The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House

by Ben Rhodes

ON JUNE 14, 2013, Hassan Rouhani was elected president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, representing the more moderate faction of Iranian politics. He was not the preferred candidate of Iran’s hard-line Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This fact alone was an extraordinary contrast to the 2009 election, when Khamenei had thrown his support behind the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, placing opposition leaders under house arrest and launching a sustained crackdown on the opposition. Rouhani had campaigned on a platform of seeking improved relations with the West, linking progress on the nuclear issue to the goal of improving the Iranian economy. His election indicated that Iranian public opinion could apply pressure on the country’s leadership from the bottom up. If that pressure was sufficient to get Rouhani elected, perhaps it could compel Iran to make concessions on its nuclear program.