The annual September summit at the UN General Assembly – UNGA for short — is one of the few occasions when global adversaries can meet and conduct sensitive high-level diplomacy.
In 2013, it was the setting for a major breakthrough between the U.S. and Iran. First, the foreign ministers of the P5+1 – the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany – met with Iran’s envoy. Then Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif had an animated one-on-one conversation with then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. Zarif told reporters afterwards that it was “more than a chat.” Referring to talks on Iran’s nuclear program, he added, “This was a good beginning. I sense that Secretary Kerry and President [Barack] Obama want to resolve this.”
Fast forward a decade and the optimism of that moment is long gone. Iran’s nuclear program is closer than ever to the ability to make weapons. Overall, Iran-U.S. relations appear to have reverted to the norm of the past four decades – no direct contact, economic warfare, hostage-taking, and mutual recriminations.
UNGA coincided with one positive development — the long-sought release of five American hostages in Iran. The intricate deal involved mediation by Qatar, Oman, and Switzerland and entailed the transfer of $6 billion of Iran’s own money from South Korea via Switzerland to Qatar. The money – revenue from oil sold to South Korea just after the Trump administration withdrew in 2018 from the nuclear agreement the P5+1 and Iran had reached in 2015 – is to be strictly monitored by the U.S. to make sure it is spent for non-sanctioned humanitarian goods.
But President Joe Biden, in a speech to the General Assembly, scarcely mentioned Iran, apart from insisting that it would never be permitted to develop a nuclear weapon. Enrique Mora, the Spanish diplomat who has been in charge of nuclear talks with Iran for the European Union’s External Action Service, met with Iranian negotiators on the sidelines of UNGA and then with the U.S. special envoy for Iran, Abram Paley. However, efforts to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated under the Obama administration still look miniscule a year since Iran rejected an EU draft.
A few hours after Biden spoke, his Iranian counterpart, Ebrahim Raisi, addressed the General Assembly. Raisi excoriated the U.S. for its withdrawal from the JCPOA, the reimposition of sanctions, and the assassination (under Trump) of Qassem Soleimani, head of the external arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Raisi said Soleimani’s death – in a U.S. drone strike near Baghdad airport in early 2020 – was a “gift” to the terrorists of the Islamic State group and that those who killed Soleimani should be punished – although Raisi did not specify how.
Raisi also accused Western countries of fomenting unrest in Iran after the death a year ago of a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, in police custody for the “crime” of imperfect veiling. Raisi chided the Europeans for harboring members of an anti-regime group called the Mujaheddin-e Khalq and inveighed against France for prohibiting schoolgirls from wearing the hijab. All this was topped off by Raisi’s claim that the world had undergone a “paradigm shift” of influence from West to East. “They are the past,” Raisi said of Western nations that have tried to isolate Iran for the past four decades. “We [i.e. Asian nations] are the future.”
Many critics of Iran, especially in the large Iranian diaspora, decried the fact that Raisi was allowed to come to New York given his record of repressing human rights going back to his days as a junior prosecutor in 1988 when Iran summarily executed 5,000 political prisoners at the end of the Iran-Iraq war. However, the U.S. is obliged, under its host agreement with the U.N., to admit all foreign leaders who wish to attend UNGA. Tellingly, the Biden administration sanctioned a previous Iranian president — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – on the same day that Raisi landed in New York and the five U.S. hostages left Tehran. Ahmadinejad was cited for the case of Bob Levinson, a retired FBI agent who was picked up on the Iranian resort island of Kish in 2007 and subsequently died in Iranian custody. It was a reminder, as if one was needed, that Iran has made a habit of seizing Americans since 1979-81, when Iran held 52 U.S. diplomats for 444 days.
Raisi, following the pattern of his predecessors, also held off-record encounters with assorted Americans in New York, but these meetings only appeared to perpetuate the impasse.
The Council on Foreign Relations organized one of the meetings on September 20. Ground rules forbid identifying the participants or what Raisi said. However, it was permitted to report the questions. They were adversarial, reflecting the dim state of U.S.-Iran relations.
