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Rouhani’s Bet on the Iran Deal

Robin Wright image

"Like Barack Obama, Iran’s President, Hassan Rouhani, took a big gamble last week, but his was riskier," writes Robin Wright.

Like Barack Obama, Iran’s President, Hassan Rouhani, took a big gamble last week, but his was riskier. In a speech on Friday, Rouhani declared that the proposed nuclear deal with the United States and five other major powers marked the “first step” in reaching “the highest point of constructive interaction” with the world. Iranians should be prepared to embrace other steps, he said. “If we have any sort of tension with any nation, we want to put an end to such tension.”

Rouhani is a smooth talker—he has a Ph.D. in constitutional law from Scotland’s Glasgow Caledonian University—and he has often used conciliatory language about improving human rights and increasing press freedoms even as his hard-line counterparts ban newspapers and order executions in record numbers. But this time Rouhani confronted opposition bluntly. “Some think we should either fight with the world or surrender to other powers,” he said. “We believe there is a third option. We can cooperate with the world.”

The speech was dubbed in English and broadcast live on Iran’s PressTV, which runs internationally and on the Internet. Rouhani has now staked his Presidency on closing the deal—the deadline is June 30th—and generating the financial rewards of sanctions relief for his long-stalled domestic agenda. He called it a “new chapter.” If he fails, though, it could be the last chapter for yet another Iranian President.

Iran’s Presidency has been a risky job ever since the revolutionaries amended the constitution, in 1989, following the death of the founding cleric Ayatollah Khomeini. The amendment scrapped the Prime Minister’s job and made the President head of government. It was widely viewed as an attempt to gradually transform the Islamic Republic from a rigid Islamic state with an omnipotent cleric-for-life into something more like an actual republic, with powers shared by an elected President under term limits.

Rouhani’s three immediate predecessors all failed to find a viable formula, however. Their attempts to normalize a revolutionary state by assuming more power over both domestic and foreign policy (albeit in vastly different ways) crushed their careers. The state of play with the United States was a common undercurrent.

The country’s wiliest politician, Hashemi Rafsanjani, who engineered that constitutional amendment, tried as President to open a commercial channel to the West in 1995, by offering the U.S. oil company Conoco a billion-dollar oil-and-gas development contract. It would have been the most lucrative deal in Iran’s history, but it met with suspicions in Washington, in no small part because of Tehran’s practice of arming and aiding terrorist groups. Under congressional pressure, the Clinton Administration instead imposed new sanctions blocking all oil business. At home, Rafsanjani’s domestic openings were derailed by hard-liners reluctant to cede ideological ground and wary of his outreach to the United States. Since then, despite numerous comeback attempts, including campaigning for President and parliament, Rafsanjani has been repeatedly humiliated.

In 1998, his successor, Mohammad Khatami, called for Tehran and Washington to bring down the “wall of mistrust” and, at the United Nations, proposed a “dialogue of civilizations.” In 2003, Iran agreed to a temporary freeze of its uranium-enrichment program. It also made a secret overture for a “grand bargain” to end tensions with Washington. The timing and sentiment never synced with the Clinton or Bush Administrations. By the time Khatami left office, in 2005, he was marginalized by suspicious hard-liners at home. Both his reform agenda and his dialogue died. He remains popular—to the point that the anti-reformist judiciary two months ago announced a media ban on mentioning Khatami’s name (without actually mentioning his name in the decree).

Even the zealot Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got in trouble for assuming too much Presidential power in domestic and foreign policy. Shortly after his 2005 election, Iran resumed enriching uranium and increasing its number of centrifuges, and he survived into a second term with the support of the Supreme Leader and of security forces who put down mass protests against election fraud. But he, too, ran afoul of the deep state. One example was his agreement, in 2009, to an international nuclear deal. “We are ready to coöperate” with the West, he insisted. Others didn’t agree. Iran backed out. It was one of many reasons Ahmadinejad’s eccentric coterie was blackballed even by religious conservatives by the time he left office, in 2013.

The framework that Iran tentatively accepted last week goes much further than the 2009 deal. Rouhani already faces backlash. “We gave up a race-ready horse and we got in return a broken bridle,” Hossein Shariatmadari, the editor of the hard-line newspaper Kayhan, said. The lawmaker Ahmad Tavakkoli wrote the President to demand that parliament, dominated by conservatives, ratify any agreement. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, the U.S.-educated negotiator, was summoned over the weekend to explain the terms.

To further complicate matters, discrepancies are also emerging between Washington and Tehran over what the deal includes. The four-page fact sheet issued by the Obama Administration clearly took Iran by surprise. Almost immediately, Zarif tweeted, “The solutions are good for all, as they stand. There is no need to spin using ‘fact sheets’ so early on.”

A key difference is over the schedule for lifting economic sanctions—the major incentive for Tehran to give up many of its centrifuges, capabilities, and stockpiles. The United States suggested that sanctions relief will be gradual, as Iran complies with curtailing its nuclear program. Zarif countered with a tweet quoting the official announcement: “‘US will cease the application of ALL nuclear-related secondary economic and financial sanctions.’ Is this gradual?”

Will the two Presidents succeed in sorting through those differences—and avoiding slippage—over the next three months? As the talks intensified, Obama is said to have devoured the specifics of nuclear programs. Rouhani, for his part, served for almost two decades as Iran’s national-security adviser, under both Rafsanjani and Khatami. He was the chief nuclear negotiator when Iran temporarily froze enrichment in 2003.

Over the weekend, Obama gave a long interview about the Iran deal to the Times. He indicated that Washington now thinks Rouhani’s Presidency is credible as an interlocutor. “What we’ve seen over the last several years, I think, is the opportunity for those forces within Iran that want to break out of the rigid framework . . . to move in a different direction,” he said. “It’s not a radical break, but it’s one that I think offers us the chance for a different type of relationship, and this nuclear deal, I think, is a potential expression of that.”

 The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author.

The article was originally published in the New Yorker.

About the Author

Robin Wright image

Robin Wright

USIP-Wilson Center Distinguished Fellow;
Author and columnist for The New Yorker
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Middle East Program

The Wilson Center’s Middle East Program serves as a crucial resource for the policymaking community and beyond, providing analyses and research that helps inform U.S. foreign policymaking, stimulates public debate, and expands knowledge about issues in the wider Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.  Read more