Iran has chosen a new president. But it's more accurate to say he was elevated by its rulers than elected by its people, in a sham procedure that saw all but seven of nearly 600 candidates disqualified by the Guardian Council, which like most every entity in Iran ultimately answers to the theocracy.
The engineered result saw the favored candidate, Ebrahim Raisi, win with 62% of the vote in what was the lowest-turnout in the history of the Islamic Republic, signaling the cynicism many Iranians harbor toward the repressive regime.
Raisi will likely make it even more oppressive. He has a history of human rights abuses, including when he served on a commission that sentenced thousands of dissidents to death in 1988 — killings he has praised. He currently heads the judiciary and may rise even higher than president if, as some experts anticipate, he succeeds Supreme Ruler Ali Khamenei, the 82-year-old cleric who has cruelly ruled Iran for 32 years.
Raisi's win consolidates conservative power. And it sidelines the ostensibly more moderate factions represented by outgoing President Hassan Rouhani, who while loyal to the regime still had a better sense of the deep frustrations felt by most Iranians — the vast majority of whom were born after the Islamic Revolution. Many chafe under social restrictions and economic constrictions brought on by sanctions (including on Raisi himself) triggered by Iran's malign behavior.
Those sanctions were dramatically ratcheted up by the Trump administration after it pulled out of the Iranian nuclear deal, a multilateral pact designed to keep Iran from developing a nuclear weapons program. The Obama-era agreement between Iran, six world powers and the European Union was flawed. But even the U.S. acknowledged Iran was in compliance, which after the U.S. exit is no longer the case, creating a dangerous dynamic in an already volatile region. However well-intentioned, the Trump administration's "maximum pressure" campaign did not work.
President Joe Biden has sent envoys to negotiate a potential re-entry to the agreement. Raisi, reflecting the supreme leader's position, indicated during the campaign that Iran is willing to return to compliance in exchange for sanctions relief. But during his first post-election news conference Raisi declared that "regional issues and missiles are not negotiable," showing inflexibility on some of the deal's key weaknesses.
The administration should proceed cautiously and not squander its current leverage. Yet prematurely ending the renegotiations because of Raisi's history and hard-line rhetoric would be a mistake. Indeed, Raisi's, and the regime's, nature shows why Iran must never acquire nuclear weapons.
America has historically negotiated nuclear issues with other abhorrent governments. "The sort of basic truth of international politics is that you often have to make deals and you often have to engage with unsavory regimes," Mark Bell, a University of Minnesota assistant professor of political science, told an editorial writer.
Bell, a proliferation expert and author of "Nuclear Reactions: How Nuclear-Armed States Behave," added that throughout the Cold War the U.S. negotiated with the U.S.S.R., "a country that was far more threatening to the United States than Iran would or will ever be, regardless of who the Iranian leader is. They did it not because they were naive about the Soviet Union's intention or human-rights record, but because it was in the United States' interest."
The U.S. should not be naive about the Iranian theocracy's fundamental nature, its hand-picked president, its heinous human-rights record or its regional destabilization. At the same time, it must not be naive about the ramifications of a nuclear-armed Iran. It is in America's interest to continue to try to prevent that disaster through diplomacy, not force.
