President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran arrived in the Tajik capital Dushanbe Thursday to attend a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as well as sideline meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan.
Upon departure from Tehran, Raisi addressed reporters on the "importance of regional cooperation," a fundamental component of his stated foreign policy. As a hard-line president hailing from the less accommodating, anti-US layer of Iran's political structure, Raisi has promised to prioritize neighbors over Western powers, with which the Islamic Republic has rarely been on good terms over the past four decades.
