Iran’s Return to Pragmatism
The Iranian presidency seems to be a cursed position. Of the eight men who have held it before the current president, five eventually found themselves politically marginalized after their term finished. Two others fell to violent deaths in office (a bomb attack in 1981, a helicopter crash in 2024). The only exception is Ali Khamenei, who went on to become the supreme leader.
Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s centrist president from 2013 to 2021, could be poised to break the spell and stage a political comeback.
The prospect seemed far-fetched until recently. Pressed on one side by hard-liners and on the other by opponents of the Islamic Republic, the regime’s centrists and reformists had become political nonentities. In the last years of his rule, Rouhani was among the most hated men in Iran. His landmark achievement, the 2015 nuclear deal with the Obama administration and five other powerful countries, was destroyed when President Donald Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018. Iran’s security forces, which are not controlled by the president, killed hundreds of protesters in 2017 and 2019 while he looked on. He was followed as president by the hard-line Ebrahim Raisi, picked in 2021 in an uncompetitive election. With Khamenei’s backing, the hard-liners went on to capture most of the available instruments of power in Tehran. Last January, Rouhani was even denied a run for the seat he had held since 2000 in the Assembly of Experts, a body tasked with appointing the supreme leader.
But the events of 2024 shifted the balance of power in the Middle East—and inside Iran. Israel’s battering of Hamas and Hezbollah greatly weakened Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance. The fall of the Assad regime in Syria last month was the final nail in the axis’s coffin. Khamenei’s foreign policy now lies in ruins. Last year, for the first time in their history, Iran and Israel exchanged missile and drone attacks on each other’s territory. Following Raisi’s death in a helicopter crash in May, Khamenei allowed a reformist, Masoud Pezeshkian, to run for and win the presidency—a significant concession, as reformists have been effectively sidelined, if not barred, from national politics for nearly two decades. Now Rouhani’s star foreign minister, Javad Zarif, is back as Pezeshkian’s vice president for strategic affairs. Both Rouhani and Zarif campaigned for Pezeshkian and have found themselves on the winning team.
[Read: RIP, the Axis of Resistance]
Having brought international isolation, domestic repression, and economic ruin to the country, hard-liners find themselves red-faced. Although the almost 86-year-old Khamenei is still fully in charge, he has lost much respect, not only among the people but also among the elites, and the battle to succeed him is already under way. Recently, Khamenei has signaled his possible openness to abiding by the anti-money-laundering conditions set by the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force. If Iran is to have any hope of solving its economic problems, it has no other choice: The country is currently one of only three (the other two are North Korea and Myanmar) on the FATF’s blacklist. But the issue has long been a touchy one for hard-liners, who see cooperating with the FATF as capitulation to the West and fear that it will force Iran to curtail its support for terror groups.
An emboldened Rouhani is back in the spotlight, giving speeches and defending his time in office. In the past few months, he has repeatedly complained that his administration could have engaged Trump directly but was stopped from doing so. (This is an implied dig at Khamenei who, in 2019, publicly rejected a message that then–Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe brought to Tehran from Trump.) Rouhani has called for “constructive interaction with the world,” which is regime-speak for negotiations with the United States in the interest of sanctions relief. None of Iran’s problems can be solved without addressing sanctions, he recently said. He has also called for “listening to the will of the majority of people” and freer elections. These statements have made him the target of renewed attacks by hard-liners, such as Saeed Jalili, who lost the election to Pezeshkian last year.
What may look like factional bickering is significant in this case. Rouhani speaks for part of the Iranian establishment that rejects Khamenei’s saber-rattling against the U.S. and Israel on pragmatic grounds. He is in many ways the political heir to Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a once-powerful former president who eventually ran afoul of Khamenei and died in 2017. Rafsanjani and Rouhani are often compared to the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. They sought to transform Iran from an ideologically anti-Western state to a technocratic one, with a pragmatic, even West-facing, foreign policy. During his presidency, Rouhani made state visits to France and Italy and was accused of neglecting Iran’s ties with China and Venezuela. His cabinet included many American-educated technocrats, and his administration tried to purchase American-made Boeing planes.
