(Washington Insider Magazine) -Just a few months ago, I wrote regarding the internal and external innovations which led up to the recent Presidential Election in Iran, which, while contested and largely boycotted as per internal and external sources, saw those people who chose to participate, pick the Principalist hardliner, now-former-Judge and accused human rights criminal, Ebrahim Raisi. This was a significant election for the direction of the nation, and for the sake of the Iranian Nuclear Deal of which had been long championed and won, prior to Donald Trump, by moderate former-President Hassan Rouhani; with the conservative victory, the consolidation of political power that occurred shortly thereafter, as well as the comments made by the current Ayatollah, it appears as though any reimagined “JCPOA 2.0” is in perilous danger of becoming impossible to rework.
Meanwhile, the relatively moderate former administration of the last eight years has given way to one that is not only far more politically and religiously traditionalist, but one that is also culturally repressive vis-a-vis domestic issues. As the world has borne witness to thus far, the Raisi administration has, and will likely continue to be far less diplomatically and outwardly amicable or flexible in negotiations with America and the European nations towards the ultimate goal of nuclear deterrence, peace, reconciliation as well as economic and cultural cooperation.
The old, essentially-deceased JCPOA, the one that one Hassan Rouhani signed with Barack Obama and the other major European powers, the one that should be just over six years old this year, might have helped create a massive difference in Iran over the last year and a half or so of COVID-19 and opiate-induced suffering in the midst of great, dire poverty. Hassan Rouhani did his best by coming to this agreement to put his nation in the most favorable position going forward, and especially should a major catastrophe like this end up occurring; in the end, unfortunately, it was all not to be regarding his plans, and while an old revolutionary leader like the recently deceased Abulhassan Banisadr predicted that the theological hold was slipping on Iran in the last few years, the Ayatollah, his chief disciple, and the oligarchic Guardian Council have attempted to reassert power and authority over the nation, in part thanks to the actions of the 45th President.
And speaking of the former American President, Donald Trump, to summarize it succinctly, did all he could to damage the relationship and its prior progress, as well as ultimately nixing the United States’ participation in the original JCPOA itself. Yet for America’s 46th President, Joe Biden, it will be both crucial, as well as un-enviable, to reconcile this relatively re-fractured relationship so as to resuscitate the international cooperation that will ultimately best serve both nations, as well as the desperately beleaguered Iranian people, best; as we will go into a bit later, it might even, eventually, lead to a happier ending for the Iranian Revolution than has currently been observed since 1979.
With the different posturing both Ebrahim Raisi, as well as the Ayatollah himself has been making recently, however, it appears that negotiations will be guarded and that the timbre of these reconvened sessions will be anything but warm and easy; this will be something a bit different than many diplomats will have seen for some time regarding Iran, as during the early JCPOA discussion between the Obama and Ahmadinejad administrations, discussion and work towards a Nuclear deal has been reported as being reasonable, and as having laid the groundwork for the next, more moderate administration of a Chief international and nuclear negotiator for decades, Hassan Rouhani. It is difficult to imagine an administration less friendly regarding America out of the prior President’s of the Islamic Republic of Iran, since perhaps the third President, Ali Khamenei.
The aforementioned former President and current Ayatollah and Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, as he has grown older, weaker, and more sickly, have wished to create a viable path for his chosen successor to smoothly take over from him, as was set into motion by his predecessor, Ruhollah Khomeini so many years ago. It has been suggested that Khamenei, a former religious exile alongside the aforementioned first Ayatollah and Supreme Leader of the Iranian Islamic Republic, has basically chosen Raisi as his successor and raised him to this moment and position for that eventual purpose. And while Ebrahim Raisi might be getting fast-tracked towards this eventual pedestal and all its responsibilities, he cannot claim to be as religiously esteemed, by Islamic education, as either of his predecessors, no matter how badly he might wish to be.
With all of this, the intricacies of the man, and his own religious and political ambitions, whether it be for this Presidency or beyond, in mind, this current “Supreme-Leader-in-waiting,” as we might call him, deserves a real and in-depth analysis; while doing so, it will also be imperative that we appraise the likelihood, as well as the merits, of a rejuvenated JCPOA 2.0. While his Presidential predecessor, the man who negotiated most of the Nuclear Deal with the 44th American President Barack Obama, was, as I have described him before, a “worldly man,” President Ebrahim Raisi is a man of tradition, Iranian and Islamic in particular, in very different ways than Hassan Rouhani.
