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 attack Israel with missiles twice after Hamas started the war on October 7, 2023.
Zarif was rewarded for supporting Pezeshkian with a plum perch as vice president. He was actually Vice President for Strategic Affairs, one of several vice presidential positions in the Iranian government, although Zarif campaigned alongside Pezeshkian in a manner similar to U.S. running mates.
Zarif became a major target for hardliners in Iran’s endless factional struggles for power. He actually resigned once before, only two weeks after he took office, during a power struggle over the composition of Pezeshkian’s cabinet. Pezeshkian refused to accept his resignation and Zarif was back at his desk by the end of the month.
Pezeshkian did not immediately accept Zarif’s second resignation on Monday, although his office confirmed receiving the letter of resignation.
Zarif’s opponents have hounded him with invocations of a law that ostensibly forbids Iranians from holding public office if they, or their children, hold dual citizenship. Zarif’s children were born in the United States when he was part of Iran’s mission to the United Nations, so they are naturalized American citizens who hold U.S. passports.
Zarif wrote a testy social media post on Sunday night in which he complained about facing “the most ridiculous insults, slanders, and threats against my family in the past six months,” a period he described as “the most bitter” in his forty years of government service.
Zarif said he would resign on the advice of Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, the chief justice of Iran, who told him to “return to the university” to “avoid further pressure on the government.” Zarif has worked as a university professor and guest lecturer during most of the time he was not a government official.
“I hope that by stepping aside, the excuses for obstructing the will of the people and the success of the government will be removed,” he wrote on social media platform X. “I am still proud of my support for the esteemed Dr. Pezeshkian, and I wish him and other true servants of the people the best.”
Zarif has been chafing under restrictions imposed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who holds all the real power in Iran, another reason why the “moderates vs. hardliners” narrative is often little more than a sideshow. Khamenei issued an edict banning negotiations with the Trump administration in February, and Pezeshkian said on Sunday he would submit to the Ayatollah’s will.
“I personally believed that it would be better to hold talks. But the supreme leader said that we do not negotiate with America. So, I also announced that we will not negotiate with America, that’s the end of it,” Pezeshkian said, setting the stage for the departure of his diplomat vice president.
Another development on Sunday was the impeachment of Finance Minister Abdolnasser Hemmati, a former presidential candidate.
Pezeshkian had attempted to defend Hemmati by arguing that Iran’s economic problems “are not related to one person, and we cannot blame it all on one person.” Hardline lawmakers proceeded to do exactly that, delivering a string of angry sermons about how sky-high inflation was making life difficult for Iranians before voting to impeach Hemmati.
Zarif was head of the committee that selected ministry heads and other top officials of the Pezeshkian administration, so Hemmati’s defenestration was a signal that his own position was becoming tenuous.
Also, Hemmati’s opponents were quite open about booting him out as a signal that Iran was not interested in making concessions to improve its economic ties to the Western world. Hemmati’s wing of Iranian politics argued that heavy sanctions imposed after President Trump withdrew from the JCPOA, coupled with Iran’s devastating losses in Syria and Lebanon during the Gaza conflict, made it impossible to reduce inflation without developing better relations with the U.S. and Europe.
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