Jeffrey Goldberg, Columnist

Five Reasons Not to Trust Iran on Nukes

Rohani has been invested in his country's nuclear program for years, and there are no signs that he's interested in disarming in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.

September 24, 2013 at 6:45 PM UTC

By Jeffrey Goldberg

Jeffrey Goldberg is a columnist for Bloomberg View writing about the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy and national affairs. He is a national correspondent for the Atlantic, the author of "Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror" and a winner of the National Magazine Award for reporting. He has also covered the Middle East as a staff writer for the New Yorker. Goldberg began his career at the Washington Post. He later wrote a column for the Jerusalem Post, covered the Mafia for New York magazine, and wrote for several years for the New York Times Magazine. He has been a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a fellow of the Jerusalem Foundation. He was born in New York, and now lives in Washington with his wife and three children.

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Iranian President Hassan Rohani -- who this week is attempting to charm the pants off the United Nations, President Barack Obama, world Jewry and Charlie Rose -- may succeed in convincing many people that the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, doesn't actually want to gain control of a nuclear arsenal.

Why Rohani would assert this is obvious: The sanctions that the U.S. is imposing on Iran are doing real economic damage. A crippled economy threatens the interests of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and thus the regime's stability. We know that the regime isn't popular among many segments of the Iranian population -- witness the brutal crackdown on large-scale protests in 2009 -- and that it must make at least some of its citizens happy if it is to survive in the long term.