As if President Donald Trump isn’t busy enough taking a woodchipper to the federal bureaucracy, threatening to wage economic war in North America, putting the screws on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to pressure him into peace talks with Russia and giving impromptu interviews in the Oval Office every other day, he has added another weighty item to his “to-do” list: negotiating a nuclear agreement with Iran.
During an interview with Fox News, Trump let it be known that he sent a letter to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to begin a line of communication. The gist of the missive was clear enough: I’m interested in striking a deal with you on Tehran’s nuclear program, but if you refuse to come to the table, there will be trouble. “Something is going to happen one way or the other,” Trump said after revealing news of the letter. “I hope that Iran, and I’ve written them a letter, saying I hope you’re going to negotiate because if we have to go in militarily, it’s going to be a terrible thing for them.”
This isn’t the first time Trump has openly expressed his desire to engage in diplomacy with Iran. Even during his first term, when his administration enacted a yearslong maximum pressure campaign that drove Iran’s crude oil exports down by 75%, Trump flirted with the prospect of negotiations. In September 2019, on the sidelines of the annual U.N. General Assembly meeting, Trump was waiting for Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian president at the time, to pick up the phone, much as Rouhani did with Barack Obama six years earlier. The conversation with Trump, however, never occurred; Rouhani wasn’t keen on becoming Iran’s version of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who sat with Trump for two summits with nothing to show for it.
In the days since Trump sent his letter, not much has changed in Iran’s outlook. Khamenei, the man who will decide whether or not Tehran re-enters a diplomatic track with Washington, told the Americans to shove it. The Supreme Leader clearly has 2018 stuck in the back of his mind, the year when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Barack Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (colloquially referred to as the “Iran nuclear deal”) and re-imposed the very sanctions Washington lifted a few years prior. As the old saying goes, “fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
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Events on Iran
