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Iran watchers have been right to throw some cold water on Friday’s surprising first-round outright victory by Hassan Rowhani. Rowhani has a very long history in the inner circles of the Islamic Republic’s power structure. He’s known Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei for more than four decades, and has managed to avoid the post-2009 purges of reformists and moderates. That says something about his standing in Khamenei’s eyes, as does the fact that the Guardian Council approved him as the most prominent moderate in the eight-man field. They knew there was a significant chance he’d be the next president if they did so, and he is not powerful enough that they would have taken such a step out of fear. Khamenei can’t be thrilled by the election, but he can’t be panicked, either.

So Rowhani’s election isn’t the next step in some Iranian march to liberal democracy. But it is still a major moment in Iran’s history. Several of the other candidates were closer ideologically to Khamenei. Khamenei’s alleged favorite among these was his nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, whose platform seemed to center on bowing and scraping before the Leader. Yet Jalili finished a distant third. Khamenei had wanted the election to flip a middle finger to the West; Rowhani’s big result was a bit of a middle finger to Khamenei.

Hassan Rouhani's stunning and sweeping victory in the Iranian presidential election is already generating much debate among expert Iran-watchers about how to interpret this outcome. There are different views, for example, on what inference should be drawn regarding the posture of Supreme Leader Khamenei toward the election. Was this outcome one that the leader might have anticipated and is part of a skillful management of contending factions, or does the election result instead indicate that the leader's control of Iranian politics is less than was often surmised? There also are different views on what role sanctions-induced economic strain may have had on the election. These are genuine questions on which objective and well-informed observers can disagree. Not genuine is the spin from some other fast-off-the-mark commentators who are endeavoring to deny any significance to Rouhani's victory and to portray the Iranian regime as nothing but the same old recalcitrant adversary—a spin motivated by opposition to reaching agreements with Iran and the favoring of confrontation and even war with it.

Useful implications for policy toward Iran can be drawn without resolving all these analytical questions, even the genuine ones. Sometimes a particular course of action is the best course under any of several different interpretations of exactly what is going on in another nation's capital. This is one of those instances. In particular, there are clear implications for approaching the next stage of negotiations on, and policy toward, Iran's nuclear program—which, for better or for worse, is the subject dominating discussion of relations with the Islamic Republic.

Sometimes a child is able to drag a parent into doing something the parent might not really want to do—say, taking the kid to an amusement park—through a two-step process. The first step is to nag, repeatedly and insistently, about going to the park. The parent, not wanting to be bothered about such a chore, tries to buy time and assuage the child by saying that they aren't going to the park now but they will when a suitable day arises. After some time goes by and the trip to the amusement park still has not been taken, the child's theme becomes, “But you promised.” The issue is framed no longer just in terms of the pros and cons of going to the amusement park but also in terms of the parent's credibility. The parent, worried about maintaining credibility of both promises and threats on other possible matters, gives in.

A similar process is occurring with some of those who, for whatever ill-conceived reason, would welcome a war with Iran. With some of the same people, it is occurring also with the nearer-term issue of intervening in the civil war in Syria. In each case step one is agitation in favor of threatening the use of military force. Step two is to argue that unless the threat is carried out, U.S. credibility will be damaged. Similar to the child who wants to go to the amusement park, the same persons whose urgings led us to get into an option-reducing box then yammer about the damage that results from being in that box, unless we get out of it in the particular way they want.

In the aftermath of last week’s major revelations about the National Security Agency, Hayes Brown has a great piece in which he catalogues the many times in American history when the country has (rightly or wrongly) put national security before individual liberties. In response to the now-famous leaker Edward Snowden’s assertion that “we managed to survive greater threats in our history . . . than a few disorganized terrorist groups and rogue states without resorting to these sorts of programs,” Brown takes us on a comprehensive tour from the 1798 Sedition Act to the fight against Al Qaeda. He notes that “history is replete with instance after instance of the U.S. government suppressing or outright violating the rights of its people in the name of furthering national security.”

Brown concludes:

courtesy of Wikimedia commons.The Washington Post reports today that American intelligence operatives covertly sabotaged prominent Al Qaeda magazine Inspire successfully in the wake of the Boston bombing. By using enhanced cyberhacking techniques to monitor the publication cycle, agents were able to mangle the May 14th edition of the English-language AQAP propaganda publication. When the issue appeared online, the text on page two was compromised and the following twenty pages completely blank. Within a half hour of the flawed issue's publication, it had been taken down in response to the hack.

