I was pleasantly surprised to see an Associated Press photo on the BBC website this morning showing a smiling Ali Larijni, Iran’s pragmatic but now fired nuclear negotiator, chatting to Javier Solana in Rome while his hardline replacemant, Saeed Jalili, stood by looking like something he just ate was disagreed with him. I can’t help wondering if the story represents a real issue in the Iranian nuclear problem, or if the western media are building it up out of wishful thinking. It is certainly going to make work for my International Organisations class who will be working on non-proliferation later this semester.
Both Larijani and Jalili were keen to stress the continuity of policy, but the very fact of Larijani’s presence in Rome as the representative of Ayatollah Khamenei sends a clear diplomatic message. Last week, when Larijani, a well known pragmatist in terms at least of tactics in the Iranian nuclear crisis, resigned and was replaced by Jalili, who is a hardliner close to President Ahmadinejad, it did look like as if Iranian policy was going to get tougher. There seemed to be a real danger that Iran would push the buttons of the Western powers, leading to demands for much tougher UN sanctions this side of Christmas. Any debate in the security council about that would certainly have seen sharp differences between US and Russian views.
Now Larijani is back in the picture, literally. The ‘supreme leadership’ in Iran, the Ayatollahs, regularly send minders with government representatives on diplomatic missions, but they could have sent some non-entity, a faceless figure with no history. Instead they opted to send the man whom Ahmadinejad had effectively sacked. The Ayatollahs – Khamenei is in charge but they are a group, with a range of views – are a bit like the Catholic Church in the West: they were around before Ahmadinejad, they expect to be there long after he is gone from ‘power’, and they can take a long view. By the time Iran has a working reactor or a nuclear weapon, Ahmadinejad won’t be President, but there will still be a ‘Supreme Leader’. They still want a nuclear programme, of course, and may well want nuclear weapons, but they don’t appear to be in the same rush that Ahmadinejad is in
The fact that between 180 and 200 MPs signed a letter supporting Larijani out of the 290 members of the Iranian parliament is more complicated though. It looks like a significant endorsement of Larijani, but to get that many signatures, you would need to get a lot from among the 160 or so conservatives whom one would expect to normally support Ahmadinejad. However, there is a bit of history there – Larijani was a candidate in the election which Ahmadinejad won. In fact, Larijani was pretty much the ‘official’ conservative candidate but was a flop in the first round. Chances of Larijani runnning again next time – pretty good I’d say. Chances of Khamenei kicking the conservative political machine to make sure they don’t mess it up next time – also looking pretty good right now.
The AP photo that the BBC chose to illustrate the story may not be entirely representative of the mood of the talks between Iran and the EU, but it did capture a moment, and diplomacy is made up of little moments like that. The details of the story tend to support it.
It is certainly going to make work for the students in my International Organisations class, who have to do a ‘model UN’ simulation on this topic later this semester. I don’t usually split national positions in the simulation exercise, but I think this year I might have to assign two different students to ‘play’ the two different Iranian positions.