Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, has distanced himself from the agreement with the United States, and made clear that his negotiators had little room to grant concessions to “the enemy.”
In his first public comments on the deal, in a statement issued late Thursday, Mr. Khamenei said he had assented to the deal but he did not agree with signing it, “as a matter of principle.” He did not elaborate. The agreement grants Iran broad economic benefits while delaying negotiations on its nuclear program for later.
Mr. Khamenei said he had authorized the agreement because Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, had accepted responsibility for it and committed to protect the rights of Iranians and the “resistance front,” likely a reference to the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah, which is at war with Israel.
“He has also stated explicitly that if the American side seeks excessive demands, he will not submit to them,” Mr. Khamenei wrote, referring to Mr. Pezeshkian.
Mr. Khamenei praised Iran’s diplomats and denigrated President Trump, saying he had come to the agreement “out of desperation.”
In effect, Mr. Khamenei deflected responsibility for the agreement onto Iran’s elected government. Iran has a hybrid system of government, with some elected institutions that hold far less power than the theocratic elements of the government, including the supreme leader, a cleric.
By referencing “excessive demands,” Mr. Khamenei is constraining his diplomats’ ability to grant concessions at the negotiating table, although what qualifies as “excessive” was not specified.
“It is obvious that the in-person negotiations that will take place in the future do not mean accepting the enemy’s view,” he wrote.
Mr. Khamenei’s father and predecessor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, often took a similar tack. He allowed Iranian diplomats to conduct talks with the United States and world powers over the country’s nuclear program, and endorsed the resulting deal in 2015, but then publicly criticized its implementation and downplayed his own involvement in it.
Mojtaba Khamenei’s message on Thursday signaled that the deal with the United States would not lead to many more such agreements, Ali Afshari, a former activist in Iran and now a political analyst living in the United States, wrote on social media.
The message also suggested that the regime’s confrontational foreign policy is unlikely to change, he said.
Soon after the message was released, senior Iranian officials issued their own statements reacting to and expressing gratitude to Mr. Khamenei. One member of an important Iranian consultative body said any agreement must observe Mr. Khamenei’s “red lines.”
Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s Parliament speaker who has led negotiations with the United States, thanked Mr. Khamenei and sought to reassure him of the team’s approach, in a statement published on state media early on Friday.
“If the enemy seeks excessive demands along this path, we have already proven that our hand remains on the trigger, and we have no hesitation in delivering a crushing response to the enemy — one whose taste it has already experienced in the recent war,” Mr. Ghalibaf wrote.
