Iran’s president-elect Masoud Pezeshkian’s has written two open letters to the world, prompting speculation about what his agenda will be and whether he can deliver. His messages so far, aimed at three separate audiences – Iran’s immediate neighbors, the West, and China and Russia – represent a peace offering, but they come with caveats. Pezeshkian is hardly waving the white flag. Nor does he even have a flag to wave given his limited institutional powers as an elected president in the Islamic Republic, where the unelected supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the generals in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) constitute the core of the powerful “deep state.”

In fact, the conventional wisdom is that Pezeshkian is yet another bit of window dressing put up by the “deep state” in Tehran, which effectively calls the shots on the most contentious foreign policy files, including Iran’s attitude toward the Americans, the Arabs, and the Israelis in the region as well as its nuclear and missile programs and proxy warfare model.

Pezeshkian’s job, the thinking goes, is not to change the course of Iranian policy but to ease international pressure on it. That said, the Iran of 2024 is truly confronting monumental socio-economic challenges that not even the “deep state” can brush aside. It might just be that Pezeshkian’s sudden emergence as president was orchestrated from the outset as a pretext for the Iranian regime to change course.

If so, this new president’s promise to focus on regional de-escalation and cooperation — and not prioritize a quick dash for a new nuclear deal with the West — should be encouraged for one principal reason: de-escalation with the Arab world can provide a pathway for Tehran to climb down from its regional agenda and its stance toward Israel. After all, no other policy issue is arguably as decisive for the Islamic Republic’s political future and foreign policy trajectory.

The promise

As a candidate, Pezeshkian trashed Iran’s foreign policy performance. He likened Iran’s position in the world to being inside a “cage” and denounced his main hardline rival, Saeed Jalili, as a man who wants to build walls around the country. Pezeshkian lashed out at the idea that “self-determination” equals “self-isolation.” As he put it, “Iran has to engage in dialogue with the world and secure its share [of the benefits of international cooperation].”

This was all very bold given that in the Islamic Republic, all of the core strategic foreign policy decisions have, since 1989, been made by Ali Khamenei. The supreme leader hinted at his displeasure at some of Pezeshkian’s election slogans, but he did not stop his candidacy. This point speaks volumes about Khamenei’s possible intentions.

The smart focus on the Arabs

In his two letters to the world, Pezeshkian played it safe. Perhaps too safe. But then again, remember that his gameplan, if he does indeed have an independent one, is to move slowly and gradually toward policy change without making Khamenei and the IRGC leadership feel it is too risky from their vantagepoint inside the regime power structure.

In his first letter, Pezeshkian asked the Europeans to “set aside self-arrogated moral supremacy” and look to cooperate with Tehran. If Europe plays ball, then apparently the sky is the limit.

Predictably, he was much more cautious about the Americans. Again, this is not a surprise given Khamenei’s extreme sensitivity on the issue of US-Iranian relations. For now, Pezeshkian’s message to Washington echoes Khamenei’s line: “Iran does not—and will not—respond to pressure.”

This was the safest call Pezeshkian could make, signaling to Washington that the ball is in its court if the United States and Iran are to take another stab at rapprochement. It is easy to dismiss it as a hollow gesture, but the message that came out of the recent Iranian election process is unmistakable: all factions within the regime these days agree that economic normality is impossible while the American sanctions on Iran remain in place.

Pezeshkian also claimed that the United States has “no strategy for Iran.” Nor does Iran have one for the US, if he were to be frank. The closest Tehran has to a US strategy is the tired old slogan that the United States has to leave the Middle East. Not only is that highly implausible but it directly undercuts the one clear-cut policy Tehran has successfully been pursuing for the last few years, namely constructive engagement with the pro-US Arab Gulf states.

In his second letter, Pezeshkian spoke to the Arabs, and his message was straightforward — that Iran does not seek to continue the zero-sum-game competition in the region. If the Gulf Arabs do well, that is a net positive gain for Iran and the entire Middle East, as he put it. Pezeshkian spoke about “unity of the region,” but was careful not to question the close relations between the Arab governments and Washington.

One has to hope Pezeshkian will drop his predecessors’ repeated failed attempts at appealing to the Arab Gulf states by turning the question of a US departure from the Persian Gulf into a non-negotiable demand to establish some kind of regional security structure in an effort to reduce tensions.

