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An American investigator, held by Iran for three years before its release last year, questioned the viability of any US attempt at rapprochement with Tehran, saying the latter “thrives” on existing tensions between them.
Xu Wang, who was imprisoned in Iran on charges of “espionage”, wrote an article on Foreign Affairs titled “Lessons I learned from three years I spent in an Iranian prison. The rapprochement is a fiction: the Islamic Republic thrives through tensions with the United States “.
Xue Wang, a graduate of Princeton University, was commissioned to conduct a study at archival centers in Tehran, but was arrested in August 2016 and sentenced to 10 years in prison in July 2017 for “espionage under the guise of investigation “and” collection of confidential information and documents. “
Regarding his university, he said that he specialized in the history of Eurasia in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and that he was in Iran to conduct research on one of the dynasties, and confirmed that he “did not commit or seek to commit” that. of which he was accused.
In December of last year, he was released under a prisoner exchange agreement with Washington.
In his article, Wang notes that at the beginning of his years in prison, he believed in the need to strengthen relations with Tehran, but his ideas changed over the course of his period there, which reached 40 months.
The American researcher of Chinese origin says that the Tehran regime accuses people who declare their desire to bring the relations between the two countries closer to a “soft conspiracy”, and in that context condemns innocent Americans who declare it, and uses them as hostages to obtain concessions from the US government, and not only that, rather, he uses this to express his basic ideology, which is that reconciliation with the United States “is a threat to him, and all attempts at rapprochement must be repressed” .
The writer believes that Iran does not want to normalize relations with the United States, because doing so “will nullify the justification of the existence of the revolutionary regime” and will speak of the existence of “a threat from a foreign enemy that would justify internal repression and expand its influence in the entire Middle East and its environs. “
Wang notes that the years in prison provided him an opportunity to learn about the system from within and to meet figures from the spectrum of society, including people who worked for the regime.
He quotes a prison cellmate, a former employee of a high-ranking government agency, who told him that the former secretary-general of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council said the regime does not want any reconciliation with the United States “because it will undermine its legitimacy “and it only wants to maintain a state of tension” that can be controlled. “To justify its domestic and foreign policy.
The former US prisoner indicates that the investigator who took his case informed him of the need to confess that he is a “spy” who works for the United States and that this recognition is necessary, so that the Iranian intelligence services can present a case against him and demand that the United States pay money and exchange prisoners.
He notes that there is competition between the intelligence wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and the Ministry of Intelligence, to obtain funds from the United States, and warns that paying money to the regime encourages it to arrest more Americans.
The researcher doubts the viability of the nuclear agreement, which was signed coinciding with the beginning of his years in prison, and believes that the regime was “very indecisive” about this agreement, noting that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, in particular, feared that lead to demands “for political and economic liberalization, which is what can harm the interests of the regime.”
The regime and its hardliners also saw the boom in economic activities in the country as a result of the agreement as a “threat to them”, because the prosperity of the private sector “would lead to an increase in the power of society at the expense of the State”.
That is why they took measures that would ‘suffocate’ this sector, especially the technology industry, since, shortly after the conclusion of the agreement, they launched a campaign against the technology industry and entrepreneurs who accused them of allying with the West (especially the United States ) with the aim of conspiring against the regime.
