Iran’s mask has slipped. After years of shadow play with the West, Tehran has made clear even to a US president wearing rose-tinted Aviators that there is no meaningful deal to be struck on its nuclear programme. Iran’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, takes over this week and he wants to do everything differently from his predecessor Hassan Rouhani, a wily Glasgow-educated pragmatist who thought he could use diplomacy to confound the West.
Raisi, who was a member of the death commissions that handed out execution orders to political critics in 1988, won this June’s rigged election as the favourite of the ageing, ailing supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. Together they agree that all the many protests racking Iran — about a drought that is causing power shortages, about inflation of more than 44 per cent, about poor levels of Covid vaccination (3 per cent of the population at present, despite five waves of the virus), about racketeering — are down to poor governance and a breakdown in trust between leaders and led.
The nuclear negotiations with the US and Europe are a distraction from this domestic agenda, not the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Especially as there is every chance, according to Iranian analysts, that Joe Biden will be a one-term president and that his successor might go back on every promise that he makes.
“The feeling is that some Iranian politicians grovelled too much at the feet of the US and the European Union,” says Mohammad Marandi, a professor at Tehran University. So the deal will be put on ice. “I think Mr Raisi intends to go back to the ideals of the [Islamic] Revolution.” That is, social justice: a new regard for those left behind by the yawning poverty gap.
The calculation of the Rouhani team and Biden’s advisers on Iran was that an arrangement could be struck allowing post-Trump America to return to the nuclear deal if Tehran verifiably slowed down its production of nuclear fuel. All that had to be sorted out was the sequencing of the lifting of sanctions and the limiting of Iranian centrifuges. Get that fixed before Raisi was sworn in and he could reap the financial benefits while disowning moral responsibility for the deal’s imperfections. But it didn’t happen that way. One American negotiator was so confident that diplomacy would soon be back, he put his suits in storage at the Vienna hotel where the talks have traditionally been held. They’ve been there for four months.
Advertisement
There was, quite simply, no way that Raisi could allow Rouhani to end on a high note. He had been a darling of the West for too long. This week he sealed his fall from grace with a rare (if vague) public apology. “What we told people was not contrary to reality but we did not tell the whole truth because I didn’t find it useful and I was afraid it would harm national unity,” was his swan song on state television.
That could have been a reference to the mistaken shooting down of a Ukrainian passenger plane by a Revolutionary Guard unit. Rouhani refused to acknowledge the incident for several days, fearing the wrath of Ayatollah Khamenei more than that of his people, who were worried about being nudged into a broader war.
Now, when Iranians take to the streets, as they have been doing in oil-rich but water-poor Khuzestan province, they chant for an end to money being diverted to foreign adventures, to the bank-rolling of proxy armies across the region. Raisi refuses to give up the proxy wars: they are part of his programme to complete the Islamic revolution, first as president, then later after his likely elevation to supreme leader. But he has to square the circle: stand firm against the West on the nuclear programme, resist pressure to change course and yet find the cash to soothe the Iranian poor.
Raisi is in hock to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) which has been encouraged to grow, to win battles abroad, to threaten international shipping, to assassinate critics. It has never been so powerful, so much so that some fret that it will eventually try to mount a coup against the theocratic state.
An intriguing new report by two Iranian scholars for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change thinks this won’t happen. “Khamenei does not want the IRGC to be seen in the driving seat,” write the authors, Saeid Golkar and Kasra Aarabi. But what happens when Khamenei dies (he’s 82) and Raisi takes over with Revolutionary Guardsmen at
his side?
Advertisement
The ruling clerics see the IRGC role as being purifiers of the Islamic revolution. They are more than that, though, operating three power centres: an intelligence service that vows to keep Iranians safe from all internal and external enemies; a military-political pillar that projects the authority of the supreme leader and fights Iran’s wars; and an economic side that runs businesses such as construction and that is pivotal to Iran’s resistance axis across Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.
These wings overlap but also compete. Screeds have been written about IRGC fault-lines: regional rivalries and generational frustrations all play a part. There are modernisers, even in the secret police, but their only unifying mission is regime survival. If Raisi puts a step wrong in his dealings with the West, if he loosens his grip on the nuclear programme, they will come knocking on his door.
Raisi has risen because of his proven ruthlessness; he will need all of that if he is to face off repeated challenges from Iran’s sinister guardsmen.