Moderates vs. Hard-Liners

It’s difficult to believe that after half a century of dealing with the Islamic Republic of Iran, the United States remains “perplexed,” as The New York Times recently described it, by the nature of its revolutionary regime. Curiously, however, every American administration since the birth of the Islamic Republic in 1979 has posited the same theory about the regime’s nature: namely, that the ruling clique in Iran is composed of moderates and hard-liners who continually vie for power, and that America can meaningfully affect Iranian internal power dynamics.