Rialpolitik: The New Iranian Dealmakers

“Policy towards Iran must be suited not to religious ideologues who happen to be flush with petrocash but, rather, to racketeers who happen to be religious ideologues.”

After this summer, the face of Persian politics might be the angular, carefully bristled one of Saeed Mohammad. Until he resigned this month to run for the Iranian presidency, Mohammad managed Khatam al-Anbiya, a massive development conglomerate and the premier moneymaker of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He seems to be the sort of fundamentalist stripling in whose pious lap Iran’s octogenarian Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, hopes to plonk the country. He is also, however, a second-generation member of the Guard Corps—with a doctorate in civil engineering and a uniform unwrinkled by combat. If the 2015 nuclear agreement is not soon resuscitated, President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken will have to deal with a new kind of man in Tehran: an officer and a businessman.

The nearly 200,000 Guardsmen, or pasdaran, who permeate Iranian society constitute a distinct class. The Guard Corps is the spawn, the conserver, and exporter of the 1979 Islamic revolution by which Shi’ite theocrats ended the Pahlavi dynasty. It is parallel to the Iranian Armed Forces, comprising its own military branches, the Quds Force—a special operations and intelligence hybrid—and a volunteer militia that runs the streets like an open secret police. But it is not all arms and ascetics. While other Islamist organizations, too, have tried to pad holy providence with cash, the Guard Corps’ financial enterprise appears to have superseded the scriptural. American foreign policy should recalibrate accordingly. Besides war, the greatest known threat to a business empire is good, old, American free-market capitalism.

“Back in the ‘80s, it was a very pure force, ideologically. Very Islamic,” an anonymous Iranian economist told the Los Angeles Times in 2007, “but now the whole thing is about making money.” The Wall Street Journal in 2019 calculated the Islamic Revolutionary portfolio to be worth $28 billion. That is with its large stakes in shipbuilding and auto-manufacturing but without the inestimable shadowy revenue from directing charitable foundations and smuggling oil, guns, and Afghan heroin. A truer figure might be close to $100 billion: nearly a quarter of Iran’s national income (a thick slice of which each year is served to the Lebanese Hezbollah and other armed, regional sectarians). However strong their religious conviction might be, younger Guardsmen have developed a taste for lush leather and indigo suits.