NEW YORK — Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is slated to address the UN General Assembly session that opens Sept. 20. It will be Rouhani's fourth such address, but this year he will notably only stay in New York for less than 48 hours.

Rouhani’s whirlwind visit to the United States comes at a time when he finds himself under increasing fire at home by hard-liners, who charge that the most important achievement of his foreign policy, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), is “useless” and a “stain of disgrace” on Iranian history. Indeed, since the signing of the nuclear agreement in July 2015, Iranian hard-liners have relentlessly sought to devalue Rouhani’s success in ending the nuclear crisis while portraying it as another Treaty of Turkmenchay.

The 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay, signed by Qajar Iran and tsarist Russia, saw Iran cede many of its northern territories to Russia after suffering military defeat. To this day, Iranians invoke this treaty as a symbol of national surrender and humiliation. In this vein, Seyyed Morteza Hosseini, a hard-line member of parliament, said on May 25, “The story of the JCPOA in history will be like the Treaty of Turkmenchay when it comes to the posterity of this country.” He added, “People should make a right decision in the [May 2017] presidential election and not let [Iran] be humiliated.”

The obstacles hampering implementation of the nuclear deal, which many Iranians see as rooted in “stonewalling” by the United States, is giving hard-liners in Tehran more pretexts and power to expedite their plan to damage Rouhani’s standing ahead of the May 2017 presidential election.