Analysis: Ebrahim Raisi and Iran's Nuclear File

Welcome Judge Raisi! Welcome to the hectic world of Iranian politics; It’s no more the theoretical turban of a theologian legalist, but a cool-headed politician and a diplomat about to make his footprints on international affairs as the new Islamic Republic of Iran president!

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Ebrahim Raisi is somewhat of an oddity, a curiosity in a complicated world he is about to enter with all the cutthroat political meanderings and diplomatic relations that are potentially so cataclysmic. He is a local, domesticated apparatchik who is about to enter into the deep seas of international politics simply because of Iran’s nuclear file, its nuke missiles and uranium grade enrichment which nobody seems to have any clear idea of where are they going to and how they are going to be handled and produced.

On the other hand, Joe Biden, the new president of the United States wants to sleep easy without having the ‘trigger on the button’.  He is prepared to let bygones be bygones and wants to re-enter the brokered Iran Nuclear Deal of 2015, and which his predecessor Donald Trump got the United States out off point blank and basically torn in a 2018 labored-international accord that had the backing of the UN Security Council members of Russia, China, France, Britain plus Germany.

That certainly put the cat among the pigeons. In Trump’s world a myopic, narrow-minded-tunneled vision had been withered at a stroke of a pen. Iran become once again under international sanctions and even of any of these powers flaunted such cruel embargos, they would face the scorched wrath of the United States.

This is what Raisi facing now as an elect-president who would take the reins of power this coming August, and is yet to put his new cabinet and worldview together. When Trump repudiated the nuclear deal, the Europeans plus China and Russia pleaded with Iran to maintain a modicum of respect to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Iran agreed to, but nevertheless it started uranium enrichment that eventually shot up to an alarming 60 percent. Furthermore, it is no longer allowing UN nuclear inspectors to enter their nuclear facilities. Therefore, the situation with Iran is at a knife-edge with ropes ready to tightened through large knots.

From experience, and that includes the period which led to the JCPOA signing in 2015, Iranian policy-makers right up to president-elect Raisi, believed in the trusted Islamic adage of: Patience. That is to operate at a level to get the most out of a bad situation. Patience means deliverance and this is what Raisi is looking for.

Despite the fact that he has been labelled as a radical, a conservative, a theologian and someone looking for local, petty politics the new man at the helm in Iran is a shrewd, calculating politician who knows what he wants. He is a radical but a pragmatist, he is a yes man, close to the leadership of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but there is a sense of domestic drive in him as seen by his widespread economic agenda that brought him to power in June 18, 2021.

This drive is today forcing the search for economic packages to get Iran out of its economic ills and depressions and to give Iranians a decent life. He wants to crackdown on corruption from the top of the political pyramid right down to the state institutions and economic sectors; he wants to revive the private sector, manufacturing and get the country working again with wild claims of creating four million jobs during his tenure and reduce poverty and improve housing. These are seen as grandiose amusing claims but they are coming from a conservative politician who is seeking to breathe life into Iran.

But it is not ally rosy. For such plans require liquid cash and investments which the country had been starved out of since 2018. Raisi knows full-well Iran needs to get back to full compliance with the JCPOA accord regardless of the humiliation and derailment Trump tried to institute. In theory, full compliance means the unlocking of investments and allow the realization of a better economic future for Iranian kinsmen.

This is not the full story. The Biden team is today taking it upon itself not to go for the full lifting of economic sanctions pointing to the fact that Washington policy-makers are actually working in accordance with the Trump mentality and vision, and who long believed the Iran deal is a bad one that needed to be abrogated.

There is a sense of push and pull in this new US administration with policy makers seeking a tagging approach as if they are in a wrestling match or one fighter handing his protagonist to the other for more beatings and threshing. There has to be a greater ethical, moral approach to the JCPOA accord, and which Biden desperately needs to make because it stands out as an early foreign policy success in his administration and which the US president wants to project away from his predecessor.

It is early days yet. We are only at the beginning of the line with negotiations in Vienna taking a turn for the worse which is rather unpleasant, dissipating development. But both sides are playing for time despite the determination of the outgoing administration of Hassan Rouhani in Tehran to save the nuclear day!

From that point of view, it seems JCPOA will need to have wait till for instance, things simmer down in Iran and Raisi takes over the reins of political power.  This is an opaque, practical view put forward by the critics of the incoming president and supported by Iran’s Supreme leader Khamenei who is supposed to control both domestic and foreign policy. Khamenei on the other hand, likes to display objectivity above the world of politics but it has long been suggested he agreed to the nuclear deal of 2015 as something good for Iran.

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As the deal begun to be thrashed by Trump, something which created much animosity with America’s European allies, Khamenei as well, reacted in a retrograde manner, becoming ambivalent to the whole issue of international negotiations with notion of trust thrown out of the window. There is no doubt there is a tag fight. Iran and Raisi included, believe full compliance means international sanctions on the country has to be lifted if not it is back to a very Square One. So the protagonists have to wait a while.

One thing is sure. European countries favor the rehabilitation of the deal and the return of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors to Tehran. It is they who are likely to push for some kind of lifting of sanctions that would be agreeable to all. We just have to wait and see but it is clear Raisi is coming with an olive branch no less so than to Saudi Arabia and urging it to establish diplomatic relations with the state.

With this development only time will tell but Biden is projecting himself as a strong believer in multilateralism and the United Nations. Can he go the extra mile?