Sanctioning Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, President Trump this week made likelier his meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.
With the more moderate Zarif now blacklisted, his future negotiations with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo or another U.S. official would make him appear weak to the hardliner faction. Those elements aligned under the Revolutionary Guard Corps would present Zarif as an appeaser and persuade supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to remove him.
That leaves Rouhani as the only high-level public official who might engage with America. Ayatollah Khamenei won’t do so himself for fear of jeopardizing his mantle as the guardian of the revolution.
Trump has repeatedly offered direct talks with Rouhani, but some say that Iran won’t accept that. I disagree.
Iran will want to negotiate in some form because it must. Its only alternative is to accept the implosion of its economy, or to fight the United States in a war. Neither option is practical. Nor can the European Union salvage Iran’s economy without risking escalated U.S. sanctions pressure on its own economy.
Yes, Iran would like to wait out the Trump administration in the hope that a more malleable Democratic president might replace him. But the extraordinary measure of Iran’s economic crisis makes that option very difficult. Iran needs economic relief and needs it now.
Nor are the practicalities of talks as complex as some assume. Iran believes that it can deal with Trump far more effectively than it might with some of his senior officials. Trump’s great flexibility with Kim Jong Un, even as the North Korean leader escalates his ballistic missile tests, will also have been noticed in Tehran.
Moreover, Trump has ignored Pompeo’s list of demands for a new Iran deal and instead focused clearly on restraining Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile program. That makes Iran optimistic that some kind of discussion with Trump might bear manageable dividends.
