New Delhi, July 2 -- TEHRAN - Masoud Pezeshkian traveled to the holy city of Qom on the morning of July 1 after senior clerics had called his agreement with Washington a "strategic mistake." The trip was not announced in advance. It was the kind of visit that follows a rebuke, not a briefing.

The clerics who issued that verdict are not marginal voices. They are members of the Assembly of Experts - the body that selected Ali Khamenei's successor - and who now hold institutional authority over Iran's religious establishment at the precise moment the country's president needs that authority behind him. When they call the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding a strategic error, it is not opposition rhetoric. It is a structural challenge to t...