40 Time October 14, 2019
iran’s PresidenT arrived in new
York City in September and left, as
usual, without meeting the American
one. Both Hassan Rouhani and Donald
Trump professed an appetite for sitting
down and talking over the ever more
treacherous rift between their nations.
But as Rouhani has pointed out in private,
Iran’s top elected official “has no authority
in foreign policy.” That authority—and
nearly every other strand of power in the
Islamic Republic—resides with the elderly
cleric who remained 6,000 miles away, in
the country he has not left for decades.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 80 years of
age, disabled by a saboteur’s bomb blast
and lit by a righteous certainty, holds the
title of Supreme Leader of Iran. But he
has quietly emerged as the most power-
ful person in the Middle East, with uni-
formed military fighting in Syria and loyal
proxies dominant in Lebanon, Yemen
and (despite a U.S. investment of $1 tril-
lion and thousands of lives) Iraq. Since
the spring, behind a thin veil of denials,
he has also presided over an audacious
and escalating campaign to raise un-
certainty and global oil prices, shooting
down a $176 million U.S. drone, blowing
holes in tankers and bombing the heart
of Saudi Arabia’s oil production, all with-
out drawing a U.S. military response.
Khamenei, who has confounded
every U.S. President he has faced since
coming to power 30 years ago, harbors
a particular animus for Trump. In June,
he told the Prime Minister of Japan, who
had come bearing a message from the
White House, “I do not consider Trump
as a person worth exchanging any mes-
sage with.” A detonation on the hull
of a Japanese oil tanker the same day
might have been an exclamation point.
Perhaps no other foreign leader is
working harder to put Trump out of of-
fice than Khamenei. And perhaps no
other foreign leader differs in more ways.
Trump, thrice married and irreligious, has
lived a life of opulence and publicity. The
deeply devout Khamenei has been mar-
ried for over 55 years, and he openly dis-
dains pomp and materialism. Trump,
operating on impulse, exhibits no orga-
nizing principles. Khamenei has shown
a lifelong commitment to his: resistance
against “global arrogance”— his moni-
ker for American imperialism— is both
ideology and strategic doctrine for the
theocracy. When Trump unilaterally
withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 deal that
had significantly curtailed Iran’s nuclear
program, the move validated Khamenei’s
view of the U.S. as “deceitful, untrust-
worthy and backstabbing.” The sanc-tions Trump then imposed have further
debilitated Iran’s economy, sending it to
50% inflation. But they seemingly stiff-
ened Khamenei’s resolve. “Resistance,”
Khamenei said in a recent speech that
included the word 70 times, “unlike sur-
render, leads to the retreat of the enemy.”
In Trump, Iran has an enemy who does
not want to fight. After an Iranian mis-
sile shot down that massive U.S. drone in
June, Trump at the last minute retracted
his own order for military retaliation.
Two days later, he thanked Iran for not
shooting down a manned flight: “That’s
something we really appreciate.” The
vacillation seems to have only increased
Khamenei’s appetite for risk, and on
Sept. 14, Saudi Arabia’s largest oil facility
was crippled by a missile and drone attack.
Iran denied involvement, but the
game unfolding now is one Khamenei
knows well. For years, he has carefully
calibrated Iran’s reaction to U.S. pres-
sure: an insufficient response might
project weakness and invite more pres-
sure. An excessive response, on the other
hand, could trigger a serious U.S. retali-
ation and risk outright war. It’s a situa-
tion made even less predictable by two
qualities the leaders do share: each har-
bors an appetite for conspiracy theories
and a profound sense of victimization.World
Being
Khamenei
The life of Iran’s Supreme
Leader tracks that of the
Islamic Republic he has led
for three decades:
- In 1980, Khamenei
visited American hostages
inside the captured
U.S. embassy - Recovering in a Tehran
hospital from a 1981 bomb
blast that cost him the use
of his right hand - Portraits of Khamenei
and his mentor and
predecessor, Khomeini
(right), at a Tehran polling
place in June