A perpetual, and perpetually misguided, American notion about international negotiations is that sitting down to talk constitutes some sort of reward for the party on the other side of the table—a reward to be bestowed only in return for good behavior. This notion may be involved, even if only indirectly, in the curious U.S. resistance to participation by Iran in the prospective international conference about the conflict in Syria. Perhaps the resistance has more recently lessened; on Tuesday the deputy Iranian foreign minister commented in Moscow that Iran had received a “verbal invitation” to attend the conference, without specifying who had extended the invitation. We should hope that the verbal invitation will turn out to be a firm one.

The United States has been joined in its resistance by France. Maybe Paris's posture has been rooted somehow in old French hang-ups about the Levant. The reason for the similar posture by the Obama administration, notwithstanding its leadership role along with Russia in arranging the conference in the first place, is unclear. If the administration itself does not subscribe to the talking-as-reward school of thought, possibly the policy has been just one more manifestation of an environment in Washington in which anything that could be construed as a positive gesture toward Iran is considered bad politics and the opposite is always good politics.

In the days after the joint Syrian Army–Lebanese Hezbollah victory over the rebels in the strategic town of Qusayr, the Assad regime has been positively giddy, announcing plans for a major offensive to retake the northern city of Aleppo. Assad’s key backer, Iran, has also been gloating. A victory speech of sorts, reported by hardline outlet Fars News and translated by the American Enterprise Institute’s Iran Tracker, offers a broad insight into how one of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s closest advisers sees the Islamic Republic’s standing in the region, and how the Syrian conflict figures in Iranian strategy. It’s a vision that sharply conflicts with how we’d expect Tehran to see itself—and accordingly, one that should be closely examined as the United States attempts to compel Iran to make concessions on its nuclear program.

The speaker, general Yahya Rahim-Safavi, is Khamenei’s top military aide, a role that he took up after a decade heading the politically powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He’s an influential player—notably, he backed the infamous head of the IRGC’s covert Quds Force, general Qassim Suleimani, whom the New York Times branded “Iran’s Master of Chaos.” And if his position and background didn’t already give it away, Rahim-Safavi is known as a resolute hardliner.

In Rahim-Safavi’s eyes, Iran’s strategic position is strong and getting stronger, and two men are responsible—Ali Khamenei and George W. Bush.

Sixteen years ago I participated in the annual summer study of the Defense Science Board, a panel of senior experts and executives from the private sector created in the 1950s to advise the Department of Defense on scientific and technical matters. The summer study is the board's biggest project each year, for which it assembles a large ad hoc task force going well beyond the board's own membership. The topic of the study performed in 1997 was DoD Responses to Transnational Threats. I worked with a science and technology subgroup that made its principal focus the use of modern information technology to collect and exploit data pertinent to terrorist threats.

The resulting report recommended aggressive exploitation of the then-new World Wide Web and data-handling technology available in the private sector to perform such collection and exploitation. The report talked about the importance of exploiting “meta-information” on use of the Internet as well as substantive information possibly pertinent to terrorist threats. The term “data mining” was used, not as a dirty word but instead as a descriptor of the kind of technology that the government ought to employ more extensively. Perhaps as a reflection of the fact that it was mainly scientists and engineers and not lawyers who wrote this part of the report, there was no mention of drawing fine lines or indeed any lines between collection abroad and within the United States.

The president's appointments of Susan Rice and Samantha Power certainly have caused a stir, as reflected in commentary right here at The National Interest. Without adding to the pile of overall judgments about these choices, something more can be said about how these appointments raise an issue concerning the correct and incorrect ways to draw lessons from history. Both appointees are identified with ex post facto anguish over the international response to the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and a determination not to let a similar event happen again. Rice is quoted by Power, in the latter's later writing about this event, as saying that “I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required.”

The big news today is that Susan Rice is slated to replace Tom Donilon as the national-security adviser to President Obama. Meanwhile, Samantha Power will be nominated to take Rice’s place as ambassador to the United Nations. Here at TNI, Jacob Heilbrunn calls this the “return of the liberal hawks.” Heilbrunn notes that after having chosen the more realist or pragmatic Chuck Hagel and John Kerry as secretary of defense and state, respectively, Obama appears to be “balancing his foreign policy team” and “attempting to create competing power centers in his administration.”

With this in mind, it’s worth revisiting a brief passage from David Remnick’s biography of the president, The Bridge. Remnick describes how, during his brief stint in the Senate, Obama occasionally met to discuss ideas with prominent journalists like Fareed Zakaria, David Brooks and Thomas Friedman. He writes: