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Iranian Vice President Mohammad Javad Zarif resigned on Sunday evening, strongly implying in his resignation letter that he was forced out by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni and other theocratic hardliners.
Zarif, 65, was Iran’s foreign minister from 2013 to 2021 and served as Iran’s lead negotiator for the 2015 nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The deal was signed by President Barack Obama, but President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018, citing Iranian cheating and support for terrorism. Zarif was seen as a leader in the “moderate” or “reformist” wing of Iranian politics. Along with Hassan Rouhani, who was president of Iran when the JCPOA was negotiated, Zarif endorsed “moderate” candidate Masoud Pezeshkian in the June 2024 special election to replace hardline President Ebrahim Raisi after he died in a helicopter crash.
Terms like “moderate” and “reformist” are highly relative in Iranian politics, particularly since Western media constantly abuse such language to paint leaders like Zarif and Rouhani as preferable to the “hardliners.” Pezeshkian won an upset victory to become a moderate and reformist president, for example, but he has not been much help when it comes to halting Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, and he proved quite bloodthirsty when it came to using Iran’s terrorist proxies to shed innocent blood on behalf of Hamas in the Gaza war and was willing to directly attackIsrael with missiles twice after Hamas started the war on October 7, 2023. (Read More)