Many of the questions were about the Iranian government’s role in the deaths of more than 500 people and the arrest of thousands in the nationwide protests that erupted after Amini’s death. What did it say about the legitimacy and longevity of the Islamic Republic that it had resorted to extreme repression of its people 40 years after a revolution against the Shah who had also used excessive force against his opposition, one participant asked.
Others asked whether Raisi had meant his threats against those responsible for the death of Soleimani and whether he would pledge not to assassinate former American officials. There have been reports that Iran is targeting former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former National Security Advisor John Bolton for their role in the U.S. decision to kill the Iranian general.
There were questions about the hijab and why Iranian women are forced to wear the veil. Other queries dealt with Iran’s electoral system, under which candidates are vetted for their loyalty to the regime. One participant asked whether Iran would permit a referendum – suggested by a now marginalized reformist faction in the country – on the continuation of its clerical-led system.
One participant asked whether Iran had had anything to do with a near-fatal attack on the author Salman Rushdie in 2022; another asked about the difficulty for Western journalists to obtain visas to travel to Iran. There was also a question about why Iran was backing Russia in its war against Ukraine given Iran’s own history as a victim of an invasion by Iraq in 1980. One participant wanted to know what Raisi thought of U.S. attempts to convince Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel.
A final questioner noted that the U.S. is full of successful Iranian immigrants – many of them products of elite Iranian universities. Why do so many Iranians leave, he asked?
Raisi was elected in 2021 with virtually no opposition – all other plausible candidates were barred from running. He is likely to be re-elected the same way in 2025. The real power in Iran, of course, is not the president but the Supreme Leader – Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who just turned 84. A staunch opponent of the U.S., neither Khamenei nor Raisi seem likely to extend an olive branch to Washington anytime soon. And the mood in Washington as Biden embarks on a re-election campaign appears to be the same.
Barbara Slavin is a Distinguished Fellow at the Stimson Center where she directs the Middle East Perspectives project.
Raisi and Biden at UNGA: Back to Square One with Iran
By Barbara Slavin
Middle East & North Africa
The annual September summit at the UN General Assembly – UNGA for short — is one of the few occasions when global adversaries can meet and conduct sensitive high-level diplomacy.
In 2013, it was the setting for a major breakthrough between the U.S. and Iran. First, the foreign ministers of the P5+1 – the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany – met with Iran’s envoy. Then Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif had an animated one-on-one conversation with then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. Zarif told reporters afterwards that it was “more than a chat.” Referring to talks on Iran’s nuclear program, he added, “This was a good beginning. I sense that Secretary Kerry and President [Barack] Obama want to resolve this.”
Fast forward a decade and the optimism of that moment is long gone. Iran’s nuclear program is closer than ever to the ability to make weapons. Overall, Iran-U.S. relations appear to have reverted to the norm of the past four decades – no direct contact, economic warfare, hostage-taking, and mutual recriminations.
UNGA coincided with one positive development — the long-sought release of five American hostages in Iran. The intricate deal involved mediation by Qatar, Oman, and Switzerland and entailed the transfer of $6 billion of Iran’s own money from South Korea via Switzerland to Qatar. The money – revenue from oil sold to South Korea just after the Trump administration withdrew in 2018 from the nuclear agreement the P5+1 and Iran had reached in 2015 – is to be strictly monitored by the U.S. to make sure it is spent for non-sanctioned humanitarian goods.
But President Joe Biden, in a speech to the General Assembly, scarcely mentioned Iran, apart from insisting that it would never be permitted to develop a nuclear weapon. Enrique Mora, the Spanish diplomat who has been in charge of nuclear talks with Iran for the European Union’s External Action Service, met with Iranian negotiators on the sidelines of UNGA and then with the U.S. special envoy for Iran, Abram Paley. However, efforts to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated under the Obama administration still look miniscule a year since Iran rejected an EU draft.
