THEY'RE JUST TRYING TO SAVE THE REGIME:

 After Khomeini's death in 1989, the pragmatic Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani became President, followed by the reform-minded Mohammad Khatami. But the hardliners struck back. When Khatami's reform program was ineffective, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an obscure officer of the Basij militia, was elected Mayor of Tehran in 2003 (after just 12% of the city's voters turned out), and then defeated Rafsanjani in 2005 to become President.

Ahmadinejad, a fanatical devotee of Khomeini, the revolution's first imam, was a reminder of the revolution's populist inception. To promote an aggressive nuclear policy was to vindicate Khomeini's battle against America, "the Great Satan." Only when Iran's voters lost patience with Ahmadinejad's incompetence and elected Hassan Rouhani in 2013 could the Islamic Revolution be said to be over. [...]

But there is a deeper reason for the success of the nuclear negotiations: Khomeini's Islamic revolution of 1979 has finally ended - and Khamenei knows it. He must also know that the export of Islamic revolution from Shia Iran has lost its allure, replaced in the Sunni world first by the global jihad of al-Qaeda and now by the so-called Islamic State and caliphate of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

For Iran, what counts now is no longer ideology but national interest and realpolitik. That is why it finds itself currently backing the opponents of revolutionary Islam: Bashar al-Assad against the Islamists in Syria and the Houthis against al-Qaeda in Yemen. And it is why it finds itself not only signing a nuclear accord with the Great Satan but also tacitly cooperating with it against the Islamic State, their common enemy. Now that the revolution is over, cooperation in other areas is likely to become equally appealing.

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