Likening the Iranian pragmatists’ battle against hard-liners to his fights with Congress, he said in an interview with Washington Post: “The hard-liners made Foreign Minister [Mohammad Javad] Zarif and President [Hassan] Rouhani’s life very difficult, just as hard-liners in the United States had a role in making — oppositionists, I wouldn’t call them hard-liners, I’d call them oppositionists . . . made it difficult for our negotiations,” Kerry said.
But he sharply cautioned against any US effort to support Rouhani’s camp in this month’s parliamentary elections: “The worst thing we could do is meddle.”
He also discussed the nuclear deal with Iran as his biggest diplomatic achievement.
