The modern Middle East’s most accomplished dictator

Since 1989, Ali Khamenei has been the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

He has outlasted and outplayed everyone else within the first revolutionary generation. His men now control all the critical institutions in the state. He out-negotiated the United States and western Europe in nuclear talks despite severe sanctions. He has pushed Iran's atomic program ever closer to a bomb. He defeated the United States in Iraq.

And, as has become even more obvious as the Iranian people repeatedly rise up in nationwide protests against the theocracy, he has also pushed Iranian society to a breaking point.

Filling in for host Cliff May is FDD senior fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht, and he's joined by Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations to discuss "the most accomplished — and, perhaps, most consequential — dictator in the middle east since World War II, Ali Khamenei."