: As Iran’s Nuclear Talks Resume, the West Needs to Understand Who It’s Dealing With #WorldNEWS After months of playing hard to get, Iran returns to the nuclear talks with international powers today

As Iran’s Nuclear Talks Resume, the West Needs to Understand Who It’s Dealing With #WorldNEWS
After months of playing hard to get, Iran returns to the nuclear talks with international powers today in Vienna. But does the West really know who it’s negotiating with?
The return to negotiations over the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) will be the first time the West faces Iran under its new President, hard-line Islamist cleric Ebrahim Raisi. Gone are the days of Javad Zarif, the soft-spoken, smiling, U. S. -educated former Iranian foreign minister. All policies in the Islamic Republic were and are determined by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But Zarif’s charm offensive made dealing with Khamenei’s regime more palatable for Western diplomats, at least optically.
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The new hard-line face of Iran’s nuclear negotiations is Ali Bagheri-Kani, a deputy foreign minister who will adopt a new approach, have different priorities, and present a new set of challenges. U. S. and European diplomats are aware of this — but what they may not realize is that Bagheri-Kani represents a systemic change well under way in the clerical regime, whose consequences should alarm the West.
Raisi was groomed to become president to “purify” the Islamic Republic. For Khamenei and his inner circle, purification is necessary to advance Iran to the next stage of the Islamic Revolution: the creation of an ideal Islamic state, which they regard as incomplete. Purifying the state includes further deepening the Islamization of society and improving administrative efficiency, while ending rife mismanagement and Iran’s consequent economic woes which they blame on Western-oriented bureaucrats running the state.
As our new report for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change uncovers for the first time, Raisi is shifting the power equilibrium in the Islamic Republic for the first time in 42 years, in order to fully cleanse the system. An elite group of technocrats has emerged as a power base in the clerical regime. Educated at the same, deeply hardline university, and devoted to running the government in the service of ideological goals, they present a new and entirely unfamiliar challenge to the West.
The school for a new elite
This emerging cohort of ideological technocrats, which includes Bagheri-Kani, have one important affiliation in common: the Imam Sadegh University (ISU), an elite institution designed to indoctrinate the next generation of Iranian bureaucrats.
ISU is exclusive, cult-like and reserved for the most fanatical regime supporters. It was established in 1982 by hardline clerics led by the late Ayatollah Mahdavi Kani, whose goal was to fuse the hawza (Shia seminary) with the modern university to nurture officials capable of running an Islamist state — think hardline clerics in suits.