Hassan Rouhani

Hassan Rouhani was president of Iran from 2013 to 2021 and negotiated the nuclear agreement that an American administration then left. He is a cleric with a Scottish doctorate, from Glasgow Caledonian, who joined the opposition to the Shah as a student and spent the 1980s and 1990s in the security apparatus - deputy commander of the armed forces during the Iran-Iraq war, then sixteen years as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, where he led the earlier nuclear talks and agreed a suspension that hardliners never forgave. He won the 2013 election on the first round, promising to end the sanctions that had cut Iran's oil exports by more than half and driven inflation above forty per cent. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action of 2015 capped enrichment and opened Iranian facilities to inspection in exchange for relief, and it worked on its own terms until the United States withdrew in 2018 and reimposed sanctions, after which the economy contracted sharply and Rouhani's domestic position collapsed. He was a moderate by the standards of the system and within its limits: the 2019 protests over fuel prices were put down with hundreds killed under his presidency. Ebrahim Raisi, whom he had beaten in 2017, succeeded him. He was barred from standing for the Assembly of Experts in 2024 by the same Guardian Council that had allowed him to run for president twice, which is a precise measure of how far the system moved after him. The JCPOA is not dead and not alive: Iran's enrichment has gone far past its limits and the agreement's own sunset clauses have begun to expire. His reputation in Iran suffered less from the deal than from what happened to prices after it collapsed. He remains a member of the Expediency Discernment Council. His memoirs of the nuclear negotiations were published in Persian and are unusually candid about the internal opposition he faced.

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