Iran's Moderates Win Election
But It Won't Matter to Trump
By Robin Wright
But It Won't Matter to Trump
By Robin Wright
Donald Trump arrived in Saudi Arabia this weekend to launch
a new Middle East coalition designed to confront Iran, just as Tehran announced
the reëlection of President Hassan Rouhani, the man who dared to engage
diplomatically with the United States. Rouhani won a commanding victory:
fifty-seven per cent in a four-way race, with seventy-per-cent turnout. He
fended off a challenge from a populist right-wing cleric, Ebrahim Raisi, a
rising political star backed by hard-line power centers such as the
Revolutionary Guards. Street celebrations erupted Saturday night from Tehran to
Mashhad, the eastern city with Iran’s holiest shrine.
President Trump’s trip symbolizes a formal U.S. reversal on
Iran. There is no foreign-policy issue over which Trump and former President
Barack Obama disagree more. Trump’s mobilization of Sunni Arab regimes to
challenge predominantly Shiite Iran risks increasing regional and sectarian
tensions in the energy-rich Gulf. New sanctions, some imposed last week by the
White House and others in the pipeline in Congress, threaten to undermine the
spirit of diplomacy created during two years of arduous negotiations between
Tehran and the world’s six major powers. It produced a deal, in 2015,
containing Iran’s nuclear program—the most important nonproliferation treaty in
more than a quarter century.
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