Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (R) with President Rowhani at far left. REUTERS/IRNA
Iranian President Hassan Rowhani is ratcheting up his engagement with the West and the United States in particular, giving his first interview to an American media outlet this week ahead of his speech at the U.N. General Assembly in New York next Tuesday. The self-styled moderate who was elected on a promise to dramatically change his nation’s antagonistic foreign policy also saw his agenda get a boost (both symbolic and substantive) recently from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei before an audience of the ultra-conservative Revolutionary Guard. Despite the consensus among Iran-watchers that all military matters fall to Khamenei and his advisers, Rowhani insists he has the authority to nix Iran’s nuclear energy program and explicitly promised in the NBC News interview that Iran would never develop nuclear weapons. And to brighten the picture still further, Iran released 11 key political prisoners as a goodwill gesture on Wednesday.
The promise of a thaw implicit in all this seems to good to be true — and it is. Which is not to suggest Rowhani is misleading with his very public desire to mend fences. But until we see a bona fide policy concession on uranium enrichment beyond the cosmetic reduction in activity that came with Rowhani’s initial ascent to power, all of these developments are consistent with the ruling ayatollahs wanting to appear open to fresh engagement and reforms while essentially maintaining the status quo. After all, the participants in the Green Movement that rallied around the doomed 2009 presidential candidacy of Mir-Hossein Mousavi did not simply disappear; many organizers flocked to Rowhani as it became clear he was the closest thing to a reformer that the clerics would permit to take the office this time around. So the elevation of Rowhani and his goals serves both to co-opt and outflank the domestic political opposition, neutralizing some of its potency. There are plenty of historical examples of this phenomenon, whether Otto von Bismarck instituting social welfare programs to sap the Socialist movement of its urgency in late 19th-century Prussia or, more recently and perhaps much more relevant, the quasi-empowerment of the legislature in Jordan by King Abdullah in hopes of preventing a local blossoming of the Arab Spring.
That being said, exactly what Rowhani — who apparently exchanged letters with President Obama ahead of his NBC interview — says before the U.N. will be telling. Expect plenty of promises to take steps forward on diplomatic relations and assurances about innocuous nuclear energy plans (essentially what he told NBC). But will he move at all on Syria, where the ayatollahs remain steadfast in their defense of the Assad regime? That’s possibly the most disturbing scenario: that these modest steps on reestablishing ties could just be a way to keep the international community from homing in on Iran’s deep support for the brutality of the Syrian government and its in-country allies.
