President Rouhani holds the key to Irans economic revival.
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Tehran tingles with anticipation--and tension. "The sun is shining again in Iran," says Nazila Noebashari, owner of Aaran Art Gallery, which often shows the work of young female artists. "There are smart people at the helm. The world is treating us differently and speaking with us differently, and we're speaking differently now too." Even normally cautious politicians talk of a new beginning. "We have all been given a historic opportunity to try to restore confidence that has been lost over the years," Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tells me.
Over the next six months, diplomats will try to turn the temporary deal into an enduring pact. The outside world wants to ensure that the Islamic Republic, which over the past decade has developed much of the know-how, equipment and technology to make a nuclear bomb, does not produce the world's deadliest weapon. In turn, Iran seeks to come in from the political and economic cold.
As the revolution celebrates its 35th anniversary in February, Iran and the U.S. are, after many false starts, on the same page for the first time. The question is whether they can get beyond fear and suspicion to turn that page.
A New Calculus
After my tour of the old embassy, I visit Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, one of the three student leaders of the embassy takeover; he later served in parliament and on Tehran's city council. Today, his smartly barbered hair is white. He wears designer glasses and is clean-shaven, a contrast to the beard that he once wore--and that is still de rigueur among most of the political elite. Like that of many in the revolutionary vanguard, Asgharzadeh's politics has evolved over the years.
The embassy takeover was supposed to last three to five days, Asgharzadeh recalls, a gesture of protest against Washington's decision to give the Shah refuge. "But it got complicated, and it was out of our control, and it caused a deep wound," he tells me. He now supports renewing relations with the U.S.--and reopening Henderson High. "I would like to spend all my energy to heal this wound," he says.
The new thinking is not just the mellowing of middle age. Iran's strategic calculus is also shifting as the regional balance of power flips. Tehran was inadvertently the big winner after American military muscle ousted its two neighboring archrivals--the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq's Saddam Hussein in 2003. But with the U.S. troop drawdown in both places, the predominantly Shi'ite country suddenly feels more vulnerable. It is threatened by the return of al-Qaeda franchises in Iraq and Syria and the rise of Salafism--a fundamentalist brand of Sunni Islam that is vehemently, often violently, opposed to Shi'ism--across the Middle East.
So the U.S. is increasingly attractive as a de facto ally--or at least not an active rival. "Al-Qaeda is a cancerous tumor in the Islamic world," Asgharzadeh tells me. "So we have common ground in fighting terrorism."