[Read: The collapse of the Khamenei doctrine]
Iran’s centrists are less interested than the reformists in democratization, and more focused on fostering economic development and good governance. This emphasis allows them to extend a broad umbrella. Rouhani’s agenda of pragmatic developmentalism is shared to varying degrees not just by reformists, but by many powerful conservatives, including the Larijani brothers (a wealthy clerical clan that includes several former top officials), former Speaker of Parliament Ali Akbar Nateq Nuri, former Interior Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi, and even the current speaker of parliament, Mohammad-Bagher Qalibaf (who was for years a top commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps).
Iran’s current weakness and desperation offer Rouhani and his allies an opportunity to wrest back power. Doing so could put them in a favorable spot for that inevitable moment when Khamenei dies, and the next supreme leader must be chosen. Rouhani has some qualities that will serve him well in this internal power struggle. Unlike the soft-spoken reformist clerics, such as former President Mohammad Khatami, he is a wily player who spent decades in top security positions before becoming president. (Khatami had been Iran’s chief librarian and culture minister; Rouhani was the national security adviser.) During his two-term presidency, Rouhani confronted rival power centers, such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, without fear. His experience negotiating with the West goes back well before the Obama era. In early 2000s, he led Iran’s first nuclear negotiating team, earning the moniker “the diplomatic sheikh.” In the mid-1980s, Rouhani led the negotiation team that met with President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser, Robert McFarlane, in the arms-for-hostages deal known in the U.S. as Iran-Contra. In 1986, Rouhani even met with a top Israeli security official, Amiram Nir (who was posing as an American), to ask for help in countering Iranian hard-liners.
But does Rouhani have any reasonable chance of returning to power? As always, Tehran is full of discordant voices. According to one conservative former official who spoke with me on the phone from Tehran, Rouhani is a major candidate for succeeding Khamenei as supreme leader. The official asked to be anonymous, given that “we have been ordered not to discuss the succession.” A high-ranking cleric and a former reformist MP cited the same gag order, but observed that Rouhani’s fortunes were rising; they declined to predict whether he could become supreme leader.
Mohammad Taqi Fazel Meybodi, a reformist cleric, is not so hopeful. “I don’t believe folks like Rouhani can do much,” he told me by phone from his house in Qom. “They don’t hold power, and hard-liners oppose them. These hard-liners continue to oppose the U.S. and have an ideological worldview. They control the parliament and many other bodies.”
Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, a former reformist MP who is now an activist based in Boston, believes that the regime will seek a deal with the U.S. regardless of who is in power. “There have long been two views in the regime,” she told me: “a developmentalist one and one that wants to export the Islamic Revolution. But the project of the latter now remains defeated. Iran has no way but to go back to development.” Even in what many consider a worst-case scenario—if Mojtaba Khamenei, the leader’s son known for his ties to the security establishment, succeeds his father—he, too, will be forced to adopt the developmentalist line, Haghighatjooo says.
[Read: Iranian dissidents don’t want war with Israel—but they can’t stop it]
Haghighatjoo is even hopeful that the new Trump administration, with its willingness to break with past norms, will provide an opportunity for normalization between Iran and the U.S. Such an approach would “give strength to the developmentalists, especially now that the Axis is weakened,” she said.
Khamenei continues to resist such notions. In a defiant speech on January 8, he lambasted the U.S. as an imperialist power and pledged that Iran would continue to “back the resistance in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Yemen.” He criticized “those who want us to negotiate with the U.S. … and have their embassy in Iran.”
But Iran is in dire straits, and the supreme leader can ignore the facts for only so long. In many ways, he resembles his predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolutionary leader who, in 1988, likened his acceptance of a cease-fire with Iraq to “drinking a chalice of poison.” Having promised for years that Iran would continue to fight until it overthrew Saddam Hussein, Khomeini’s volte-face came out of desperation—and at the urging of Rafsanjani and Rouhani (a young Zarif, then a diplomat at Iran’s UN mission, helped write Iran’s letter to the UN Security Council, officially accepting the cease-fire).
Many analysts now loudly wonder whether Khamenei, too, will drink his chalice of poison. He might have no other choice. The old ayatollah’s project has evidently run aground—and Iran’s pragmatists have fresh wind in their sails.