76

The negotiations and discussions on the Iranian nuclear issue uncannily reflect a still controversial episode in Iranian-US relations—the Iran-Contra affair. This murky affair of US arms sales to Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), which had given rise in the 1980s to a political scandal in the United States but had been suffocated in Iran, involved a certain Hassan Rouhani, who was one of the main negotiators before becoming president of the Islamic Republic of Iran in August 2013. By a strange twist of fate, it was Senator John Kerry who had conducted the political trial of the illegal financial transfers stemming from the deal benefitting the Contras, the anti-communist rebels from Nicaragua. This means that Iranian money had indirectly participated in the financing of the anti-communist fight in the midst of the Cold War. Recently, both of these protagonists have found themselves in charge of the negotiations on the Iran nuclear deal: Rouhani via his minister of foreign affairs, Mohammad Javad Zarif, a regular visitor to the United States; and Kerry as secretary of state under the Obama administration. The two have finalized an agreement that may upset the regional geopolitical balance of power by promoting a strategic US-Iran rapprochement.