His features seemingly frozen in a perpetual frown, Mohsen Rezaei is one of the new hard-line faces of the Iranian regime. A former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and a military advisor to slain Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he now serves Khamenei’s son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, in the same post. Rezaei has been quoted in recent days as indicating that Iran’s policy of “strategic patience” is over and that Tehran will never bend to U.S. President Donald Trump.
But Rezaei, like other senior Iranian officials, once entertained the possibility of compromise with Washington. Indeed, he openly promoted it. Nearly two decades ago, during a 2007 reporting trip to Iran, I received a surprise invitation from Rezaei to meet him at his summer villa on the Caspian Sea, about 150 miles north of Tehran.
He didn’t smile much then, either. But it was clear that Rezaei and the regime were looking for a face-saving way out of the nuclear standoff with Washington, which was almost as tense then, under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as it is now. After offering me tea and fruit in his garden, Rezaei indicated that the Islamic Republic was eager for some kind of deal and told me: “If America pursues a different approach than confronting Iran, our dealings will change fundamentally.”
