Iran’s regime President, Ebrahim Raisi, marked the first anniversary of his inauguration last Monday with a wide-ranging speech in which he ridiculously claimed that his administration had solved numerous socio-economic problems at both national and local levels. The speech was aimed to portray an unstable ruling theocracy as more powerful than ever. Yet, Raisi miserably failed by presenting some bogus facts and figures.
It was no doubt for the same purpose that Raisi avoided referencing the fraught negotiations over the future of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal until roughly the midway point of his two-hour address. When he did, it was only to reiterate the regime’s outstanding ultimatums and to champion his own imaginary success in “neutralizing” US sanctions with domestic economic production. Such claims reinforce prior statements from Raisi and other regime officials, which portray the regime’s Western adversaries as being in much more desperate need of a deal to restore the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
This reflects the regime’s effort to exploit a global energy crisis to acquire new concessions from the JCPOA’s Western signatories. That crisis largely stems from the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine, which Tehran recently began actively supporting by providing the Russian military with missile-carrying drones.
Therefore, Iranian officials and state media outlets argue that by isolating themselves from Russian oil and gas markets, Western powers have only made themselves desperate for an Iranian alternative.
Tehran now brags about its readiness to fulfill Western energy needs, but that claim has no foundations as the regime is presently struggling to meet its domestic gas needs, even while sanctions dramatically constrain its export capacity.
Iran’s domestic shortages were highlighted throughout the summer by various reports of power cuts and price hikes, several of which sparked massive protests. Other such protests stemmed from issues of water scarcity and systematic corruption in the face of escalating poverty rates all across the country. Such protests continue to the present day and plainly belie Raisi’s claims of having solved domestic issues by visiting local communities and hearing public grievances.
In reality, Raisi’s domestic travel was more likely intended to intimidate the public into keeping silent about those grievances. This is in line with the role those pro-democracy activists warned he would play after being installed as president by the regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in June 2021.
Ali Khamenei had previously sought to consolidate power in the parliament, and Raisi’s appointment was part of the same strategy. Khamenei had tapped Raisi for the nation’s second-highest office specifically because of his reputation for human rights abuses and violent crackdowns on dissents. In 1988, Raisi was one of four officials to serve on the Tehran “death commission” during a massacre of political prisoners, of which 30,000 lives nationwide. And in 2019, as head of the judiciary, he oversaw key aspects of the crackdown on that November’s nationwide uprising.
Public awareness of this record led to candidate Raisi being widely condemned as the “butcher of Tehran” in the run-up to a tightly-controlled sham election in which the vast majority of Iranians refused to participate. Since his selection as the regime’s president, protests have continued to feature the calls for regime change that defined the November 2019 uprising while also adopting the more targeted slogan “death to Raisi.”
The ongoing recurrence of that slogan underscores the dishonesty of Raisi’s claims about the domestic situation during his anniversary speech. The entire international community should be aware of that duplicity and its motivations when assessing how to deal with the Raisi administration and the clerical regime as a whole in the weeks and months ahead.
The Iranian regime is now openly attempting to drag out nuclear negotiations through the month of September, but its strategy hinges on Western powers erroneously taking Raisi seriously when he claims that the regime is politically stable, economically strong, and able to exert significant leverage over its global adversaries.
The regime is as weak as it has ever been, suffering from the aggregate effects of global scrutiny, sanctions, domestic uprisings, and associated activism by the Iranian Resistance.
The best response to Raisi’s claim is to hold him and the regime accountable for past and ongoing crimes. But before doing any of that, the international community must make it absolutely clear that they reject Raisi’s narrative about the conditions inside Iran and will never let his administration dictate what is in the interest of global security or the Iranian people.
