Here's an overview of the politics behind Iranian foreign policy from the RTSG substack that they gave in their article on the 2022 protests.

To properly understand the events of late 2022, it is vital to analyze the role of different factions in Iran and their power struggles. Although many analysts in the West portray the political class of the Islamic Republic as a completely unified bloc under the control of a supreme dictator, this is far from the truth. Since the very early days of the Islamic Revolution, many factions have existed in the popular front bloc that formed the Islamic Republic. Although many of these factions, such as non-Islamic Liberal Democrats and Communists, were purged in the 1980s, strong disagreements persisted amongst the clerics and revolutionaries that ultimately consolidated their dominance in the revolutionary period

The issue that most divided this new political class was foreign policy. As opposed to the “hardline” or “principlist” faction that saw sovereignty and opposition to Israel and American imperialism as one of the primary aims of the revolution, a faction also existed that sought to work with the West, and although they saw no harm in ousting the Shah, they still believed that Iran should follow a Liberal economic and political path, albeit under a more Islamic framework. This faction came to be primarily led by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and would even engage in negotiations with the US government in the 1980s known as the Iran-Contra Affair

After the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, Hashemi Rafsanjani, or Rafsanjani, as he now preferred to be called, became the first President of Iran under the new post-Khomeini constitution. He and his party, the Executives of Construction, were known as the ‘Moderate’ faction and they began a process of liberalization in the economic and socio-cultural spheres. Rafsanjani’s two terms as President were then followed up by the birth of the closely aligned ‘Reformist’ faction led by President Mohammad Khatami. Khatami’s government pushed a policy of increasing liberalization and attempted a rapprochement with the USA under the framework of a “Dialogue of Civilisations”. In his time, Iran saw his supporters conduct the first attempt at major political change conducted through street protests during the 18 Tir movement

Khatami’s Presidency was then followed up by Ahmadinejad, whose Presidency saw a patchwork of policies and political alignments as well as the largest protest movement in the Islamic Republic’s history as millions protested the outcome of the 2009 Presidential elections under the leadership of the Reformist candidate, former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi. In 2013, the Reformist-Moderate movement won back power as Hassan Rouhani won the presidential elections with the promise to negotiate with the USA and end Iran’s sanctions

To alleviate these sanctions, in 2013, Hassan Rouhani ran for the presidency, with an unprecedented level of advertisement and media excitement around his campaign, to negotiate with the West and get sanctions lifted. Rouhani won and pushed negotiations with the USA into overdrive, resulting in the 2015 ‘Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action’ or JCPoA, according to which Iran would limit its nuclear program and in return would have certain sanctions lifted. This was supposed to be the first step in a series of negotiations that would then target Iran’s military capabilities and regional network of alliances, finally resulting in the Islamic Republic becoming a Western-aligned nation, aiming to follow the developmental model of nations such as Japan and Germany. One such example was that in 2016, merely one day after US President Barack Obama’s executive order was signed lifting Iran nuclear sanctions as part of the JCPOA, Obama signed new sanctions targeting Iran’s missile/defense programs. Not long after, Reformists such as Rafsanjani hinted at being willing to negotiate away Iran’s missile program, by issuing statements such as “the world of tomorrow is a world of dialogue, not missiles”, which sparked political feuding between Reformists and Principlists

In 2018, however, everything changed when US President Donald Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, started his “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign, and Iran’s economy fell into an unprecedented recession. The Reformists, who continued to be the ruling party at the time under Rouhani, did not aid the economic situation. In addition to passing hyper-neoliberal economic policies, they had delayed Iranian trade deals with China that would have alleviated and offset pressures caused by Western sanctions, all in the hopes of returning to an idealistic JCPOA with the West. For instance, Xi Jinping proposed Iranian cooperation/entry into China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as early as 2015 and 2016; Rouhani wouldn’t take him up on his offer until years later in 2021 when Iran finally joined BRI, after mounting pressure from Khamenei and the economic situation. Adding to this, Trump also assassinated Iran’s highest-ranking military commander, General Qasem Soleimani, in early 2020, and destroyed all hopes for the Reformist project within Iran

Following the failure of the JCPOA and the terrible economic decline of Iran, caused by sanctions and the hyper-neoliberal policies of the Rouhani government, the Reformist movement lost all the wind in its sails. By the time of the 2019 parliamentary and 2021 presidential elections, they had no popular candidates who could run in the elections as the grand promises of the last two administrations had proven fruitless. As a result, a Principlist parliament was formed in 2020, and “hardliner” Seyyed Ebrahim Raisi won the 2021 presidential elections. For the first time in decades, the Iranian government seemed unified from top to bottom. However, before things could settle and Raisi could begin to implement his policies, the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement suspiciously sprung up, claiming to not only challenge Raisi but also to want an end to the Islamic Republic as a whole.

[...] This new foreign policy has thus far turned Iran into an important node in the new confrontation between Western powers and the non-Western world, with Iran acting as the third power in a triad that has formed with the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China. The derailing of this new foreign policy and the damages it would incur for Iran would weaken the new emerging global system and damage the non-Western world in its confrontation with American unipolarity. This would leave allies such as Russia in a more fragile state and could destroy the new-found confidence of states such as Saudi Arabia in their pursuit of less Western-orientated policies.

In short, it seems like the JCPOA was the darling project of the Iranian "Reformist" faction, the characterization of whom by RTSG immediately brings to mind a Westanbetung capitulationist like Gorbachev. It is rather interesting to read about the Rouhani government's self-sabotaging liberal idealism given that Western coverage through the entirety of the contemporary Iranian period has been just static portrayals of an "unchanging hardliner leadership."