Essay on Shargh Yearbook - 2018
The original text was in Persian and the following translation was done by Ai.
On the night of March 22, a headline dominated the news, overshadowing every other news item, even Bashar al-Assad’s quiet trip to Tehran: the resignation of the Foreign Minister. A sudden resignation that was first seen in an Instagram post and then later heard in the form of an official text that was faxed to the president’s home that night.
Although the full reason for Zarif’s resignation was his absence from the “meeting with Bashar al-Assad,” it is clear that this was only a spark in a warehouse of grievances. Grievances that had made a capable politician of Zarif’s level question the extent of his authority in the area under his management.
In addition, he had been facing all kinds of sabotage every day for a long time, and other discontented people from other parts
of the government were also attacking him and the Foreign Ministry on all kinds of pretexts. It is as if a part of society had forgotten, in the course of history, that it was not Zarif nor even his team, but rather the approach of diplomacy and dialogue with the world that removed us from Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter as a threat to international peace and security, lifted international and European sanctions against us, and made the world support Iran as much as possible, even against the most powerful government and country in the world. Today, the world has become a stage for Iran’s legitimacy and the illegitimacy and mere hegemony of the United States and its regional allies.
Although with the arrival of Trump and the United States’ withdrawal from the JCPOA and its violation of UN Security Council Resolution 2231, coercive threats have been made against our country, the opposition of Europe, China, and Russia, as well as other countries such as India, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey, regardless of how much they are able to circumvent and violate these sanctions, is politically of paramount importance. Because history does not end today, and with the passing of the era of pressure, what remains are these legitimizations and supports.
Another aspect of this resignation was that the authority of the Foreign Minister and his organization, according to him, has been questioned in areas that were symbolized by Bashar al-Assad's meetings in Tehran. All that we have heard in official positions about administrative errors and haste and such, however much it may be based on reality, cannot answer this long-standing complaint of Zarif. Therefore, it is certain that other parts of the government and their sovereignty, and even more so, should consider the authority of the Foreign Ministry much more than before.
However, this resignation, apart from the official and stated matters mentioned above, was an important turning point in Iran's foreign policy. Iran is now facing several sensitive issues in the foreign sector: the JCPOA and its fate, which is more dependent than ever on Europe's structural and political support for it and is sometimes overshadowed by oppositional issues and positions on this continent, joining the Financial Action Task Force and approving related bills, regional issues, the missile issue, and above all, the issue of sanctions imposed by the current US administration and the successive mischiefs of the Trump team and its regional allies.
Zarif, of course, along with professionally expressing the regime's positions, by semiotically choosing the subject of his resignation showed that the Foreign Ministry's specialized opinion on the regional issue may be a somewhat different and more interactive approach to achieve similar goals, so that the country can largely avoid paying political and security costs while maintaining regional influence and engaging in proportionate interaction with Europe and the Arab countries of the region.
The question of whether "Zarif after his return" is the same Zarif before his resignation? It does not seem so. But what changes should be expected from his political behavior in the coming session depends on the agreement reached with other sectors during his thirty-hour stay at home that forced him to return. Depending on the support that the people, the government, the president, and the government in a more general sense give him, we may expect a much more powerful Zarif than in the post-JCPOA era: a minister who, in the context of the JCPOA negotiations, enjoys unquestionable trust and support to a large extent, and whose foreign policy initiative is not only in dealing with a part of the world and a specific case, but is absolutely dependent on his decisions and methods.
It does not seem that, with all the wisdom we know from Zarif, he returned to work without such a change in what he himself demanded for the Foreign Ministry during his thirty-hour resignation. Therefore, if this is the case, this resignation can be considered an important and meaningful point in the country's foreign policy, and especially regional policy: a moment when history in Iran's regional policy can be divided into before and after. The point is that in this resignation - whether these matters were taken into account or not - there is an opportunity hidden in the face of potential threats that the country, and especially the Rouhani government, can take advantage of it to change its regional interaction towards the expert wishes of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Regardless of its content, Zarif's protest had a form that only one destiny was considered, namely the consolidation and promotion of the position of the ministry under his management in the country's macro foreign policy, considering its semiotics. He himself knows that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not the only actor in the country's foreign policy, but at the same time, according to the law and international custom, he rightfully expects that all institutions active in international activities, including institutions, other ministries, and the armed forces, all carry out their activities in coordination with the top of the pyramid of the ministry in charge of foreign policy.
Because otherwise, the threshold of interaction with the world may be completely out of his hands. In addition, violating this issue will weaken the diplomatic apparatus in international negotiations.
In any case, considering the current situation of himself and the country, it seems that Zarif, like all the times we have seen, chose a very calculated and appropriate time to act. Whether Zarif is the Foreign Minister or anyone else, foreign policy is the most serious part of any government even in the most normal circumstances and for this reason, in a professional structure, there must be only one custodian and a single approach. After making major strategic decisions collectively, which is usually done at the highest level of leaders, decision-making and initiative in the next layers, design, method, instructions, implementation should only come from the center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and so on. The further away from this basis, and the more "exceptionalist" and parallel approaches that are, in a word, unstructured and outside the hierarchy, the greater the cost and the less the benefit, and ultimately the country's positions on the international stage become indefensible.
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