The Resistance
IRAN’S PRESIDENT ARRIVED IN NEW York City in September and left, as usual, without meeting the American one. Both Hassan Rouhani and Donald Trump professed an appetite for sitting down and talking over the ever more treacherous rift between their nations. But as Rouhani has pointed out in private, Iran’s top elected official “has no authority in foreign policy.” That authority—and nearly every other strand of power in the Islamic Republic—resides with the elderly cleric who remained 6,000 miles away, in the country he has not left for decades.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 80 years of age, disabled by a saboteur’s bomb blast and lit by a righteous certainty, holds the title of Supreme Leader of Iran. But he has quietly emerged as the most powerful person in the Middle East, with uniformed military fighting in Syria and loyal proxies dominant in Lebanon, Yemen and (despite a U.S. investment of $1 trillion and thousands of lives) Iraq. Since the spring, behind a thin veil of denials, he has also presided over an audacious and escalating campaign to raise uncertainty and global oil prices, shooting down a $176 million U.S. drone, blowing holes in tankers and bombing the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil production, all without drawing a U.S. military response.
Khamenei, who has confounded every U.S. President he has faced since coming to power 30 years ago, harbors a particular animus for Trump. In June, he told the Prime
