Nuclear deal with Iran more likely to benefit hardliners than promote democratic reform

Khatami's January 1998 interview with CNN represented a remarkable gambit, given that Iranian officials had granted only rare interviews to the U.S. press. His stunning rhetoric – he began by paying respect to the "great American people" and expressed "an intellectual affinity for American civilization" – stood in sharp contrast to a speech only days before by Khamenei, who accused the West of using "guileful propaganda tricks…to bring about instability and insecurity in the nation." However, while the bold move was intended to open new channels with the West, it closed doors at home. The interview ignited a storm of controversy within Iran, exacerbating conservative mistrust of Khatami. Conservative opposition reflected self-interest, as rapprochement with the United States would have boosted Khatami's approval ratings to stratospheric levels, as well as an ideology that equated regime orthodoxy with regime survival. Two weeks after the CNN interview, after a muted response from Washington, Khatami spoke about the United States in much more strident terms in an address before the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini, and on a subsequent visit to the United Nations suggested that the interview had been "misinterpreted" and asked Americans "not to confuse a dialogue among people and cultures with political dialogue." For much of the rest of his presidency, Khatami and the reformists focused their attentions on mending other breaches in Iran's international relations, and took relatively few concrete actions to reach out to Washington or respond to the belated overtures mounted by the Clinton administration two years later.

Rouhani was chosen and vetted by a process overseen by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who holds true power. Despite winning by a landslide, with a popular mandate for reform, Rouhani has delivered no real change. The much-expected Iranian “glasnost”—the “openness” under Mikhail Gorbachev that signaled real change in the Soviet Union—has not materialized. Rouhani has issued some vague calls for referendums, without saying what exactly would be put to vote. He has made veiled criticisms of the Revolutionary Guards, but hasprotected them from anti-corruption campaigns. While he (along with Khamenei) uses social media like Twitter to communicate with audiences outside Iran, he has not extended that freedom to his own countrymen.

Rouhani’s apologists his efforts at reforms have been stymied by the hardliners, and that a nuclear deal will give him the ammunition to make those reforms real. But it strains credulity that a deal with the West will allow the president to do what what a landfall election win did not.

The hardliners have their own thoughts about a nuclear deal. If they have toned down some of their previous criticism of the negotiations, that is likely because, as the New York Times points out, “a general satisfaction… with the direction of the talks, and the successes Iran is enjoying, extending and deepening its influence in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.” The Supreme Leader himself has been, as is his wont, having it both ways, allowing the negotiations to proceed while calling for “Death to America.”

Rather than empower Rouhani and the reformists, a nuclear deal will mean they are of no further use to the conservatives, and ripe for toppling—or at least shoving aside. There are indications that the conservatives are shoring up their control of the country, most notably by electing one of their own to the council that will name a new Supreme Leader when Khamenei dies. Not only was Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani—a former president—and nominally a reformist—denied the post, his son was sentenced to 15 years for corruption and embezzlement. It was a chilling reminder of who’s really in charge in Tehran.

For some, the greatest value in an agreement lies in the prospect of an end, or at least a moderation, of Iran’s 3½ decades of militant hostility to the West and established international institutions, and an opportunity to draw Iran into an effort to stabilize the Middle East. Having both served in government during a period of American-Iranian strategic alignment and experienced its benefits for both countries as well as the Middle East, we would greatly welcome such an outcome. Iran is a significant national state with a historic culture, a fierce national identity, and a relatively youthful, educated population; its re-emergence as a partner would be a consequential event.

But partnership in what task? Cooperation is not an exercise in good feeling; it presupposes congruent definitions of stability. There exists no current evidence that Iran and the U.S. are remotely near such an understanding. Even while combating common enemies, such as ISIS, Iran has declined to embrace common objectives. Iran’s representatives (including its Supreme Leader) continue to profess a revolutionary anti-Western concept of international order; domestically, some senior Iranians describe nuclear negotiations as a form of jihad by other means.

The final stages of the nuclear talks have coincided with Iran’s intensified efforts to expand and entrench its power in neighboring states. Iranian or Iranian client forces are now the pre-eminent military or political element in multiple Arab countries, operating beyond the control of national authorities. With the recent addition of Yemen as a battlefield, Tehran occupies positions along all of the Middle East’s strategic waterways and encircles archrival Saudi Arabia, an American ally. Unless political restraint is linked to nuclear restraint, an agreement freeing Iran from sanctions risks empowering Iran’s hegemonic efforts.

The heroic case. Sure, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is an irascible and violent revolutionary bent on imposing a dark ideology on his people and his neighborhood. Much the same could be said of Mao Zedong when Henry Kissinger paid him a visit in 1971—a diplomatic gamble that paid spectacular dividends as China became a de facto U.S. ally in the Cold War and opened up to the world under Deng Xiaoping.

But the hope that Iran is the new China fails a few tests. Mao faced an overwhelming external threat from the Soviet Union. Iran faces no such threat and is winning most of its foreign proxy wars. Beijing ratcheted down tensions with Washington with friendly table-tennis matches. Tehran ratchets them up by locking up American citizens and seizing cargo ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Deng Xiaoping believed that to get rich is glorious. Iranian President Hasan Rouhani, a supposed reformer, spent last Friday marching prominently in the regime’s yearly “Death to America, Death to Israel” parade.

If there is evidence of an Iranian trend toward moderation it behooves proponents of a deal to show it.