Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here. July 17, 2024 |
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What will change in Iran, now that it has elected reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian?
Conventional wisdom says: not much. After Pezeshkian's win, experts quickly noted that in Iran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has all the real power. Despite the new president's preference for a better relationship with the West, skepticism of Iran's harshly enforced requirement that women cover their hair, and recognition of young Iranians' broad dissatisfaction, Pezeshkian will be unable to defy Khamenei and his clerical allies. Pezeshkian may have no desire to.
Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, a Harvard Kennedy School fellow and international-affairs professor at Texas A&M's Bush School of Government and Public Service, stresses that view in a Foreign Affairs essay, writing: "Pezeshkian's win will lead to some policy shifts. His government, for example, might strike a modest nuclear deal with Washington. It could also create some social and political space for its citizens, particularly for young people and women. ... But on the whole, Pezeshkian is likely to govern in seamless coordination with the supreme leader—just as [the late hardline President Ebrahim] Raisi did," before his death in a helicopter crash in May prompted the new election. "The country will maintain its assertive regional policies and nuclear program. It will strengthen its friendships with China and Russia, and it will continue to thaw ties with neighboring countries. … Iran may have a surprising new president, but the future of Iran still looks like its past."
That interpretation may be supported by US allegations that Iran had plotted to assassinate former President Donald Trump—which Iran has denied, and which was not connected to the attempt on Trump's life at a campaign rally on Saturday.
Others are a bit more hopeful, emphasizing that marginal policy changes could be meaningful. Hamidreza Azizi, a visiting fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, writes for the European Leadership Network that Pezeshkian's recent English-language foreign-policy op-ed in the Tehran Times offered "a familiar mix of warnings and historical grievances typical of Islamic Republic officials," when it came to Pezeshkian's view of the West. That said, Azizi argued it's best to wait and see what Pezeshkian does in practice. At The American Conservative, Bijan Ahmadi of the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy sees a desire by Iran to re-enter nuclear negotiations with the US, even if the path to an agreement would be "fraught" with political obstacles in both Washington and Tehran.
In a New York Times guest opinion essay last week, Holly Dagres of the Atlantic Council wrote that Pezeshkian's government "offers hope of some reprieve from the hard-line government of Mr. Raisi and the country's dire economic situation," although liberal young Iranians won't be satisfied until Khamenei is out of power. Then again, as Dagres notes in her The Iranist newsletter, international human-rights lawyer Gissou Nia argued on X that global media attention on the possibility of liberalizing changes in Iran is unhelpful, in that it "focuses the energy on a system that has proved time & time again it is unwilling or unable to reform."
On Sunday's GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN, Fareed will have an interview with new Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri Kani about the challenges facing the new government—and the alleged assassination plot. |
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Ukraine's Important Summer |
What will the rest of the summer hold for Ukraine? After its eagerly anticipated counteroffensive failed to make major gains last year—due in part to a delay in Western weaponry shipments, some argue—the first half of 2024 has been marked by gloomy reports. At Der Spiegel in February, Christoph Reuter chronicled the misery of trench warfare amid Russia's superior firepower. At The New York Review of Books in April, Tim Judah wrote of a collapse in national fighting spirit.
As for what's happening now, keen war observer Michael Kofman tells host Ryan Evans on the latest War on the Rocks podcast episode that the next two or three months may be difficult for Ukraine, but Russia has failed to capitalize on an offensive against Kharkiv, and a recent trip to the front suggested to Kofman that Ukraine is "showing improvements" across all three major areas of concern: "manpower, fortification and munitions." New Ukrainian mobilization efforts have been effective, Kofman says, and a collapse of the front lines seems unlikely. |
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As Afghan Women Suffer, the World Moves Ahead |
Not all Afghan women lamented the return of the Taliban, Mélissa Cornet writes in the London Review of Books. "During the two decades of US-sponsored government, progress failed to trickle down to the countryside. Many of the women I interviewed who lived outside the cities saw the Taliban's arrival as a positive thing: they had never had girls' schools in their areas anyway, and they always had to wear the burqa, even when Afghanistan was home to more than 100,000 American troops. At least now there is peace."
But for others, the Taliban regime is a nightmare with no end in sight. One young Afghan woman estimates to Cornet that she has left her home only five times in the last two years. An international legal campaign to "end gender apartheid" offers little hope, as enshrining that principle in international human-rights law would be unlikely to force change on the Taliban. Meanwhile, some countries in the region are accepting Taliban rule and dealing with Kabul's powers that be.
Cornet writes: "[T]he gap is growing between countries which insist on principle that they won't engage with the Taliban without concessions on women's rights and pragmatic neighbouring countries which prioritise regional stability—these countries increasingly occupy the diplomatic space in Kabul. With all parties entrenched in their own corners—and with the proposed codification of gender apartheid as a crime unlikely to make much difference—it's hard to see who or what would enable a breakthrough. Afghan women don't expect anything to change. 'In the last two and a half years,' [ex-prosecutor] Latifa said, 'every media organisation, every UN agency has been doing their independent research on women's rights. They know exactly what is going on, and yet what have they done for us?'" |
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