Get Ready for Rouhani's Charm Offensive

Get Ready for Rouhani's Charm Offensive

Supporters praise President-elect Hassan Rouhani as a champion of change. His detractors, meanwhile, see him as a shrewd apparatchik, a status quo figure determined to buy time for Iran to become a nuclear power. The reality is more complex. When I first interviewed him in Tehran in the mid-1990s for a research project I was conducting about the Rafsanjani presidency, I found him to be intelligent, cunning, self-assured, and cautious with words. For a man of the cloth, his answers to my questions were non-ideological. Then, as now, he was pragmatic -- someone with whom one could do business.

Read Full Article »
Comment
Show commentsHide Comments

Related Articles