Masoud Pezeshkian, a cardiac surgeon who emerged from political backwoods this summer to beat a slew of hard-liners and become President of Iran, walked into the ornate ballroom of a New York hotel this week to meet the press. It was his American début. He was wearing a crisp white shirt under a dark suit. No tie. After the 1979 Revolution, the young theocracy banned neckties as a symbol of Western, notably U.S., influence. Pezeshkian had two layers of security—an élite Revolutionary Guard unit that protects Iran’s top officials and a U.S. Secret Service detail that escorts visiting heads of state, friend or foe, on trips to America. New York police officers in flak jackets were deployed outside the hotel.
It was an incongruous scene, on Monday, with the Middle East in flames. Israel, which is supported and armed by the United States, was pounding Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia supported and armed by Iran. Hundreds were dying and thousands were injured as Pezeshkian spent his first full day in New York under American protection. Hezbollah has been the cornerstone of Iran’s so-called forward defense for more than four decades. During the past two weeks, its leadership, bases, and weapons arsenal have all been targeted in more than fifteen hundred Israeli air strikes and in novel intelligence operations in which thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies carried by Hezbollah members were detonated.
Iran is clearly nervous. As Pezeshkian walked past me toward the head of a U-shaped table lined by reporters and editors, I held out my business card. He took it. A diplomat from the Iranian mission to the U.N. chastised me. The Revolutionary Guards wanted to expel me from the event, he said, even though he knew that I’d interviewed six Iranian Presidents, dating back to the nineteen-eighties, including the future Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. I’d just gone through security checks, including a metal detector outside the building, and bag and wand inspection to enter the ballroom. “What if the card had been poisoned?” the diplomat said. Hours earlier, Reuters had reported that the Revolutionary Guard had banned the use of common communications devices by its own forces, who number almost two hundred thousand.
Pezeshkian sounded both plaintive and angry. He issued an overture, implicitly including the United States. “We are willing to have dialogue. We’re willing to have peace. We do not want to fight. We do not want war,” he told us. “In what other language do we need to express this to everyone? We just want to let everyone know, and make everyone understand, that we want to live in peace.” Tehran, in exchange, wanted access to international trade, technology, medications, and food supplies—much of it inaccessible because of thousands of sanctions imposed by the Trump and Biden Administrations. During a hastily organized Presidential campaign, Pezeshkian, whose predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi, was killed in a helicopter accident, had vowed to end Iran’s economic isolation. “I have come to rescue the people from the hardships of sanctions,” he said at the last of five Presidential debates, in June. That’s one of the several reasons he beat five other candidates.
Pezeshkian’s victory reflects Iran’s wildly erratic politics. He served as Health Minister under a previous President, between 2001 and 2005, but was disqualified by the Council of Guardians, a body of twelve jurists and clerics, when he tried to run for President in 2021. He served four terms in Parliament representing minority Azeris; he was Deputy Speaker between 2016 and 2020. The Council of Guardians disqualified him—as it often does political candidates, for no stated reason—from running for a fifth term this spring. That decision was reportedly reversed, as occasionally happens, at the behest of the office of Supreme Leader. In June, the Guardian Council allowed Pezeshkian to run for President, possibly as a token moderate in a field of favored hard-liners. Iranian voters had other ideas.
The outside world has long struggled to understand how much power Iran’s President holds in a system where the Supreme Leader has the final word on almost everything and the Revolutionary Guard shapes regional security policy. Hard-liners also now dominate the legislature and the judiciary, which is infamous for imposing draconian sentences, including death by hanging, for vague charges related to offending the theocracy or Islam. Past Presidents have routinely been isolated politically, banned from travel, and barred from speaking to the press after they leave office. A former Prime Minister and a former Speaker of Parliament, who both ran for President in 2009, and challenged the results during the nationwide Green Movement protests, have been under house arrest for more than a dozen years. I’ve increasingly wondered why anyone wants to run for President of Iran at all.
Some analysts think Pezeshkian, a widower who raised three children after his wife and their youngest son died in a car crash decades ago, may be different from his predecessors, even if only slightly, and only because of the recent turmoil in Iran. “He’s not Mohammad Khatami, who was intimidating to the Supreme Leader because he was so popular,” Ali Vaez, the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, told me. “He’s not Hassan Rouhani, who was a canny operator of that system and knew how to circumvent the Supreme Leader. And he’s not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was basically ungrateful for the Supreme Leader elevating him to the pinnacle of power. At the same time, he’s also not Ebrahim Raisi, who was completely subservient.”
Pezeshkian, a pragmatist who is widely viewed more as a physician than as a politician, has managed to navigate Iran’s political minefield even as his unusual candor renders him vulnerable to a deep state lurking in the background. Nouradin Pirmoazen, a thoracic surgeon, went to medical school with Pezeshkian and his wife and also served in Parliament. He is now in exile, in California, after criticizing the government. “We have to judge Pezeshkian in the environment of Iran,” Pirmoazen told me. Pezeshkian, he said, is “the last chance” in a “dark time” for the Revolution, which, for decades, has silenced, jailed, or killed an astonishing cross section of Iranian society: dissidents, musicians and movie directors, women and labor activists, mayors, members of Parliament, ex-Vice-Presidents, the children of former Presidents. If the new President doesn’t open up society or end Iran’s economic isolation, Pirmoazen said, “then the nation fails.”
In New York, Pezeshkian reflected the paranoia of the revolutionary regime as it faces another, far more significant political transition—picking a successor to the aging Supreme Leader, who has been in power for thirty-five years. Most Iranians have known no one else. Tehran has cultivated a phalanx of religious allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen—frontline forces arrayed against a nuclear-armed Israel and the Sunni governments in the region. Pezeshkian is no different from those who came before him, hard-line or reformist, in backing the Axis of Resistance. “Hezbollah, or any other group that wishes to defend her rights, we defend them. We defend righteousness,” Pezeshkian told us, at the New York hotel. “If we defend the Palestinians, we’re defending the rights of those who cannot defend themselves. We know more than anyone else that if a war, a larger war, erupts in the Middle East, it will not benefit anyone.”
The strategic prism through which Tehran’s leaders, whatever their politics, view the world, has been shaped by the two wars that were launched shortly after the Revolution, more than four decades ago. The first was a grisly eight-year conflict with Iraq, in the nineteen-eighties, during which Saddam Hussein’s military unleashed chemical warfare. The Reagan Administration provided Baghdad with intelligence on Iranian positions. The C.I.A. later estimated that tens of thousands of Iranians were killed by chemical weapons in the war—with more than a million casualties over all. Most of the Sunni Arab world also supported Iraq’s Sunni government, further isolating Iran. The other war was Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, followed by a two-decade occupation during which Iran’s brethren Shiites were targeted. Perceiving itself as a perpetual victim, the Islamic Republic has nurtured allied militias across the region ever since.
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