James' World 2

I last interviewed Ebrahim Raisi, the ultra-hard-line President of Iran, during his début appearance at the United Nations, in 2022. He spoke belligerently and with such speed that the interpreter struggled to keep up. He was the same on the U.N. dais, where he furiously waved a photo of General Qassem Soleimani and demanded that Donald Trump be tried for ordering his assassination—a “savage, illegal, immoral crime”—in a U.S. drone strike, in 2020. Back home, Iran was in turmoil after nationwide protests erupted in response to the death, in police custody, of a twenty-two-year-old named Mahsa Amini. She had been arrested for improper hijab; too much hair was showing. Raisi’s government ordered a brutal crackdown; security forces eventually killed more than five hundred protesters and arrested nearly twenty thousand. During an interview with a handful of journalists, conducted in the chandeliered ballroom of a New York hotel, Raisi was asked about the protests. “We’re all professionals,” he said, and insisted that we focus on the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program “rather than diverting to other issues.”

Raisi, who had a manicured white beard and wore a black turban signifying his descent from the Prophet Muhammad, offered no hint of diplomatic compromises over the growing tensions with the West, as three of his predecessors had done during their U.N. visits. He instead boasted of a shifting world order that mobilized America’s rivals. After his election, in 2021, Raisi oversaw Tehran’s expanding military cooperation with Russia, which included the transfer of hundreds of drones for its war in Ukraine. He tightened ties with China, which is now the main importer of Iranian oil, thus bailing Iran out of the sanctions noose created by Washington. At home, however, Raisi was “derided for incompetence” and often the butt of relentless Persian humor, Vali Nasr, the former dean of the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, told me. Raisi invoked tougher enforcement of the hijab and restricted personal freedoms, which in turn sparked the widest protests against the regime since the 1979 Revolution. He was arguably Iran’s most unpopular President. “Whoever succeeds him could be construed by the public as an improvement,” Nasr added. Raisi was also the first President to be personally sanctioned by the U.S.

Raisi died in a helicopter crash on Sunday. He was flying back from the country’s border with Azerbaijan, in the northwest, where he had celebrated the opening of a new dam with his Azerbaijani counterpart—a symbol of Iran’s strengthening relations with nations in the Caucasus. He flew in a convoy of three helicopters. Two landed safely after navigating thick fog over remote and rugged mountains. Raisi flew in a vintage U.S.-manufactured Bell helicopter, a model purchased during the monarchy in the nineteen-seventies. (Bell stopped producing it more than twenty-five years ago.) Iran has struggled to maintain its aging aircraft, and U.S. sanctions have complicated access to spare parts. Despite early conspiracy theories about deliberate sabotage of Raisi’s helicopter, which spread feverishly across social media, Iran attributed the crash to a “technical failure” after the charred wreckage was finally found early on Monday in a dense mountain forest. Eight others, including Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, were also killed.

Raisi died at a precarious time for a revolutionary regime that is ever more xenophobic, paranoid, and rigid. His legacy is “a sharp deterioration of Iran’s relations with the West, owing to the failed efforts to negotiate a return to the 2015 nuclear agreement, increasingly close military ties with Russia, and the perilous tit for tat with Israel,” Ali Vaez, an Iran expert at the International Crisis Group, told me. His successor will have to deal with “deep social and economic discontent, regional instability and tension, and, over the longer horizon, the fate of the Islamic Republic.”