The release of Nazanin and the enigma of Iran

Nazanin is free. Amid the sorrow and gloom of war in Ukraine, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release, after six years of captivity in Iran, is a rare moment of joy to be savoured.

But like it or not, it reminds us that Iran, the largest and most consequential state in the Middle East, remains stubbornly defiant despite all attempts to restrain, let alone shape it.

In the end, after years of bungled diplomacy, it was Tehran that called the shots. Nazanin’s carefully choreographed flight to freedom happened only after Britain paid a 40-year-old, £400 million debt to Iran. Hostage or pawn, she had served her purpose.

Her release, along with her fellow dual national Anoosheh Ashoori, removes one of the last obstacles to successfully concluding the stalled Iran nuclear deal and, in theory, making the world safer. Mere mortals, Homer reminds us in the Odyssey, are playthings of the gods.

The international community has never believed that Iran’s nuclear programme was entirely peaceful. History supports this view. The world’s nuclear club is the most exclusive and, for some — especially those that combine great ambition and deep insecurity — the most desirable. It’s a club with unequalled clout, backed by the hideous logic of annihilation. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the West’s limited response is proof of the value of membership.

The nuclear accord with Iran was first brokered in 2015 by the permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany. It was ditched by Donald Trump, in his zeal to break things, cheered on for his own reasons by the hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s then Prime Minister.

Under the new deal, now being finalised, Iran is supposed to rein in its nuclear programme, reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium, scrap its weapons-grade, heavy-water plutonium production and allow international inspectors in.

In return the West will lift crippling economic sanctions, including, in all likelihood, the freeing of billions of dollars in frozen assets. Just as its ally Russia is cast into outer darkness, Iran will come into the light.

Some equilibrium will be restored to a Middle East torn apart by two decades of war, civil strife, failed states that became the incubus of Islamic terrorism and a refugee crisis of biblical proportions that has engulfed Europe.

War between the Islamic Republic and Israel becomes less likely. The prospect of an arms race between the two rival oil producers — Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia — recedes. The theocratic state starts to play by the international rule book. At least that’s the theory.

But we should be cautious and clear-eyed. The lesson of Vladimir Putin’s savagery in Ukraine is that autocratic regimes couldn’t care less about what we like to think of as the rule-based order. They take what they can. The autocrat’s playbook is one of the oldest self-help texts in history.

Iran is an ancient civilisation. It has in the past enjoyed close historic and commercial links with the West. It has a highly educated and connected middle-class. And yet it remains a fully paid-up member of the despot’s club, as it has been for much of its history.

I witnessed the birth of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979. On February 1, a fortnight after the Shah had fled, the lugubrious Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini left his exile in the Paris suburb of Neauphle-le-Château and boarded Air France 4721, a Boeing 747, for the seven-hour flight to Tehran. I, and a small number of journalists, were invited to join him.

As we followed Khomeini’s tumultuous cavalcade into the capital, millions lined the streets. What struck me most was the full-throated national pride of the waiting crowds.

Iran, unlike virtually every state in the region, is not a made-up country. Its identity and self-assurance is rooted in millennia of history. Khomeini and his successors have exploited this with skill.

Some, and I confess to being among them, hoped for a return to a liberal Iran guided by the country’s educated middle class. We were soon disabused. Wishful thinking is the Achilles heel of the democrat.

Khomeini launched a fundamentalist revolution with himself as its sole supreme leader, judge, jury and executioner. It survives to this day. His successor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is one of the world’s longest-serving and most dogged autocrats.

We should remember that ideology and missionary zeal, not pragmatism, drive Iranian policy. Iran today remains first and foremost an Islamist movement on a mission with an economy bolted on, like a caravan.

There was a brief period under former president Akhbar Rafsanjani when a pivot to a more open economy and a rapprochement with America seemed possible. But the door was slammed shut when the leadership concluded that this threatened its hold on power.

It has since been replaced with harsh internal repression and an underground economy driven by sanctions. This includes alternative sources of income, such as the mass production of illegal amphetamines.

Regionally, Iran stepped into a vacuum created by the Lebanese civil war, the invasion of Iraq and the failed Arab spring.

Today Iran’s Revolutionary Guard projects the theocratic state’s power by arming and supporting proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Syria — with devastating consequences.

Lebanon, for example, is now a failed state in desperate straits where nothing happens without the approval of Hezbollah, the jewel in Tehran’s crown.

Not everyone in Iran is happy with the leadership’s foreign adventurism. Big anti-government protests over water shortages, unemployment, spiralling prices, the effect of sanctions and poor handling of the pandemic have been growing.

Lifting of sanctions will ease the plight of ordinary Iranians. In the short run this will help the regime, which has also carefully cultivated relations with both Russia and China.

But four decades on from the birth of Iran’s Islamic revolution, not much has changed. Its leadership pursues the same policies with blinkered, unflagging zealotry. This, we must concede, is an achievement,

Elsewhere in the Gulf, Arab regimes have used their oil wealth to create astonishing economic prosperity by integrating into the world economy: world-class airlines, museums, universities, internationally competitive healthcare.

By comparison Iran is a quasi-medieval hermit kingdom. Neither Nazanin’s release nor a nuclear deal will change this. Certainly not while Khamenei is in power.

Iran remains a misfit set in its ways, too stiff to mellow and too single-minded to crack. We should remember this.

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