Do you remember the fate of Mohsen Rezaee's son? Do you remember how he was deceived or gulled by anti-Iran people abroad? He was murdered in Dubai and Mohsen Rezaee has confirmed this. And Mohsen Rezaee has always been one of the key figures in the IRGC.
I don't see how this would encourage Rezai to appease the US regime for personal gains. His son Ahmad, obviously, was politically unstable: when he first fled Iran, he not only turned against the Islamic Republic but made incriminating statements against his own father in relation to the AMIA affair.
What about Haddad Adel? He is part of the revolutionary core of the system. Isn't he? His son in law is an Iranian-American. He couldn't speak Farsi before he moved back to Iran.
Yet, Haddad Adel has no private motivations to forego Iran's national interests to the benefit of the US. Being an Iranian-American doesn't necessarily imply that one will legitimize the American regime, by the way. Even an American citizen may actively oppose Washington and its criminal policies.
Yeah. Rafsanjani, Khatami, Larijani, Rouhani, they all have extensive ties with abroad. Maybe Ghalibaf too. I do not know to what extent this applies to other figures in the system, but I know for a fact that many people within the system have business and familial ties with abroad. This makes them prone to making decisions that may not be in Iran's best interests. I believe the JCPOA is partly due to this conflict of interests, as well as other factors.
Never seen valid evidence regarding Ghalibaf. But when it comes to figures such as Rafsanjani, Khatami or Rohani, they do not represent defining features of the Islamic Republic: on the contrary they are dissidents, people who wish to operate "regime change" from within and more precisely, as far as Iran's relations to the US are concerned, they are actually seeking a return to the conditions which prevailed under the Pahlavi monarchy.
So if business and familial ties to the west are an obstacle to the pursuit of national interests, then the shah regime can impossibly be portrayed as one which had Iran's best interests at heart, whether in the nuclear or other domains, given how it was fundamentally a submissive US client state, whereas the Islamic Republic is an anti-imperial polity at its core, notwithstanding liberal dissidents (fifth columnists) in its midst who wish to turn back the clock.
The Islamic Republic's 43-year record of directly challenging and jeopardizing zio-American interests is incomparably broader and more intense than anything leaders such as Saddam Tikriti, Muammar Khadafi, Omar Bashir or Slobodan Milosevic ever managed to achieve in this regard. Yet, the US got rid of the latter nonetheless. Meaning that if Washington could not proceed with "regime change" in Tehran, it is not because of the tendency to appease America exhibited by domestic dissidents within the IR, but because the US regime has resoundingly failed in this endeavor, given Iranian resilience and power, a net result of the policies of the revolutionary establishment.
I should add that historically, economic interaction has seldom been the root cause for political rapprochement let alone integration. The Prophet of Islam (s) allowed Muslims to conduct trade with their enemies. Closer to us from a chronological point of view, East Asia offers a striking illustration: whereas the region is highly integrated from the economic point of view, with the majority of bilateral trade taking place between regional states themselves, politically the whole area is marred by countless simmering conflicts including unresolved territorial disputes, of which the distribution of resources in the South China Sea is one glaring example.
Even the European Union does not derogate from this rule: for although its precursor organization, the ECSC (European Coal and Steel Community) established in 1950 was economic in nature, and even though common political institutions were created at a later point, the initiators of this process, whether the Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman duo or some less known but equally paramount thinkers, were not businessmen motivated by economic considerations but fervent ideologues pursuing genuinely political goals. Economy to them was basically a means, not an end.
Hence why the issue with liberal, western-apologetic reformists / moderates in Iran is not so much a matter of individual business interests: it is ideological and political in essence. Just like the exiled opposition and the overthrown shah regime, these factions do not believe in Iran's independence, autonomy, self-sufficiency and sovereignty. They lack any trust in their country's ability to stand on its own feet, and they look up to the zio-American empire and its European auxiliaries as intrinsically superior entities. A contrario, the revolutionary core of the Islamic Republic is built around diametrically opposite ideological values.
The most important institutions of the Islamic Republic, namely Supreme Leadership and the bulk of the IRGC top brass, not only have no individual ties with the west, but more importantly they are countering NATO / zionist arrogance as a matter of principle.
