Iranian President Hassan Rouhani (R), with Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif seated next to him, addresses the opening session of a two-day ministerial conference of the Economic Cooperation Organisation (ECO) in Tehran on November 26, 2013. (Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images)[/caption]
With world media fretting over the response of Iranian hardliners to the recent nuclear deal struck between Iran and the P5+1 in Geneva, it is worth noting that politicians and lawmakers in the country have overwhelmingly welcomed the news, despite pockets of isolated—if vocal—dissent.
It is, however, completely reasonable to have concerns about the implementation of this latest deal by the Iranians. The fact of the matter is that inside the Iranian regime one finds a variety of shades committed to the Islamist/nationalist dogma that has governed the country since 1979. Bitter regime infighting, subversive action and petty mischief among rivals is as old as the Islamic Republic itself. Each faction—known generally as “reformists,” “pragmatists,” “principalists”—look at the Geneva nuclear deal differently. As of today, however, not a single faction has openly renounced the deal Foreign Minister Javad Zarif reached with his counterparts from the P5+1 states.
The nuclear deal is not the endgame for pragmatists and reformists like President Hassan Rouhani and former President Mohammad Khatami. Rather, it is the first step of many aimed at improving Iran’s global reputation and ridding the country of its ‘rogue state’ image. It is therefore only one step—albeit a big one—in the direction of re-integrating Iran into not only the global economy, but also into the political mainstream both regionally and globally.
Iran has been at this juncture before. Khatami’s landslide victories in 1997 and 2001 were very closely related to his promise to drop the ‘rogue state’ image, to reach out to Iran’s neighbors and even to question that greatest of regime taboos, the established enmity toward the United States. Khatami, however, never managed to produce a strategic transformation in Iranian foreign policy despite his genuine vision for change and massive popular support. He strove, and even succeeded, in instances that captured many headlines, such as the reopening of embassies in Europe and the reorganization of the intelligence service. His intellectual call for “dialogue among civilizations” mesmerized many, but he also managed practical foreign policy successes, among them kick-starting a process of détente with Saudi Arabia.
However, Khatami’s domestic program damaged his foreign policy reforms. As he extended a hand to the world, he simultaneously pushed for political liberalization at home. It was this aspect of the Khatami presidency that truly unnerved Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who from about 2000 systematically blocked much of Khatami’s domestic and foreign agenda. To swing the pendulum back the other way, Ayatollah Khamenei then wholeheartedly backed the election of a little- known populist by the name of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose presidency became an eight-year calamity for Iran.
The June 2013 election of Hassan Rouhani bears many similarities to the 1997 election of Khatami. Both men reached the presidency on the promise of overhauling Iran’s foreign policy, and neither man would have been allowed to run in the elections if Ayatollah Khamenei had wanted to disqualify them as candidates.
However, Ayatollah Khamenei is not an internationalist at heart, unlike Rouhani and Khatami. Ideally, the Supreme Leader would like Iran to pursue a policy of self-reliance known in Persian as khod-kafai, a policy that implies near-complete isolation both economically and politically. But ordinary Iranian people would not put up with that sort of isolation, and aspire for a better life than merely scraping by from day to day. Ayatollah Khamenei recognizes that hard fact, and that is why he sanctioned the Geneva talks to go ahead and why he has so far approved of the Rouhani government’s deal-making with the P5+1.
In other words, Khamenei—thanks to sanctions and losing some USD 5 billion dollars a month in loss of oil exports, according to a White House report published in November—was forced to compromise out of necessity. But it does not matter how Ayatollah Khamenei and President Rouhani ended up on the same page. What matters is that Khamenei is currently backing the Rouhani government’s efforts. Rouhani is, in turn, playing a much more careful game than Khatami did. He has stayed away from any sweeping domestic reform, knowing that Khamenei is highly sensitive to that sort of development, and he has gone out of his way to make the Supreme Leader appear to be the architect behind this latest round of compromises on the nuclear program.
Giving political ownership of the deal to the Supreme Leader should help smooth out any snags that could crop up over the next six months as the P5+1 look to build on the current agreement. As long as Ayatollah Khamenei is on board, there is no one in Tehran that has the political clout to stop the diplomatic momentum.
All views expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, The Majalla magazine.
