that the new leader was alive and active. A tighter cluster of four meetings in October, spanning parliament, the judiciary, the national security apparatus and the military, looks more like a decision system coming online. Those talks followed appointments that replaced commanders killed in the war, including a new armed forces chief of staff and a new Revolutionary Guard commander, and the elevation of Mohsen Rezaei as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council.

The timing tracks external mediation. After Pakistani, Qatari, Saudi and Turkish envoys shuttled compromise ideas to Tehran, meetings with Iran's chief negotiator and with Rezaei were announced in quick succession. Messages from those sessions run in parallel: conditions for ending a draining state of neither war nor peace, and orders for immediate retaliation if attacks resume. Washington still wants nuclear concessions before talks restart; Tehran wants the naval blockade eased, frozen assets freed and oil exports restored.

Comparisons with the long consultations before the 2015 nuclear deal are tempting but imperfect. Then the process stretched over years under sanctions. Now the window is compressed amid open conflict. The machinery of consultation appears to be working. Whether it can deliver a settlement as consequential as 2015, while the leader himself stays unseen, remains the open question in Tehran.