The Return of Iranian Hard-Liners’ Favorite Moderate
When Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif tried to quit last week, the move looked like another troubling defeat for his country’s beleaguered moderates. Highly intelligent, sophisticated, and U.S. educated, Zarif always made an unlikely chief diplomat for the world’s most anti-American regime. Totalitarian governments, wrote Hannah Arendt, “invariably replace all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” Zarif defied that mold, and Western officials and analysts feared that his departure would sever Tehran’s last link to the West.
In fact, he wasn’t going anywhere. Iran’s revolutionary elite, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, quickly rejected Zarif’s resignation. The foreign minister was soon back on the job, raising once again the question of what role an urbane functionary really serves in