Ebrahim Raisi: A Different History and Legacy than his Predecessor, with a Different Vision as well
Unlike the first two Supreme Ayatollahs of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi was not part of any exilable party or group in the lead up to the overthrow of the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. While a small, famous party was centered around the first Ayatollah Khomeini, and sat in exile for around 14 years, planning from Paris how to subvert both the monarchy that he despised, as well as the rights-based revolution dreamed of by men like Banisadr, and agitated for by the equally famous Massoud Rajvi, of which he had no respect for. This current, 81-year-old Kheimeni was a younger man who, according to him, was arrested numerous times before being exiled by the Shah himself as well for three years. Over time, he would grow close to the spiritual leader of Iran and would be rewarded for this loyalty by being placed in line to succeed Khomeini when he passed away in 1989. The pattern remains clear today as well: choose a youngish successor with some type of historical, conservative connection to perpetuate “Principalist” Islamic thought and dogma as far into the future as possible. Whether that vision remains practically feasible as new generations of Iranians become more politically and socially engaged will likely be witnessed across the next 20 to 30 years as well.
The man who will likely be the next Ayatollah has already referred to himself as one. This has gone unchallenged by the man he is slated to eventually replace, and that is, of course, not entirely surprising. For one thing, Ayatollah is a religious moniker and one that, based on education and righteousness, can be gained by any practicing male Muslim. The current Supreme Ayatollah of Iran, however, wishes, as his predecessor wished before him, for an easy, frictionless, and bloodless transition of power after his passing.
It is difficult to imagine which scenario might frighten or agitate those currently in power most: that another reasonable choice for Supreme Leader emerges, or that either an internal or external group of secular or religious forces seriously threatens the stability of the regime and nation itself. Therefore the current Ayatollah likely has no issue with his successor reaffirming himself as such; this cleric and justice, Ebrahim Raisi, is nuanced as well, yet in a much less modern sense, and is full of seeming hypocrisies and even some, quite severe, human rights violations.
The eighth President of Iran is 60 years old and so would be older than his predecessor after 32 years as the Supreme Leader of the country than Khemani is now. The former Deputy Prosecutor of Tehran in the 1980s and 1990s, Ebrahim Raisi would also go onto serve as the Deputy Chief Justice, Attorney General and Chief Justice of the Islamic Republic and is said to be descended from the great prophet of Islam, Muhammad, through his great-grandson, Zayn al-Abidin, and was born of a clerical family befitting this ancestry in the city of Mashhad in 1960. Growing up, Raisi briefly went to the famous and beautiful Qom Hawza at the Boroujerdi School, created by Grand Ayatollah Hajj Sheikh Abdolkarim Haeri Yazdi with Hossein Boroujedri in 1922; he has claimed to have earned a Private Law degree from Motahri University although his education has been disputed and even chided, most famously during the first debate for this last Presidential Election.
The clerical qualifications of Ebrahim Raisi are too, however, in contrast to his predecessors who reached the rank of Ayatollah through reflection and dedication, less understood, celebrated, believed, or revered than either the first or second Ayatollah of this Islamic Republic. While he has vacillated between calling himself an Ayatollah and, like his father-in-law, the famous Grand Imam Ahmad Alamolhoda, as hujjat al-Islam, which is a clerical ranking directly below that of Ayatollah, this perceived uncertainty likely did nothing to strengthen his own cult of personality for a time in the future when he’ll need it most.
Yet by whatever means, the young Ebrahim Raisi climbed the ranks of the newly formed Islamic Republic, of which he would’ve been about 18 and 19 during, such that by 1988, shortly before the death of the first Supreme Leader of the nation, Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1989, various international Human Rights Organizations say that Raisi was taking an active part, in a leadership position, in the mass killings of, mostly leftist, political dissidents in Tehran. This brutality, of which is not denied by Iranian leaders, and is generally defended as legal because of the fatwa previously issued by former Ayatollah Khomeini seems to me a price that was paid relatively early on in his career by the young man, and that hasn’t ever been forgotten by the Ayatollah whom would succeed Khomeini; while Ebrahim Raisi has served across the legal system and has demonstrated himself a formidable public figure, his real investment began when he committed those crimes against his fellow Iranians, and consequently humanity itself. Everything since has been a sort of prep process for what had been determined by the blood of secular, religious, and political dissidents on those days in Tehran so long ago.
