If Biden’s policy isn’t regime change, then he should help Iran’s reformers!
Joe Biden faces a stark choice. By reviving the nuclear deal, he could put some wind under the wings of the reformers or he could just watch them be clipped further.
As Biden’s team was handed over the keys to the White House (and presumably given the wifi password), they speedily set out to (in their own words) “undo the damage done by Trump”, to rebuild the old alliances and ‘restore America’s place in the world’ (naively assuming that America’s decline is all down to Trump’s neglect of multilateralism).
Only hours after his inauguration, President Biden signed up to 17 executive orders, including ones to take the US back into the Paris Climate Accords and the World Health Organisation. But the one Trump policy which he didn’t seem to be in any rush to reverse was the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal (or JCPOA). The deal was one of Obama’s flagship foreign policy legacies negotiated by Biden’s now Climate Change Envoy, John Kerry, and his Secretary of State, Antony Blinken.
Although, both the current Iranian Government (in office until the election in June) and the Biden Administration are instinctively keen to return to the deal, the actual process has been turned into a game of ‘No, you first’ between Tehran and Washington. They appear like some young couple at the end of a romantic phone call arguing over who should hang up first.
Though it’s not difficult to see why the US is hesitant about lifting sanctions on Iran before the Islamic Republic has returned to its JCPOA levels of uranium enrichment and stockpiling of other ‘fissile fuels’. A year after Trump unilaterally withdrew from the deal and pursued a policy of maximum pressure in 2018, the Islamic Republic tried to reciprocate and resumed enrichment in breach of the deal. But as Iran’s presidential election is just over 4 months away, the reformists are praying (quite literally) for Biden to return to the deal and relieve sanctions before Rouhani’s term ends in July so that they can reap some of the benefits and resolve the current economic double whammy of sanctions plus the pandemic. Latest estimates have indicated Iran’s real GDP to have contracted by 6.8% before the pandemic and between 15–30% in 2020 after the outbreak.
As things currently stand, the upcoming election is predicted to have a very low turnout, perhaps the lowest ever since the Islamic Republic’s inception in 1979. The recent Parliamentary (Majles) elections last year had a turnout of 42%, which was considerably lower than the 58% average in the last 40 years. The reformist minded voters who had supported Rouhani in 2013 (18 million votes or 50%) and in 2017 (24 million votes or 57%) mostly stayed at home and plan to boycott this year’s election too, leaving it for the regime’s most loyal base (estimated at around 20–30% of the population) to turn up and vote for a Conservative candidate.
So the Biden Administration effectively has a unique opportunity to help resuscitate the reformists (possibly represented by the Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif, in the upcoming election, who was once compared to Mossadegh for his role in the nuclear talks). Or they could just ‘wait and watch’ and let them be replaced by hardline conservatives who were against the nuclear deal from the beginning (not too different in this regard from the Republicans in DC or the Netanyahu government in Tel Aviv).
Among those most likely to stand is the Head of Judiciary, Ebrahim Raisi, who recently started a Xi-Jipping style anti-corruption campaign and is even rumoured to be Ayatollah Khamenei’s ‘predestined’ successor as Supreme Leader. The other conservative hopeful is the current Speaker of Majles, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who recently pushed through a bill in support of Iran’s increased nuclear activities in breach of JCPOA and is apparently desperate to meet Putin in person. Both of these men have run for president before against Rouhani. But this year, there is even talk of a military candidate from the Revolutionary Guards, possibly a certain Saeed Mohammad (52 years old, who is actually quite young by the standards of Iranian politics), who seems increasingly likely to run and even gain the approval of Ayatollah Khamenei.
So if the next 4 months are wasted away in terms of the Iran policy, as they are likely to be due to Biden’s long to-do list of ‘undoing Trump’s damage’ then the hardliners in Tehran could win and the opportunity to restore one of Obama’s legacies slips away from Biden’s fingertips. The reformists currently need a miracle to prevent the upcoming disaster (which would actually be welcomed by the regime’s internal opponents who have embraced accelerationism). But if Biden and Blinken act fast, they could give the reformers one last lease of life.
What makes this year’s election particularly important (perhaps more than ever before) is that the process of succession of the Supreme Leader is likely to fall in this upcoming presidential term as Ayatollah Khamenei (81) is rumoured to be in ill health. The tragedy is that amid years of disappointment and distrust, the Islamic Republic’s (possibly) most decisive election will enjoy the lowest turnout from those who want democracy the most.
If President Rouhani was helped by Biden to recover his credibility with the restoration of JCPOA and somehow get sanctions relief, then the reformists may just about manage to muster up enough support to keep the presidency. Rouhani may even get a boost in the race to replace Ayatollah Khamenei. Since both Rouhani and Raisi are clerics and members of the Assembly of Experts (the Iranian version of Vatican’s College of Cardinals) then the race is effectively between the two of them. It is essentially a power struggle between those within the regime who were educated in the west like Rouhani and his Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif, against those who have never set foot outside the country, can barely speak English (if at all) and also happen to have the biggest illusions about the Islamic Republic’s place in the world. And you don’t need to be a geopolitical expert to guess which faction could move the country closer to democracy and human rights.
If the next Supreme Leader ends up being a moderate/reformist like Rouhani, then he might be able to do to the post-Khamenei Iran what Krushchev did to USSR after Stalin or what Deng Xiaoping did to the post-Mao China. But all those possibilities depend on what happens in the next 4 months as the country and the region seems to be at a crossroads. If only the Biden administration avoids President Carter’s mistake and realises how high the price of their action or inaction can be for millions in the region for decades to come.