Instead, Pezeshkian spoke about Iranians and Gulf Arabs both “opposing the division of the world and polarization based on the interests of the great powers.” An optimistic interpretation would be that Iran and the countries of the Gulf should avoid becoming pawns in the US-China competition. The Gulf states will have no problem with such a message since this is their current de facto approach.

Finally, in his message to the Arabs, what Pezeshkian did not say is also telling. According to him, “the Palestinian people must … be freed from occupation and secure their natural and self-evident rights,” but he did not call for Israel’s destruction per se. He criticized Israel’s nuclear arsenal, but he framed the challenge as the need for a “nuclear weapons-free Middle East” and not just for Israeli disarmament. Again, these messages will be hard for the Arab Gulf states to reject out of hand. A Palestinian state, as part of a two-state solution as laid out under the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, and a nuclear weapons-free Middle East are both long-running Gulf demands.

In the case of the Gulf states, there are a few tracks that they will carefully watch. First is whether Pezeshkian really does have a mandate from Khamenei and the IRGC to change course since they are ultimately the ones who decide Tehran’s regional actions. The Gulf states mostly did not take Rouhani and his foreign minister, Javad Zarif, seriously for that reason. When Gulf leaders talked to Tehran, they preferred men from the “deep state,” people like Ali Shamkhani, the former secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), who signed the 2023 peace agreement with Saudi Arabia in Beijing.

Also, the Gulf states will want to see if Tehran can temper its stance on Israel. No one believes that Khamenei and the IRGC will give up on the Axis of Resistance model and the official rejection of Israel. But would Tehran be willing to maintain its ideological rejection of Israel while rolling back its regional proxies’ attacks on the country?

If so, this would go a long way toward alleviating Gulf Arab fears about the potential of a broader regional conflict that risks upending their ambitious post-oil economic development plans. After all, the fate of the Palestinians is more of an Arab cause than it is an existential question for non-Arab Iran. As of today, a plurality of the 22 Arab governments do not believe that Israel can be defeated militarily and that the diplomatic track is the only viable way forward. This is a hard reality that Tehran can accept and then shift gears to push ahead with the national revival that Pezeshkian calls imperative. “We only have one Iran [to protect],” as he put it.

Can Pezeshkian prove he can deliver?

In his presidential campaign, Pezeshkian was unequivocal about Iran’s regional challenges. As Tehran spent the last two decades preserving its nuclear ambitions at any cost, the Arab states, Turkey, and Iran’s other neighbors have surpassed it on almost all economic benchmarks. As the president-elect articulated, “We were supposed to bypass sanctions but [emerging regional economic] corridors are bypassing us.” He insists that foreign policy should help improve living standards and not burden the hard-pressed average Iranian. If he can act on this pledge, then he will be a transformational president as compared those who have come before him since 1979.

But first he has to prove that he can deliver, and he can realistically only do so if he can persuade Khamenei, the IRGC, and the rest of the regime to come along. He has said his first foreign policy priority is to have a dialogue with the Arabs. That is an approach that is more agreeable to the “deep state” than a singular focus on achieving a new nuclear deal with the Americans and all the complications that would be linked to it.

In contrast, a productive dialogue with the Gulf Arabs might just give Tehran an opportunity to recast its demand for Palestinian self-determination as part of a pan-regional framework for Iran and the Arab states to back the same concept of a two-state solution. That itself would be a heavy lift. But such an approach could give Iran space to refocus on policies that could remove or lessen the debilitating pain caused by sanctions.

After all, it is hardly a secret that Tehran’s regional agenda, including its support for armed anti-Israel groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, is as much, if not more, responsible than the nuclear issue for causing Washington and the West in general to impose sanctions on Tehran. In short, a meaningful dialogue with Arab states could give Iran a way out of its Israeli predicament, which in turn might soften attitudes in Washington on how best to deal with the Iranian challenge.

 

Alex Vatanka is the director of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute. His most recent book is The Battle of the Ayatollahs in Iran: The United States, Foreign Policy, and Political Rivalry Since 1979. Twitter: @AlexVatanka

Photo by Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images