Iran’s New President Ebrahim Raisi To Take Office in August

DAVID SANGER, CNN POLITICAL AND NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Well, I think when Secretary of State Blinken talks about this, or the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan does, what you hear from them is the following. First, maximum pressure failed. It did not collapse the regime, and it did not force them back into the strictures of the 2015 agreement or force them to go renegotiate it. That’s what President Trump and the former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said would happen, and it didn’t happen. So the next question is, is their step-by-step strategy to get the Iranians back in going to work? And I think it’s pretty clear, from what President Raisi says, that we will get back to where we were in 2015. Now, the critics of doing that here in the United States say that the problem with it is, the United States will lose all leverage over Iran. It won’t be possible then to get the longer and stronger, to get the missile deal, because you would have relieved the sanctions. The answer the administration gives to that is just what you said before, Christiane, that the Iranians have things they want. They want to be able to go operate in the international financial system in ways that they were not able to even under the 2015 agreement. And so the administration is betting that gives them the leverage. I’m not so certain. I — my guess is that if the Iranians discovered they can sell oil again at the prices that are now on the market, that that will be enough for Raisi to claim a significant victory. And if they can get the deal in the next few weeks before he takes office, if anything goes wrong, they can blame the previous government.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: So, Ellie, you look a lot at the — inside Iranian politics. And we already heard Raisi at his inaugural press conference talking about wanting to improve relations with the Gulf states, those very same Gulf states who have just signed the Abraham Accords with Israel. He talked about wanting to reopen embassies between Saudi Arabia and Iran, again, Saudi Arabia, who wants nothing more than to make this deal go away and to — they would very much like to topple the Iranian regime. What foreign policy do we expect to come out of the Raisi government? And the question of leverage, I mean, look, for 40 years, the United States has tried everything, sanctions. There’s — and all the rest of it that we have seen, and it hasn’t worked, frankly. So, address leverage, in conjunction with Iran seeming to reach out to the very ones the Trump administration were trying to bring in the fold, the Gulf states.