Throughout the long negotiations over the fate of Iran’s nuclear program, President Hassan Rouhani has withstood scathing criticism from hard-liners at home by sticking to his case that a deal with his country’s longtime enemies will bring peace and prosperity.

So the political stakes are high for the moderate president as talks enter their homestretch toward a June deadline.

If he succeeds in sealing an agreement, Iran could see much-hoped-for relief from withering sanctions that are dragging down the economy at a time when the OPEC producer is trying to ride out a severe slump in oil prices.

This AP article goes on in this vein, touting the economic benefits to Iran, and so the political benefits to Rouhani, of “sealing an agreement.”

This is naïve. Success in “sealing an agreement” means Iran gets its nuclear weapon. Full stop. Economic and political benefits in the near term are purely side effects. Political benefits in the longer term are nuclear Iranian domination of the Middle East and the destruction of Israel.

So, unfortunately, is Dubai-based political analyst Theodore Karasik naïve.

Rouhani was elected on, promoted and supported the idea that he would help the Iranian economy recover. And of course the nuclear agreement is tied to that because of the sanction. If there is no nuclear deal, the presidency will go back to a more ultraconservative leader—under a nuclear Iran[.]

Iran remains under, has been under for quite some years, ultraconservative leadership. The mullahs, led by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are in charge. Their global face, Rouhani, is just smoother about it than Rouhani’s predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

What the AP (and, apparently, Karasik) constantly miss in this is that getting the weapon is the purpose of these “negotiations,” and the drive for the weapon is to satisfy Iran’s goal of wiping Israel from the map and beyond that of emphasizing that regional domination. The mullahs, after all, are less Islamic than they are political descendants of Cyrus, Darius, and the Xerxes. (A longer term side effect is the ability to arm Iran’s terrorist allies, don’t forget.)