This is the man who will be leading the nation for the next four years, and the man with whom the Biden administration will have to get cozy with, to some degree, in order to get something like what was lost when Donald Trump pulled America out of the Iranian Nuclear Deal without having to give up way more than the 44th President of America had negotiated with Hassan Rouhani. Ebrahim Raisi, who owes his mandate to the current Ayatollah, has vowed to negotiate Iran out of this “tyranny of US sanctions” as he called them, yet should he play his cards right, with Russia and China trying to enlarge their spheres of influence to further include Iran in more significant proportions, he might be able to achieve a better structure for his nation regarding the reformation of the JCPOA with Europe and the United States as well. While this would very likely still be a positive innovation for the United States, Iran, and the international community going forward, it is understood that there will be blowback from making a deal with Iran, just as there was last time from the Senate, House, and of course, the eventual-45th-President.
Donald Trump, in perhaps the most remarkable irony of his Presidency, reneged America from a landmark diplomatic agreement without any real replacement plan, thereby destroying the diplomatic integrity and leverage of the United States for his successors. In other words, the self-acclaimed master of the Art of the Deal actually bungled the Nuclear Deal all the way down the line and will inevitably be the prime reason why the United States, for those moral, civic, and diplomatic responsibilities that more powerful nations have towards those less fortunate nations that have been excommunicated from the international community of nations, will have to end up taking a worse deal than was signed and enacted six years ago between President Obama and President Rouhanni. What will it take for the administrations of Joe Biden and Ebrahim Raisi to work towards shared goals where possible, of which the JCPOA is undoubtedly one of them, without growing weary of each other’s recalcitrance and prevarication?
Getting to a JCPOA 2.0: Ebrahim Raisi, Joe Biden, the Taliban, and the importance of trust in any relationship
Right now, despite the rhetoric coming out of Tehran towards Washington DC, hope for a revitalized JCPOA is not dead – simply ask Emanual Macron, or even the pro-JCPOA citizens of Iran themselves. While it appears as though the further Islamization of Iran is being attempted from both the top-down as well as from the bottom up, this does not necessarily mean that it will succeed or that progress in foreign affairs cannot be made, yet things are becoming more complex as time goes on. When Donald Trump unilaterally left the Iranian Nuclear Deal, discrediting and destabilizing the work that Hassan Rouhani had put in over eight years, he played into the hands of the Ayatollah, the clerics and theocratic elite, the Guardian Council, and hardliners making it even easier to make the case that moderation and cultural liberalization had, thus far, failed. Hardliners like Ebrahim Raisi, after all, won not only the Presidency this election, but representative seats in the government as well.
Even as Iran appears to be growing colder in some respects towards the innovations that Rouhani sought, however, there might still be a unifying force in the region. It appears that the answer to the question “what will it take to bring American and Iran closer together?”, and the next best opportunity for America to repair its own relations with Iran, even as the Biden administration seems to be taking harder positions against Tehran, amongst other nations, will involve the still-growing power of the Taliban in the newly reformed and internationally unrecognized Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. While the Taliban has taken back quickly from the secular Afghani government, that which America had long attempted to hold safe from it, Iran’s own relationship with the militant extremists has come under analysis and scrutiny in recent years too, albeit in different ways.
There are, regarding this relationship, contradictory reports, pieces, and papers on the connection that Iran has with and to these extremists, of whom previously pushed Iran under Mohammed Khetemi to cooperate against them with the United States during the Presidency of George W Bush; while some claim that Iran has now come to tolerate and diplomatically cooperate with the Taliban, evidence produced in interviews with Taliban officials themselves seem to suggest that the Taliban very much still see the Islamic Republic of Iran as enemies of the brand of fundamentalist Islam of which they practice. It is not as though the people of Iran, no matter their background or national origin, care for the Taliban at all; they remain as despised in Iran as Saudi Arabia and, after the reneging of America from the JCPOA signed by Barack Obama, the United States as well.
While I was not able to have those aforementioned Iranian-Afghani border skirmishes confirmed to me when I brought them up to an Iranian source, of whom would be aware of this were it to have occurred, it strikes me as a strange thing for the Taliban to lie about, given their place in Afghanistan and within the larger region itself.
Depending on which scenario is true, there is potentially a genuine, plausible diplomatic opportunity that exists to begin fixing the trust between America and Iran. Things might play out any number of ways, yet let us for the sake of this discussion, simply imagine that, like 20 years ago, the Iranian government remains opposed to the ultra-extreme Taliban, as most of its population is, and just as America is too. In this scenario, while the United States has finally decided to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan, it too does not desire the Taliban to dominate and repress Afghanistan after a two-decade occupation meant to first push them out of power, and then to ultimately destroy them.
