The Islamic Republic of Iran is the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism. Since its birth in 1979, the Iranian regime has trained, funded, even wholesale created a bevy of terrorist groups. Tehran is responsible for murdering and maiming more U.S. servicemen than any other nation in the last three decades.
And yet one of the most esteemed international affairs periodicals insists on providing Iranian regime apparatchiks with a platform.
On Aug. 28, 2025, Foreign Policy Magazine hosted Mohammad Javad Zarif, Tehran’s onetime foreign minister, for a discussion on “Iran’s Future.” FP called Zarif a “reforming voice” who has “navigated subsequent American backlash” to Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as the Iran Nuclear Deal.
Zarif, however, is not a reformer—far from it. In 2019, the U.S. Department of Treasury announced that sanctions were being levied against Zarif, whom they described as acting on behalf of, directly or indirectly, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Steve Mnuchin, then serving as the U.S. Secretary of Treasury, noted that Zarif “implements the reckless agenda of Iran’s Supreme Leader, and is the regime’s primary spokesperson around the world.” Zarif, Mnuchin observed, “spreads the regime’s propaganda and disinformation around the world through these mediums.”
Unfortunately, FP has chosen to be one of those mediums. And it’s important to be clear about who they’re elevating.
Zarif, Treasury noted, “oversees a foreign ministry that has coordinated with one of the Iranian regime’s most nefarious state entities, the IRGC-Qods Force (IRGC-QF), which is designated pursuant to terrorism and human rights authorities.” As CAMERA has noted, the IRGC has served as the head of Tehran’s terror octopus, training murderous organizations like Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Al-Qaeda, and others. And “Zarif’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its high-ranking officials have engaged in and funded efforts to influence elections, some of which have involved the IRGC,” Treasury noted. In short: there is no separating Zarif from the regime that he serves. Nonetheless, many media outlets have persisted in trying to do precisely that.
As CAMERA has documented, the press has persistently flogged the idea that Iranian politics can be reduced to a battle between “moderates” and “hardliners,” with Zarif representative of the former. But this is a false distinction. The real moderates aren’t part of a government led by a man who has pledged to destroy the United States and Israel and seeks to export the Islamic Republic’s messianic vision. Rather, the real moderates have been murdered, exiled, or are wasting away in Iran’s infamous Evin Prison. Zarif is little more than the mask that the regime puts on when it wants sanctions relief or other forms of accommodation from the West that it despises.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time that Zarif has been given a voice by other leading foreign policy periodicals. In August 2025, FP published an op-ed by him, and the publication’s bio referred to him in innocuous terms, calling him merely “an associate professor of global studies at the University of Tehran and the founder and president of Possibilities Architects: Inspiring Ascending Beyond, a nongovernmental Iranian think tank.” Zarif’s sordid history, including his use of antisemitic slurs, his calls for the U.S. to “leave earth,” and his long history of service to a virulently murderous regime, went unmentioned.
Nor is Foreign Policy alone. Zarif has published a number of essays for Foreign Affairs Magazine, including one absurdly titled “How Iran Sees the Path to Peace.” That December 2024 article was published two months after Tehran launched more than 180 ballistic missiles at Israel, and a little more than a year after Iranian-backed terrorists perpetrated the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. A number of other outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others have also platformed the regime spokesman.
It would be easy to assert—as some editors do—that other perspectives should be aired; that Zarif has a right for views to be published. The Washington Post’s Karen Attiah famously made this claim in 2018 after she was criticized for publishing an Op-Ed by the Houthis, a Yemen-based Iranian proxy whose motto is “Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews.” But the Houthis, like their Iranian benefactor, don’t allow for dissenting views. They torture, imprison, and murder their critics. They are authoritarian movements, fundamentally dishonest and anti-Western at their core. Providing them with a platform isn’t serving public knowledge. Rather, it is an opportunity for them to lie, gaslight, and engage in disinformation operations to Western audiences.