President Hassan Rouhani has emerged triumphant both at home and abroad, bringing Iran in from the cold.
Iran and world powers reached a framework agreement on Thursday on curbing Iran’s nuclear program for at least a decade, a step towards a final pact that could end 12 years of brinkmanship, threats and confrontation.
If the deal results in a comprehensive agreement in June, Rouhani’s popularity would grow even further, giving him the political capital to take on hardliners blocking his promises of political and social reforms in the Islamic Republic.
A 66-year-old mid-ranking cleric who formerly served as Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Rouhani dismisses any suggestion that his pragmatism represents a betrayal of the Islamic Republic’s founding precepts.
A comprehensive deal in June could see the West lift the trade and financial sanctions that are strangling the economy in return for limits on its atomic work, which the West says may be aimed at building weapons but that Tehran says is for peaceful purposes.
Progress has been possible in part because Rouhani has kept the confidence of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the so-called guardian of Iran’s Islamic Revolution who has the final say on all matters of state, including foreign policy.
Rouhani is bolstered by impeccable revolutionary credentials. In his early life he studied religion and opposed the then Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, joining Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in exile in Paris in 1977. After Khomeini came to power, he cemented his insider status in a series of sensitive postings.
A month after he assumed office, Rouhani and US President Barack Obama spoke by phone in September 2013 in what remains the highest-level contact between the two nations in 30 years.
The call was the culmination of a sharp shift in tone between Iran and Washington, which cut ties with Iran a year after the 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah.
Much of Rouhani’s diplomatic success has been a matter of style. The softly-spoken lawyer, who earned his doctorate in the UK, has refrained from the provocations of his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who denied the Holocaust and called for Israel to be “wiped from the pages of time.”
Known for being charismatic and eloquent, Rouhani is an active social media user, often tweeting his views about world issues, and seen as open for debate.
Rouhani kept a close eye on the talks from Tehran, and intervened a week before the interim deal by calling the leaders of France, Britain, China and Russia in an apparent attempt to break a momentary impasse.
Today, periodic bilateral talks between Washington and Iran on nuclear and regional topics appear almost commonplace, even in the absence of formal diplomatic relations, making good on Rouhani’s pledge of greater international engagement.
