U.S. Says Iran May Swap Ideology For Investment. History Shows Otherwise

As the United States and Iran begin complex negotiations for a peace deal, US officials described a fundamentally transformed relationship between two longstanding enemies.

Vice President J.D. Vance said Iran has the opportunity to secure prosperity at home and finally free itself from the evil grip of sanctions, provided it accepts long-term nuclear limitations and rethinks its most critical foreign and military policies.

Mr. Vance, who was tapped by President Trump to lead the talks, also said Iranian pragmatists and conservatives were warming to the idea that it was time to turn a new page in Iran-US relations.

The United States has been down a similar path before. In 2015, President Obama reached a deal with Iran that offered sanctions relief in exchange for restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program.

This agreement provides a cautionary tale, as the current administration has now begun negotiations with more ambitious goals.

Proponents of the agreement believed that it would lead Iran to focus on internal development rather than ideology, but it soon encountered resistance from Iran’s religious-military structure. These elements of the regime prevented the true opening of the Iranian economy and initiated a crackdown on those bringing foreign investment into the country.

Of course, Iran has suffered shocking events over the past decade, including several protests sparked by economic discontent. Its current leaders, who rose after their predecessors were killed in the last war, may decide to prioritize economic growth going forward, if only to preserve their own sovereignty.

At the time the 2015 deal was being negotiated, pragmatists in Iran were already working to maximize Iran’s economic potential.

In 2014, the country’s then-president, Hassan Rouhani, who was elected on the promise of lifting sanctions through diplomacy, met with some of the most successful Iranian Americans in technology, finance, law and business at a Manhattan hotel.

On the surface, Mr. Rouhani’s pitch was seductive: Return to Iran, bringing your contacts and investment capital with you, according to two people who attended the meeting and requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue. Mr. Rouhani told them that he wanted Iran’s economy to reach its full potential and that its talented diaspora was essential to that effort.

Sorena Sattari, Iran’s vice president for science and technology during Mr. Rouhani’s tenure, said in an email that she was at a meeting with Mr. Rouhani and Iranian American business leaders in New York in 2014. Mr. Sattari said that he held dozens of meetings with Iranian scientists and entrepreneurs during his visits to the city.

Mr. Rouhani did not respond to requests for comment sent via email and social media accounts. Ultimately, the attempt to transform the country’s economy through external links failed.

Instead of a universal welcome, many Iranian dual citizens and foreigners who attempted to work in or visit Iran in the years after the 2015 agreement faced harassment and detention by the country’s powerful security forces. Iranian leaders were suspicious of foreign capital entering their economy and believed it would be a vector for outside infiltration.

In his public statements in 2023, Mr. Rouhani in question A dual Iranian national who attended one of his meetings in New York in 2014 decided to return to Iran, but was detained at the airport when he arrived, he said.

Javad Zarif, who served as foreign minister during Mr. Rouhani’s tenure, said in an email that Iran’s policy has always been to encourage Iranian scientists and experts to return to the country, but did not address the crackdown on some of those who have returned.

Iran was left alone, and Iranians soon grew alienated from their president. Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal and reimpose sanctions on Iran during his first term in 2018 further solidified Iran’s inability to participate in the world economy.

Now, a decade later, the Trump administration is gambling that Iran’s security forces can be persuaded to soften their confrontational policies in the hope of global integration.

Or, as Mr. Vance put it in an interview in The New York Times’ Opinions section last month, Iranian leaders of different political persuasions agree that “Iran’s 47-year policy toward the United States has been a mistake.”

The interim memorandum of understanding signed by Iran and the United States in June stipulates the provision of $300 billion in reconstruction funds and the removal of all sanctions in exchange for Iran restricting its nuclear program.

Since the signing, Mr. Vance has said Iran would not receive the most significant financial incentives unless it turns its back on nearly five decades of ideological opposition to the United States and support for militant groups in the Middle East.

“If they don’t convert, they won’t get any of the economic benefits of the bargain,” he said in an interview with the Times’ Opinions section.

Such a fundamental transformation would not be in line with the habits and instincts of the Iranian government that have been shaped over decades. The ideology that brought the Islamist government to power in 1979 is still rooted in anti-US sentiment. And today Iran’s most powerful economic players are the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a military force, and semi-public companies controlled by religious leaders.

Economists and experts say their business interests would be threatened if the economy actually opened up, as it would likely bring in independent funds from outside and weaken their control over key sectors.

“I don’t believe that for a second,” said Richard Nephew, a former Obama and Biden administration official who was the lead expert on sanctions against the U.S. negotiating team that secured the 2015 deal. “I can see that these guys want to expand the ability to do international trade and things like that, but it’s not because they want to change the system.”

Just weeks after his diplomats finalized the deal in July 2015, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, then Iran’s supreme leader and who held ultimate power in Iran’s theocratic system, issued a statement. to arrange related to conversations This warned of enemy “infiltration” into Iran.

“We will not allow Americans to infiltrate our country economically, their political infiltration, their political presence, their cultural infiltration,” he said in one of the speeches.

The message was that Iran might derive some benefits from the deal, but that it would not be the basis for normalization with the United States or Western economic access to Iran. Mr. Khamenei public He thwarted Mr. Rouhani’s efforts to further advance the nuclear deal and further link Iran to the outside world.

In the years after the 2015 nuclear deal, Iranian security forces launched an operation. wave There are arrests targeting foreign nationals as well as Iranians with connections to the West. Some went to explore job opportunities, others to visit family, do research, or for other personal reasons.

Each arrest, often involving false espionage allegations, discouraged foreigners from traveling to Iran for fear that they, too, might be targeted.

“In the next few years, there will be nothing even remotely positive in terms of people coming back and investing,” said Morad Tahbaz, an Iranian-American environmentalist who was arrested by authorities in 2018 and held in Tehran’s Evin prison before being released in 2023 as part of a deal with the United States. “It’s almost hard for me to imagine that things could change so radically.”

Mr Khamenei, who was killed along with other political leaders and various military commanders at the start of the US-Israeli war in February, is no longer in power. Mr. Trump said Iran was experiencing “regime change” and praised Iran’s new leaders as “non-radicalized” and “very rational.”

Jamal Abdi, president of the Iranian National American Council, an advocacy group that favors lifting sanctions on Iran, said Mr. Vance’s comments about a new era in relations may have been oversimplified, but there was some cause for optimism that this could be a turning point for U.S.-Iran relations and their role in the region.

He acknowledged that major obstacles remain. The war has reinforced Iran’s view that its support for militant groups in the region is vital to its security, and there is deep distrust of US officials, given that past negotiations have been disrupted by attacks.

But Mr. Abdi added: “There is some evidence that a new generation is emerging in Iran’s leadership and security forces, a kind of pragmatic nationalism that is less committed to the ideological projects of the state and more focused on the practical practices of governance.”

Mr. Khamenei’s successor as supreme leader, his son Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, is only months into his reign. How he approaches Iran’s many deep problems remains largely untested, but he has been a key player in running business in his father’s office and has so far shown little inclination towards a radically different view of the United States.

Mohammad-Hossein Khoshvaght, political analyst and relative of the Khamenei family by marriage in question In a recent interview with a reformist news outlet in Iran, Mojtaba stated that Khamenei would continue in his father’s footsteps, but it was possible that his “management style” would be different in light of the “new conditions” after the war.

“Conditions have changed and naturally wisdom requires the current leader to act in accordance with the circumstances,” Mr. Khoshvaght said.