Khamenei, concerned with repairing the damage caused by his acceptance of the fraudulent reelection in 2009 of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was willing to accept the victory in June of Rouhani, a conservative reformist whom he trusted. He must have calculated that the new president would have to ameliorate the consequences of Ahmadinejad’s foreign-policy freelancing and economic mismanagement, which has had as much to do with the collapse of the Iranian economy as US-led international sanctions.