Like quarterly earnings reports for American corporations, it's now election season for key countries central to U.S. security interests.
- For President Donald Trump, it was a disappointing last week on the global scene: France rejected the far-right Marine Le Pen and elected a pro-EU, pro-NATO political neophyte, Emmanuel Macron; and South Korea will send to the Blue House executive mansion left-of-center Moon Jae-In, who has made no secret of his disagreement with the U.S.'s harsh rhetoric toward Pyongyang.
Next in the political election queue is Iran, which will hold its presidential election on May 19th. The watch list at this point is focused on the future of sitting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.
- On the one hand, whether or not this relative Iranian moderate is re-elected is not nearly as consequential as the French or South Korean election results; Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, will, after all, remain, and he is the ultimate political authority in the Iranian Republic.
- On the other hand, Iran's election still matters, largely because of the implications of the election results on the future of the 2016 nuclear agreement between Iran and the international community.
Within the tightly constrained presidential slate of "approved" candidates – six in total – foreign policy has played a surprisingly limited role. Yet it is the nuclear deal that looms large in the background. It is no secret that Rouhani was instrumental in convincing a skeptical Supreme Leader to endorse the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the deal that limited for the next decade Iran's nuclear program and opened the door for Iran to the global economy.
- Rouhani's principal opponent in the race, Ebrahim Raizi, is a conservative cleric and no fan of the JCPOA; interestingly, he is also a rumored candidate to succeed the aging and presumably ill Supreme Leader – which makes him a favorite of Iran's military worried about retaining their economic interests under a business-focused, economically reform-minded Hassan Rouhani.
The wildly differing views of these two candidates on the nuclear deal highlights the importance of how the White House frames Iran's adherence to the deal's terms. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was blasted by both ends of the U.S. political spectrum for announcing in late April what the U.S. intelligence community continues to confirm: Iran has adhered to the terms of the nuclear deal itself (the "letter" of the JCPOA), but not to its "spirit."
- This is hardly surprising. President Rouhani's desire to glean the economic benefits of the nuclear deal has given him at least a modicum of leverage with conservative clerics and the Iranian military to maintain the JCPOA's nuclear constraints.
- But in areas removed from the JCPOA's terms – the "spirit" of the deal, like supporting Shia militias and Iranian agents in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq – Tehran's regional mischief remains unabated. Iran never believed in the "spirit" of the nuclear deal to begin with.
To this point, at least, post-inauguration, Mr. Trump has avoided roiling the Iranian political and JCPOA pots any further -- to his credit. But should he and this team declare Tehran in violation of the letter of the JCPOA and roll back Iranian sanctions relief, it would almost certainly help Raizi, whose supporters would simply say, "I told you so; can't trust the U.S.!"
- The consequence? Violations of the centrifuge and enriched uranium limits by Tehran, certainly under Raizi, and probably under Rouhani as well. Both would be confident (probably correctly) that other countries would not follow the U.S. lead in re-imposing sanctions, as long as Iran steers clear of outright nuclear testing and breakout. In essence, Iran would be back to where it was, pre-JCPOA: months, or even weeks, away from becoming a nuclear weapons state.
So, in the final countdown to the vote this Friday, one hopes for continued modulation in the Trump rhetoric toward Tehran. A Rouhani victory will not usher in an age of political and diplomatic Iranian moderation; far from it. But as the Council on Foreign Relations' Ray Takeyh recently highlighted, "For Rouhani to prevail, he must win the election decisively. If the vote totals are close, the conservatives who oversee the election process are likely to nudge it toward the right – the extreme right."
