President Trump deserves credit for his openness to meet with President Hassan Rouhani of Iran in the near future.
Answering a question on Monday as to whether he would meet Rouhani without preconditions, Trump stated: “No preconditions. They want to meet? I’ll meet.”
Trump has good reason to believe that a meeting might be worth it. After all, Iran’s economy is creaking under immense pressure. Shopkeepers are closing their market stores, goods are becoming increasingly sparse, and protests are growing. That makes Trump’s offer of unconditional talks far more credible than when President Barack Obama famously offered the same back in 2009. Where Obama’s unconditional offer had no strings attached, Trump’s recent withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear agreement would carry clear implications into any meeting with Rouhani. Namely, that Iran would have to be open toward reaching an improved nuclear deal.
The difference between now and then is that the Iranians knew Obama had no real interest in a showdown. When it comes to Trump, the Iranians are far less sure where the American president stands.
There are two other advantages in a Trump-Rouhani meeting.
For one, talking is better than killing. While U.S.-Iranian disagreements reach into multiple areas, recent tensions have been problematic in reducing the political capacity of either side to compromise. And that’s a shame because the economic pressure in Iran makes Rouhani’s political bloc more inclined toward compromises that they wouldn’t have considered before now.
If Trump plays his hand well, it is feasible that he’ll be able to get a new nuclear deal that does more to restrict Iranian nuclear weapons and ballistic missile research.
A sit-down between Trump and Rouhani would also leverage Iranian political power against the hardliners. At present, Iranian public anger over the economy has been directed at Rouhani and the hardliners in relatively equal measure. This serves the regime change agenda of those like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton, who believe Rouhani and the hardliners are one and the same. But if one regards Rouhani as the leader of a more-moderate bloc (and I do), the Pompeo-Bolton approach makes conflict much likelier. By casting the Rouhani bloc as one and the same as the hardliner bloc, the U.S. makes it harder for Rouhani to make compromises and more likely that Iran will lash out.
Instead, meeting Rouhani from a position of strength would allow Trump to test the possibilities for compromise without carrying the baggage of Obama administration-style appeasement. That doesn’t mean Trump should replicate Obama’s delusion that Rouhani is some kind of Jeffersonian reformist. But alongside Iran’s economic vulnerability, a meeting with Rouhani would pressure the ultimate Iranian decision maker, Ayatollah Khamenei, to choose between compromise and the hardliners. In that sense, even if any meeting brought no dividends, it would signal to Iranians that the revolutionaries are recalcitrant and disinterested in anything but their own agenda. It would thus calcify public attitudes against them.
In short, a Trump-Rouhani meeting is worth the risks.
