Ever since Iran reached an agreement with six world powers earlier this year over its nuclear programme, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has repeatedly warned against the cultural, political and economic influence of the US in Iran. Yet it was he who backed top Iranian officials in an unprecedented series of public – and secret – direct talks with American officials, which led to an agreement that very few observers would have thought possible three years ago.
This has left many analysts, as well as business owners, puzzled about the future of Iran-US relations. Now that Iran is opening its doors to foreign trade, who will be allowed to do business there and who will not? Might a McDonald’s finally make it to Tehran?
Since his youth, Ayatollah Khamenei has been fascinated by anti-colonial literature. In the early 1960s, he translated a book on India’s independence movement and the role of Muslims in it. He praises Nehru and Frantz Fanon. Unlike most clerics, he was close to leftist literary figures such as Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, Jalal Al-e-Ahmad and Ali Shariati. That doesn’t make him a socialist. He believes in private property and supports minimal government interference in the economy. It’s revolutionary anti-colonial ideas that have intrigued him.
Yet he admires the west’s achievements in science and technology, even though he warns that such progress cannot be sustained, given the materialism, individualism, consumerism and hedonism that to him is best symbolised by the US.
Ayatollah Khamenei reads a lot of history too, especially the history of Euro-American interventions in the rest of the world and the collapse of the Soviet Union. America’s strategy of regime-change started Iran in 1953, when the Shah who had been ousted by the elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh was reinstated through a CIA-backed coup. Under George W Bush, the United States prioritised regime-change again, by military means or otherwise. Iraq and Afghanistan were occupied and some other states, including Iran, were targeted by programmes designed to undermine the authorities. In 2006 Congress approved $66m being spent on two separate projects known together as the “Iran Democracy Fund”, most of which went to such institutions as Radio Liberty, Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy – institutions all previously used to some effect during the cold war.
This was when Iran started to equate any notion of democracy, freedom, and human rights with acts of regime-change. Under pressure from most Iranian activists, President Obama changed course by scrapping the fund, and, to some degree, its discourse. But that has not stopped Iran’s worries.
To Iran’s surprise, Obama has shown a costly commitment to a comprehensive deal with Iran over its nuclear programme. Ayatollah Khamenei has welcomed this and recognises the real division within the American establishment over Iran. But as a result, he is well aware of Obama’s shaky position. Soon he will leave office and his replacement is likely to revert to a strategy of challenging or undermining the regime, with a view to changing it.
Ayatollah Khamenei thinks of the nuclear deal as the west’s recognition, for the first time, of the Islamic revolution and its independence from US influence. To him and to many in Iran, it is the US that has compromised its colonial stance of zero-enrichment. Iran, on the other hand, has won a long-sought recognition for its peaceful nuclear programme, and it has even secured international assistance for it.
But Ayatollah Khamenei also knows that the American media tend to promote the opposite view. He suspects that if a McDonald’s joint opens in the affluent north of Tehran, western media will rush to sell it as a symbol of Iran’s submission, the end of its anti-imperial revolution. In 1998, when then President Khatami was being compared to Gorbachev in the west, Ayatollah Khamenei warned that McDonald’s wasn’t just a burger joint, but part of the vanguard of American dominance. He even cited reports by Time and Newsweek, published just before the Soviet collapse, about the way American culture and businesses were conquering Moscow. A conquered Iran is not the image he likes to be aired to the world.
In the past few years, Ayatollah Khamenei has repeatedly talked about preserving and reviving the traditional Iranian-Islamic lifestyle, its respect for family, hard work, the rule of law, nature, and its respect for science. There is little doubt that the growing number of shopping malls, coffee shops and fast-food restaurants don’t fit comfortably into his vision. But the truth is that he hasn’t so far interfered to have them banned.
The message he wants the developing world, especially the Islamic world, to receive from Iran is simple: you can be a safe, advanced and prosperous state without depending on America. The public presence of flagship American brands such as McDonald’s in Iran would send the wrong signals.
As President Rouhani insisted in New York last week, Iran is genuinely opening up to the global economy. But it is not going to be an easy market for American symbols of capitalism.
