What will Iran – and the United States – do next?

From time to time, even the most belligerent warmongers get taken down: whether it’s bad weather, or other unseen forces, there are always bigger powers at work. For now, the helicopter accident that claimed the life of Iran’s president appears to have been an act of nature, the will of God, as we like to remind ourselves in Islam. Sometimes good things do happen in bad helicopters.

In the days before his death, Ebrahim Raisi was busy. Right before he left Azerbaijan for Iran, Raisi met with the country’s president at a ceremony to open a dam. Days earlier in Tehran, Raisi saw the president of the Kurdish regional government. Their talks, initiated by the Kurdish president, had been on building peace in the region and diminishing the intense conflict Iran had generated. The tone of the Tehran meeting, as recounted to me, had been conciliatory and friendly; the Kurds had appealed to Iran to lay off the regional conflict and instead build bridges with neighbours rather than exploit them in pursuit of Iran’s proxy wars.