A few hours after Biden spoke, his Iranian counterpart, Ebrahim Raisi, addressed the General Assembly. Raisi excoriated the U.S. for its withdrawal from the JCPOA, the reimposition of sanctions, and the assassination (under Trump) of Qassem Soleimani, head of the external arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Raisi said Soleimani’s death – in a U.S. drone strike near Baghdad airport in early 2020 – was a “gift” to the terrorists of the Islamic State group and that those who killed Soleimani should be punished – although Raisi did not specify how.
Raisi also accused Western countries of fomenting unrest in Iran after the death a year ago of a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, in police custody for the “crime” of imperfect veiling. Raisi chided the Europeans for harboring members of an anti-regime group called the Mujaheddin-e Khalq and inveighed against France for prohibiting schoolgirls from wearing the hijab. All this was topped off by Raisi’s claim that the world had undergone a “paradigm shift” of influence from West to East. “They are the past,” Raisi said of Western nations that have tried to isolate Iran for the past four decades. “We [i.e. Asian nations] are the future.”
Many critics of Iran, especially in the large Iranian diaspora, decried the fact that Raisi was allowed to come to New York given his record of repressing human rights going back to his days as a junior prosecutor in 1988 when Iran summarily executed 5,000 political prisoners at the end of the Iran-Iraq war. However, the U.S. is obliged, under its host agreement with the U.N., to admit all foreign leaders who wish to attend UNGA. Tellingly, the Biden administration sanctioned a previous Iranian president — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – on the same day that Raisi landed in New York and the five U.S. hostages left Tehran. Ahmadinejad was cited for the case of Bob Levinson, a retired FBI agent who was picked up on the Iranian resort island of Kish in 2007 and subsequently died in Iranian custody. It was a reminder, as if one was needed, that Iran has made a habit of seizing Americans since 1979-81, when Iran held 52 U.S. diplomats for 444 days.
Raisi, following the pattern of his predecessors, also held off-record encounters with assorted Americans in New York, but these meetings only appeared to perpetuate the impasse.
The Council on Foreign Relations organized one of the meetings on September 20. Ground rules forbid identifying the participants or what Raisi said. However, it was permitted to report the questions. They were adversarial, reflecting the dim state of U.S.-Iran relations.
Many of the questions were about the Iranian government’s role in the deaths of more than 500 people and the arrest of thousands in the nationwide protests that erupted after Amini’s death. What did it say about the legitimacy and longevity of the Islamic Republic that it had resorted to extreme repression of its people 40 years after a revolution against the Shah who had also used excessive force against his opposition, one participant asked.
Others asked whether Raisi had meant his threats against those responsible for the death of Soleimani and whether he would pledge not to assassinate former American officials. There have been reports that Iran is targeting former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former National Security Advisor John Bolton for their role in the U.S. decision to kill the Iranian general.
There were questions about the hijab and why Iranian women are forced to wear the veil. Other queries dealt with Iran’s electoral system, under which candidates are vetted for their loyalty to the regime. One participant asked whether Iran would permit a referendum – suggested by a now marginalized reformist faction in the country – on the continuation of its clerical-led system.
One participant asked whether Iran had had anything to do with a near-fatal attack on the author Salman Rushdie in 2022; another asked about the difficulty for Western journalists to obtain visas to travel to Iran. There was also a question about why Iran was backing Russia in its war against Ukraine given Iran’s own history as a victim of an invasion by Iraq in 1980. One participant wanted to know what Raisi thought of U.S. attempts to convince Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel.
A final questioner noted that the U.S. is full of successful Iranian immigrants – many of them products of elite Iranian universities. Why do so many Iranians leave, he asked?
Raisi was elected in 2021 with virtually no opposition – all other plausible candidates were barred from running. He is likely to be re-elected the same way in 2025. The real power in Iran, of course, is not the president but the Supreme Leader – Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who just turned 84. A staunch opponent of the U.S., neither Khamenei nor Raisi seem likely to extend an olive branch to Washington anytime soon. And the mood in Washington as Biden embarks on a re-election campaign appears to be the same.
Barbara Slavin is a Distinguished Fellow at the Stimson Center where she directs the Middle East Perspectives project.
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