During negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, President Obama repeatedly pressed the intelligence community to make a determinative judgment on the real intentions of Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader. The intelligence community remained divided, however, and failed to come to a consensus on Khamenei’s policy goals.
Writing in 2009, Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment described Khamenei as “the single most powerful individual in a highly factionalized, autocratic regime” even though “he does not make national decisions on his own.” Instead, Sadjadpour notes, he rules “the country by consensus rather than decree, with his own survival and that of the theocratic system as his top priorities.”
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