That only one of those ambitions came to pass, and not even permanently, will be written about in the history books as the conflict in Viet Nam is written about today. Yet continuing: The United States cannot go back into the country, despite that it is likely that there will be regional violence in Afghanistan, as was previously reported regarding the Mujahideen, as well as between the Taliban and any number of neighboring communities, peoples, or even nations. America, therefore, must use the nearly-universally-and-mutually-shared distaste for the murderous Taliban to aid its ailing relations with less extreme, yet still disagreeable, nations and peoples.
For so long, the United States has given money and aid to regimes that are not morally agreeable, but are certainly economically agreeable; while I understand and have heard arguments urging non-cooperation with Iran in this way, those arguments often fall to pieces under even the most basic of historical questioning. Does not each and every nation run the risk of materially aiding or befriending a future enemy, should that nation eventually become one at some time down the proverbial road? In other words, no relationship is permanent or unbreakable, whether interpersonal or international; trusting in nations, like in people, is an exercise in risk-reward that ultimately yields consequences, no matter what.
But as Henry L Stimson famously stated, “The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him, and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust….” Like with the people that constitute the larger cities, regions, states, and countries of the world, nations also must be trusted in order for trust to be built and grown; Barack Obama, despite his many deficiencies as President, understood this well, and attempted to demonstrate this understanding through his innovations regarding both Iran and Cuba.
Unfortunately, the 45th President did not believe in this diplomatic concept, and so chose to try and overpower any and all who disagreed with him, whether in his own party, his country or within the International community. His successor, the current 46th President, is running out of time to decide what type of President he will be if he hasn’t already determined it; the horrifying innovations in Afghanistan regarding the Taliban, and now an ISIS offshoot, known as IS-K, however, might be enough to help accelerate and re-level the negotiations to some extent.
Trust is crucial to any and every relationship, whether between people or nations, just as Mr. Stimson famously said. The United States has broken trust with Iran many times throughout its history, including most recently when America left the Iranian Nuclear Treaty unilaterally, as well as when Donald J Trump ordered the illegal assassination of Qasem Soleimani. In a previous essay regarding Iran, as well as in an earlier paragraph of this piece, I stated my belief that the former-President put Iran in a much better position to negotiate by reneging America from participating in the landmark treaty; I believe this, yet with the rise of the Taliban once again, as well as what that might mean for the region itself, America’s offer of cooperation, aid, assistance, and empathy, might actually be an important and vital enough incentive to convince the oligarchy of Iran, headed by both the Supreme Leader and President Raisi, to trust in the United States one more time, not emotionally, but for diplomatic and material purposes.
If this revised and reimagined JCPOA is consummated based on similar, not identical, nuclear protocols and standards as before, as well as with those innovations of which the Taliban are necessitating, which likely would include funding, humanitarian aid vis-a-vis their COVID-19, opiate, poverty and ever surging refugee crises, then that would be a really positive deal to consider from the perspective of the Biden Administration. There are those, like the aforementioned first President of Iran Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, who believes that the power of the clerics is in decline and that only through empowerment and support of the Iranian people, through private organizations and international aid alike, will they be able to grow strong enough to throw off the yolk of repression that continues to hang around their collective necks. It is not as though America will not be aiding, in the shadows and in the open, other regional nations who might wish to confront the Taliban, like various, pro-secular Afghani forces, as well as external, regional governments like Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Iraq; while these nations are American “allies,” human rights watch has them all as extreme human rights abusers in their own, unique ways.
Again, like the contradictions witnessed between the treatment of Communist Viet Nam v. Communist Cuba over nearly the same time span, it seems as though only unintelligible, antiquated foreign policy drivel from decades gone by exists to justify the endless contradictions in how America treats other nations. While Russia, an Iranian ally, is analyzing the Taliban before fully engaging or recognizing them as the government of Afghanistan, diplomatically speaking, it is not currently clear whether Iran will do anything similarly, with the potential violence with the mostly Afghani-Iranian Fatemiyoun Brigade as mentioned earlier on the border a real, possible threat to the nation and non-secular regime.
To extrapolate a thought experiment from a prior essay further, the JCPOA would be just a bit over six years old when this paper was written, was it still in place. Were America still a part of it, it is incredibly difficult to say just how many things might be different; I go through a few in the aforementioned essay, of course, but there are more as well, to be sure. Economic conditions in Iran would likely have been better in the lead up to the great COVID-19 outbreak that has swallowed up the world since late 2019/early 2020; consequently, internal social and political conditions, without the external pressure from Donald Trump and internal pressure from factions within Iran, might have also been better as the final term of Hassan Rouhani was winding down. As was predicted by the former first President, in these conditions, the weakening power of the clerics might truly be losing its hold on the nation and its people. While poverty and drug addiction are struggles each and every society have to struggle with, it is plausible to believe that, with greater international cooperation and integration, these hardships too would be alleviated in this aforementioned scenario.
