However, there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic about the prospects for reform.

One is that a
growing number of powerful political players support a renewed focus on China. Last year, Congress
passed the Pacific Deterrence Initiative. If fully funded, this program would allocate $27 billion over
five years to disperse and harden the U.S. base structure in Asia and equip the Indo-Pacific Command
with plenty of long-range munitions and sensors. In April, lawmakers on the House Armed Services
Committee wrote a letter to the Pentagon calling for a reduction in nonessential peacetime
operations to free up resources to prepare for great-power war. The Marine Corps and the army, the
two branches of the military most inclined to resist a focus on naval warfare in Asia, have drafted
plans to pivot from fighting insurgents in the Middle East to sinking ships in the western Pacific. And
defense experts across the political spectrum now broadly agree on how the United States should go
about deterring Chinese naval expansion.

Meanwhile, anti-China sentiment, both within the United States and around the world, has surged to
its highest level since the Chinese government carried out the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
Getting tough with China is one of the few bipartisan initiatives in the United States, and China seems
to be doing everything it can to fan these flames with “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy.

There now exists bipartisan political support in Washington for a true rebalance to Asia and a
strategic consensus among defense planners about how to proceed. The main ingredient that is
lacking is concerted top-level leadership to harness that support and put those strategies into action.
11111

Since the Iranian presidential election of 1997, when the reformist candidate Mohammad Khatami
won a surprise victory, elections in the Islamic Republic have remained relatively competitive. That
seems set to change, however. In the upcoming presidential election, slated for June 18, Iran’s
current chief justice, Ebrahim Raisi, is all but certain to cruise to victory and become Iran’s eighth
president. His win will largely result from preelection engineering on the part of the Guardian
Council, a 12-member body of jurists and clerics that is closely aligned with Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei and that vets candidates for office. Of the 592 candidates who threw their hats, turbans,
and headscarfs into this month’s race, the Guardian Council approved only seven men, of whom Raisi
is the most prominent.

The Guardian Council’s decision to disqualify many established political heavyweights shocked
Tehran’s political elite. The council rejected the candidacy of Ali Larijani, who served the longest term
of any Speaker of the parliament, currently advises the supreme leader, and led the negotiations that
produced Iran’s recent strategic partnership deal with China. Also barred from running were Vice
President Eshagh Jahangiri, who has been a heartbeat away from the presidency for the past eight
years, and the two-term past president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Criticism of the council’s decision laid bare the Iranian political elite’s hypocrisy. Larijani’s brother,
Sadeq, a member of the Guardian Council, lambasted the “indefensible” disqualifications and
derided the “security apparatus” for meddling in the vetting process. Hassan Khomeini, the grandson
of the Islamic Republic’s founder, condemned the council’s undermining of the system’s republican
institutions as “counterrevolutionary” and advised the approved candidates to drop out of the race.
Ahmadinejad joined millions of Iranians who say they are planning to boycott the elections.
Stay informed.

In-depth analysis delivered weekly.

Khamenei initially defended the Guardian Council’s choices. Although he later claimed that some
injustices were committed during the vetting process, he stopped short of demanding a reversal.
That is likely because the supreme leader may be considering structural changes: namely, converting
the country’s presidential system into a parliamentary one or replacing the role of supreme leader
with a multiperson council. A parliamentary system would limit the conflicts between the offices of
the supreme leader and the president under Iran’s existing system, and abolishing the position of
supreme leader would help his son maintain backroom influence after Khamenei’s death. Having a
pliant president such as Raisi by his side would mean that Khamenei would face little internal
resistance to what would amount to an unprecedented transformation of the Iranian political
system.

AN UNLEVELED PLAYING FIELD

When the council published its final list of approved candidates on May 25, Iranians flooded social
media with clips from The Dictator, a movie in which Sacha Baron Cohen plays a Middle Eastern
tyrant. In one scene, the dictator participates in a race, which he begins by firing his pistol into the air
—and then shooting the other runners. To Iranian observers, it served as an allusion to Raisi, who is
notorious for his involvement as a prosecutor in the execution of thousands of political prisoners in
the late 1980s.

None of Raisi’s vetted rivals pose a serious threat. One, the hard-line former national security adviser
and chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, supported Raisi in the 2017 presidential election. Polls
suggest that the gap between him and Raisi is insurmountable. The same applies to another
perennial contender, Mohsen Rezaei, the former commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps. In his previous three failed bids, Rezaei never gained more than four million votes
(compared with Raisi’s nearly 16 million in 2017, which was in turn dwarfed by the 23.5 million votes
for the winning candidate, Hassan Rouhani). Two other hard-line opponents, Amir-Hossein
Ghazizadeh and Alireza Zakani, are current members of parliament with little national recognition.
But they present no challenge since Zakani withdrew on June 16, and Ghazizadeh is likely to do the
same before voting day. The fig leaf reformist candidate, Mohsen Mehralizadeh, former governor of
the province of Isfahan, was not backed even by reformist coalitions and also dropped out on June
16, further narrowing the field for Raisi.

The only person who could potentially mobilize some popular support is