After the death of President Ebrahim Raisi in a May helicopter crash, Iran’s voters have elected a successor. Among the relatively narrow band of candidates authorized by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, the cardiac surgeon and politician Masoud Pezeshkian is a relative moderate. Yet, Lazar Berman reminds us, little is likely to change for both the citizens of Iran or, especially, Iran’s activities outside its borders. Why? Pezeshkian “has limited influence over foreign policy. On Iran’s policies across the Middle East, Pezeshkian is simply not a player. Those decisions are made by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, which is answerable to Khamenei.”

Besides,

even if he could affect Iran’s posture toward Israel, Pezeshkian falls firmly within the regime consensus. “The Islamic Republic has always supported the resistance of the people of the region against the illegitimate Zionist regime,” Pezeshkian said Monday in a message to Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Iran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah terror group currently fighting Israel.

As for Iranians themselves, Berman quotes Raz Zimmt, Iran scholar at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, who says that “The vast majority of the public does not believe in the regime, and doesn’t believe in the possibility of effecting meaningful change under this regime.”

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”