Mehdi Khalaji is a Libitzky family fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and is writing a political biography of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader.
Many Western policy makers assume that Iran is a rational player, and its policies are not driven by Islamic ideology. Under this approach, they assume that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action will encourage Iran to make tough compromises on the nuclear program to the extent that eventually Iran will also drastically alter its defiant regional policies and work with world powers to bring peace and security to the Middle East.