WaPo:

“He is a person in the middle,” with close links to both President Hassan Rouhani and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, says Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian official who teaches at Princeton University and knows the leadership well. “Shamkhani can play an influential role in managing the crisis in the Arab world,” he argues, in part because he is from an Arabic-speaking region of southern Iran.

The political balance in Tehran is important as the nuclear talks come to a head. Iranian and U.S. officials have been dickering with different formulas that would limit Iran’s nuclear stockpile and centrifuges. The United States wants to sharply limit the enrichment program and thereby extend the time it would take Iran to “break out” and build a bomb.

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