Photo credit: AP
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani smiles at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Washington: When President Hassan Rouhani of Iran commandeered the spotlight this week in Davos, Switzerland, with a message of peaceful intentions and a desire for dialogue, it was an eerie echo of 10 years ago, when Iran's last would-be change agent, Mohammad Khatami, delivered the very same message at the World Economic Forum.Comparing their appearances demonstrates how much Iran has changed in the last decade, but also how fragile the current diplomatic opening is, and how little time Rouhani may have to negotiate a nuclear deal, while holding Iran's hard-liners at bay.
Iran, Rouhani said Thursday, was determined to pursue "constructive engagement" with the world and had no intention of acquiring a nuclear weapon. In 2004, Khatami said, "Anywhere that we sense and feel that the other side respects us and does not force anything upon us, we are prepared to talk." He, too, ruled out a bomb.
Then, as now, Iran agreed to halt some enrichment of uranium and submit to United Nations inspections, as part of an effort to negotiate a nuclear deal. Then, as now, the Iranian leaders used Davos, the annual gathering of world leaders and captains of industry, as an opportunity to lure foreign investors back to their country.
But less than a month after Khatami's star turn in the Swiss Alps, Iran held parliamentary elections marred by the government's disqualification of thousands of reformist candidates. For Khatami, whose landslide election in 1997 had stirred hopes for change, it was the final blow to his own reformist credentials. By the following summer, the nuclear diplomacy had collapsed and Iran had switched its centrifuges back on.
Rouhani faces a similarly treacherous path. To close a nuclear deal, he will have to make concessions that would engender fierce resistance from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other conservative factions. His growing international celebrity - and that of his foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who was also at Davos - could bring him into conflict with Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
"Rouhani knows Khatami's history," said Abbas Milani, an Iranian scholar at Stanford University. "He knows Khamenei's delicate position. He reads the attacks on him and Zarif in Iran. So he is trying to walk this rather sensitive line to see if he can open doors."
For a variety of reasons, Iran experts said, Rouhani has more room for maneuver than his predecessor. The pain of international sanctions on Iran's economy is a much bigger motivation to signing a nuclear deal than Iran's fear in 2004 that the United States, which had invaded Iraq the year before, would march on Tehran next.
Rouhani, never a reformist, was elected with a broad consensus of Iran's clerical and military establishment to try to negotiate a deal that would ease those sanctions. Khatami, who had long spoken out in favor of democracy and civil society, was an unorthodox victor whose election presaged deep rifts within the ranks of the mullahs.
"In contrast to Khatami, there is a widespread perception that Rouhani is working with, rather than against, the supreme leader to carry out détente abroad and reconciliation at home," said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Still, he added, "Rouhani has been winning global accolades by using a similar - although less articulate and arguably less genuine - script than Khatami began using in 1997."
The surface similarities were on display in Davos. Both leaders projected a genial, reasonable image as they greeted participants. Both steered clear of the angry, anti-Israel vitriol of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who served as president between them. Ahmadinejad's inflammatory rhetoric all but ensured that he would never be a Davos Man.
Khatami larded his speech with references to German philosophers like Hegel and Weber, and said, "Democratic norms are not identical packaged-goods, ready for export." Afterward, he gamely held a chaotic news conference, in which he brushed aside suggestions that he should meet with U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, who was also in Davos that year.
At the time, Iran was not even the world's No. 1 nuclear rogue state. Two days after Khatami spoke, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military ruler at the time, admitted that his country's top atomic scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, had sold nuclear designs to other countries.
This year, Rouhani was guaranteed a sold-out crowd. He had held a history-making phone call with President Barack Obama; his country has signed an interim nuclear deal with the West, which has halted parts of its nuclear program for the first time in a decade; and Iran is viewed as something of a kingmaker in Syria, where its support for President Bashar Assad is one of the main reasons he has clung to power.
Speaking to an audience that included Israelis, Rouhani insisted that Iran would pursue a foreign policy of "prudent moderation." While he did not seek common ground with the United States on Syria, he said "all of us should work to push terrorists out."
Yet Rouhani also showed a more cautious, politically calculating side than Khatami. He canceled a planned news conference; his aides cited technical problems with the room. And in an interview with Fareed Zakaria of CNN, he insisted that Iran would not agree to dismantle a single centrifuge - a position that, if nonnegotiable, would be a deal breaker.
Rouhani, unlike Khatami, has shown little appetite for opening up Iranian society or challenging the authority of its clerical institutions. If he runs afoul of Khamenei, some experts say, it will be less because of what he said at Davos than because of his enthusiastic embrace of other first-world pursuits, like Twitter and Facebook, although he said in Davos that his frequent posts were ghostwritten.
"Davos is fully approved by the theocracy," said Suzanne Maloney, a senior fellow and an Iran expert at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. "It's the other elements of the strategy, like social media, that are problematic at home."
