Last Thursday, the Islamic Republic swore in its new president, Ebrahim Raisi, a veteran leader who has presided over some of the regime’s most murderous acts of oppression. Yet neither Raisi’s record nor his country’s most recent acts of piracy, kidnapping, and war-making deterred the EU from sending a delegate to the ceremony. Fiamma Nirenstein observes:

In 2016, Xiyue Wang, an American citizen and a PhD candidate at Princeton University, traveled to Tehran to improve his Persian, and to conduct archival research on the governance of border provinces in the 19th and early 20th centuries. A few months later he was arrested and sent to the Evin prison, where he was held for 40 months, most of which he spent in solitary confinement. He emerged thoroughly disabused of his former faith in the possibility of U.S conciliation with the Islam Republic. He had a similar change in attitude toward his university. Peter Theroux writes: