International bureaucrats don’t usually make headlines—especially when the great powers are jostling for attention. But Rafael Mariano Grossi did just that last month when, in the face of a harrowing, seemingly insoluble stalemate between the United States, Iran, and Europe, he decided on his own to fly to Tehran to try to salvage the disintegrating 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
Everyone afterward thanked Grossi for his initiative—he negotiated a three-month compromise that preserved inspection data—but no one was especially surprised at his efforts, knowing the record of the energetic 60-year-old Argentine. Yet Grossi, who is the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has also been quite active out of the headlines. Since last year, he has been frenetically finding ways to expand the IAEA’s agenda and bring it into the fight against two of the most serious issues of the future: pandemics and climate change.