Under the leadership of Hassan Rouhani in this scenario, the nation of Iran would have made massive strides in comparison to past Iranian Presidents, and it is impossible to paint a picture contrary to this within Iran. With the 2021 Presidential Election on the horizon, it would’ve been harder for the Ayatollah and the Guardian Council, as well as the nation’s reactionaries, to paint the picture that the Rouhani Administration had not created real, tangible progress for his country under a moderate, reformist leader. The Presidency would not have been as easy to fix as has been widely accused of having occurred. The enthusiastic participation of the people on the heels of all of this innovation would’ve chosen a candidate who stood for Iran that all people might live and exist in, and not Ebrahim Raisi.
While I cannot know for certain, in this scenario, I am not sure that a shrunken election pool and hardline succession could’ve been manufactured as easily under these alternative conditions; furthermore, with this economic and diplomatic cooperation still ongoing in this scenario, trust would have been developed over nearly a decade in the leadup to this innovation regarding the Taliban. Deciding at this point in the scenario to develop relations even further by funding or working, in some form or fashion, with or alongside Iran to weaken, diminish or beat back, would be less forced and awkward for both America and Iran than it would be in the reality and circumstances we actually, presently find ourselves in.
As it stands, to that end, the situation America finds itself is unfortunate but is hardly anything in comparison to the plight of the newly endangered and subjected people of Afghanistan or the continuously and increasingly desperate people of Iran. The United States finds itself in self-made conundrums of which weigh upon the nation and its citizenry as a kind of moral yolk, or an international scarlet letter of sorts; while it has itself to blame for this, it also knows the solution to reconcile and help itself. As a recent report says in sharp scrutiny, America did not understand the Afghanistan situation, or the timbre as I myself would have said, and so were unable to tailor a plan that would incorporate and assist Afghanistan’s people in creating and rebuilding the society that they wished to have; by creating in Afghanistan the society that the United States hoped for Afghanistan to be, the connection that a people must feel to their government and to their society was ignored because of the sheer power and force that America can, at any moment, wield to disastrous ends.
America must come to the table with Iran and speak plainly, sincerely, and with tact regarding its nuanced and profound set of crises. It must offer support for Iran in return for innovations regarding human rights within the nation, as well as the nature of its nuclear program; of course, Ebrahim Raisi and the Ayatollah will, as previously stated, play the proverbial hardball with America and Europe, the Islamic Republic understands that it needs this innovation as badly, if not worse, than it did all of those years before. These are the two most essential points in the entire relationship, and so must be reconciled so that cooperation, which has so many bountiful possibilities outside of anti-Taliban action, can be undertaken towards a safer, more cooperative, empathetic, and mutually understanding international community and earth.
Joe Biden has the ability as President to do this if he and his administration are diplomatically and intellectually capable, although I am unsure whether they are in this capacity, to be fair. While Biden appears sometimes reasonably capable of maneuvering within the nuanced and sensitive world of the United States Senate and its mass of factions, the man he served under as Vice President, Barack Obama, understood foreign affairs and diplomatic nuance, I think, more naturally and intuitively than does Joe. I hope to be very wrong regarding that, and should I be, it will be a step towards aiding the relationship between the two nations, in materially aiding the people of Iran as well as creating an environment where a rights-based society can develop.
In any event, between the Taliban and all of the other internalities and externalities pressuring Iran currently, if the President cannot manage to rework and reconstitute a new Nuclear, and perhaps further cooperative economic and humanitarian, deal with Tehran, then he would never have been able to in better international conditions or circumstances either; with this said, it should also be reiterated that, had the 45th President not been so unwise regarding his own understanding of foreign policy vis-a-vis Iran, there would be no need for Joe Biden to have to renegotiate with Ebrahim Raisi in this way.
Should I be incorrect, it will be one of the happier misfires of my life of intellectual prognostication, yet should I be correct, then the sad, sorry story of which includes over 40 years of torment, since the last Pahlavi Shah was forced to finally flee for good, will stretch on further into the future; no one with positive, international or domestic intentions wins in the latter scenario, and only suffering will accompany further obstinance regarding diplomatic reconciliation between the United States and Iran.