The Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. and its European allies are “encouraged” by the election of Hassan Rohani as the next president of Iran. Mt. Rohani is a “centrist figure” and is seen as “a moderate candidate.” I wonder. If Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is really the main decision-maker in Iran, including on Iran’s nuclear program, what substantive difference does it make who the president is?
Also, I wonder if these “encouraging” feelings are more a matter of Western foreign policy elites projecting their views onto the Iranian political situation than any real change in Iran. When Kim Jung Il died in North Korea, there were articles about how his son, Kim Jung Un, would be more moderate and less aggressive. (See, for example, here and here.) Except it hasn’t worked out that way, to say the least. What was happening in those articles was a transference, by our foreign policy elites, of their worldview onto the new leader of North Korea. In their view, any rational person would think a certain way. They assumed the new North Korean leader would be rational, as they defined “rational,” and would think like they did. Except maybe what they think is rational isn’t rational in North Korea. Or maybe they have different goals than Kim Jung Il does. They think a country’s leader should want to improve things in his or her country. But maybe Kim Jung Un just wants to keep power. Maybe that’s what’s rational to him, and maybe what he is doing is the rational way to accomplish that goal in the North Korean system.
The same thing is very probably true in Iran. We don’t know what the goals of the new Iranian president are or what the best way is to accomplish those goals are in the Iranian political system. Plus, we don’t know how much power he really has. In other words, don’t get your hopes up. It’s still early.
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