Principlist Ebrahim Raisi was elected Iran’s next president on 18 June 2021. He will succeed moderate President Hassan Rouhani in early August. Raisi will enter office at a crucial juncture as Iran and the West are engaged in ongoing technical negotiations aimed at reviving the nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Raisi’s landslide win in presidential elections will have important implications for Iran’s relations with the outside world. Also, it will impact the strategic and political environment in the Middle East and beyond.
Iran’s new president is trusted by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say in all state matters. It is widely predicted that the incoming Raisi administration will not be at odds with other institutions within Iran’s ruling system since principlists will control all the three branches of power. That means there will be less internal political bickering or no internal infightings at all, allowing Raisi to focus on tackling pressing issues instead.
Like Khamenei, Raisi is suspicious of the West’s intentions but has supported nuclear negotiations to revive the JCPOA. He has promised to create jobs and tackle unemployment. That is unlikely to happen, or at least difficult to achieve, without the lifting of draconian economic sanctions against Iran. Raisi knows well that sanctions need to be lifted to enable Iran to achieve economic growth. So, he is committed to the JCPOA and his election will not be an obstacle in the way of restoring the nuclear deal.
In short, Iran’s tone toward the West would harden under Raisi, but he will very likely continue to push the United States to re-join the JCPOA and lift the sanctions.
This paper argues that Iran’s strategic direction will remain unchanged under Raisi but its foreign policy will witness visible changes. There will also be changes in tactics, tone and priorities.
It also argues that what happens next will largely depend on the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden’s political will to salvage the JCPOA by lifting the sanctions or cause it to die and force Iran to reconsider its strategic direction.
Iran’s Foreign Policy under Raisi
Raisi has indicated that he will first seek to set the house in order. Primarily, he will look for solutions inside, rather than outside, the country. That means he will need to fight corruption and mismanagement, and utilise internal capacities, much more than the outgoing Rouhani administration did, and work to reactivate Iran’s domestic capabilities to the maximum.
Rouhani and his camp were optimists. They pinned a lot of hope on the JCPOA and the lifting of sanctions. But that was a humiliating experience. The unilateral withdrawal of the administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump from the JCPOA in 2018 damaged diplomacy, harmed Iran’s economy and discredited Rouhani. It also deepened the level of mistrust between Tehran and Washington.
Rouhani’s foreign policy team had been influenced by the liberalism school of thought in international relations but Raisi’s team is expected to be guided by a combination of realism and pragmatism.
The Raisi administration will not share Rouhani’s optimism. On the contrary, it will be very sceptical of Washington’s intentions. Raisi’s inauguration will mark the start of a more assertive and uncompromising approach in Iran’s foreign policy while the overall course of Iran’s strategy will remain the same. That is because Iran’s foreign policy objectives are usually decided by consensus at the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) where five of its ten members are represented by the president and his Cabinet members. Almost all decisions by the SNSC are approved by Khamenei. So, while the Raisi administration will choose its own tactics, it will operate within the goals, priorities and redlines set by the SNSC, Iran’s highest security decision-making body.
Even back in 2017, a year before the United States pulled out of the JCPOA, Raisi had said during his first failed presidential campaign, “Any administration that comes to power should be committed to the JCPOA. The nuclear deal, despite its shortcomings, is a national document.” (4)
“Liberal-minded, reformist-oriented and centrist moderate governments in Iran in the past looked to the West. Raisi wants to create a balance in Iran’s foreign relations. I expect the Raisi administration to pursue Iran’s new policy of ‘pivot to Asia’ with a stronger determination while seeking to maintain relations and manage tensions with the West. So, expanding trade relations with Iran’s immediate neighbours and boosting ties with Asian countries, specifically China, would stand high in its foreign trade strategy,” political analyst Emad Abshenas maintained. (8)
To that end, it is likely that the Raisi administration will look at the unilateral inhuman U.S. sanctions as an opportunity to stop selling crude oil – which is easy to sanction – and export added-value commodities such as gasoline, engine oil, tar and other by-oil products that are on high demand and difficult to sanction.
In televised presidential election debates, Raisi vowed to give “economic diplomacy” a top priority with the goal of increasing Iran’s exports. He repeatedly pointed to Iran’s 15 neighbours and their market of 500 million people with which Iran should promote trade and of which Iran currently only has a tiny share.
Raisi has also promised to reduce taxes for producers, obtain taxes from wealthy businessmen evading taxation by creating a new smart taxation system, fight commodity smuggling, and make production attractive through economic reforms.
Biden could have issued executive orders to lift at least some of the sanctions against Iran the day he took office on 20 January. More than five months have passed and the United States has not re-joined the JCPOA. This has strengthened the suspicion in Tehran that Biden’s goal is to create consensus against Iran and that the White House is not in a hurry to lift the sanctions. This opportunistic approach would make it difficult to salvage the deal if the talks are not finalised before Raisi’s inauguration.
“I don’t think that the U.S. will lift all the sanctions. It wants to maintain the architecture of the sanctions while offering to lift some of [them]. Washington uses sanctions as a tool to achieve its foreign policy goals. It will not give away its most important pressure tool,” Abshenas said. (12)
Iran cannot buy the idea of easing some of the sanctions. At best, a partial lifting of sanctions can be met by Iran’s partial return to the nuclear deal.
Iranian leaders had calculated that uranium enrichment technology would create “virtual deterrence.” That means Iran would possess nuclear fuel cycle technology and take its nuclear programme to an advanced stage short of weaponisation. It would be a “virtual nuclear power” without building an atomic bomb and without violating Iran’s obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). They concluded that it would be better and wiser for the Islamic Republic to offer nuclear concessions in return for the lifting of economic sanctions. They chose to accept unprecedented restrictions on Iran’s nuclear programme to become integrated into the global economic system and enjoy life without sanctions. The JCPOA was the result.
If that happens, it would be a direct consequence of the U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA and the United States’ stubborn refusal to lift the inhuman sanctions. Denying Iran of the benefits of the JCPOA would prompt Iranian strategists to conclude that Iran, a country of 83 million people, will be under sanctions under any circumstances no matter what it does and regardless of whether it complies fully with the JCPOA. It is not wise to push Iran in that direction.