President Donald Trump wants to sit down with Iranian leaders — but they don't share his eagerness to talk, revealing the limits of the president's personal diplomatic overtures.
While another adversary, North Korea, has come to the table for one-on-ones with Trump, Tehran on Sunday responded to Trump's combination of pleas and economic sanctions with provocation.
Iranian officials said they would, within hours, start enriching uranium above the limits set under a 2015 international nuclear deal, the latest in a series of potentially fatal stab-wounds in the agreement. They also said Iran would keep reducing its compliance with the deal every 60 days unless world powers shield it from the sanctions that Trump reimposed after quitting the agreement last year.
"We are fully prepared to enrich uranium at any level and with any amount," said Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesman for Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, according to media reports.
It's an approach that has left the two countries at risk of an eventual military confrontation.
But Iran's moves are a calculated gamble, officials and analysts said — an attempt to both rebuke Trump and pressure European leaders, who are trying to salvage the nuclear deal, to stand up to the United States. The Iranians also may be betting that Trump, who has shown little appetite for war, will fold first, lifting sanctions in exchange for talks.
Iran is "testing limits to gauge the response of the U.S. and the other key stakeholders," said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran scholar at the Brookings Institution. "It's a very effective way to try to read a mercurial U.S. administration and inject some greater urgency among the other parties to the deal."
A U.S. official familiar with the issue told POLITICO on Sunday that the Trump team hopes for three things: that Europe imposes some sanctions on Iran to keep it from further violating the deal; that a financial mechanism the Europeans have set up to help Iran obtain nonsanctioned goods succeeds; and that recent U.S. military maneuvers in the Middle East are enough to deter Iran from further military escalation.
"Fundamentally, we want them to stay in the deal," the U.S. official said, when asked why the Trump administration wants the European financial mechanism, known as INSTEX, to work. There's no desire to engage in an all-out war with Iran or see it build a nuclear weapon, the official said.
Both Iran and North Korea have faced Trump's fury over their nuclear programs, including his imposition of severe sanctions. But while North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, who already possesses nuclear weapons, has accepted talks, Iran's Islamist rulers, who lack nukes, remain unwilling to talk to Trump.
The reasons are many. Iran has an anti-U.S. ideology forged during a revolution 40 years ago — its leaders rarely respond well to insults and threats from a country they call the "Great Satan." And unlike North Korea, where Kim rules with an iron fist, Iran has competing political power centers, even if Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei technically has the final say.
Additionally, Tehran is still smarting from Trump's decision to pull the U.S. out of the 2015 nuclear deal. There's also lingering suspicion in Tehran that the Trump administration really wants to oust the Iranian regime — not just change its behavior.
Kim, on the other hand, may see more use in talking to Trump than goading him, even if the pair traded heated rhetorical barbs in 2017. The 30-something dictator may be willing to try the negotiations route because he already has built a nuclear arsenal and is less worried about a U.S. attack.
Kim's goal, some analysts say, is to improve his country's economy, and bolster his rule, by persuading Trump to remove sanctions. Kim may be betting that he can persuade Trump to at least offer some sanctions relief for limited nuclear-related promises on his part.
Iran, meanwhile, insists it has no desire to build a nuclear weapon. The oil-rich country has always said its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, such as generating energy. But there's always the possibility that Trump's willingness to sit down with Kim could lead Iran to decide that it needs to have a nuclear weapon for more long-term leverage.
Any such move by Iran, however, could have immediate consequences, including spurring a new Middle East war or a nuclear arms race. U.S. allies in the Middle East — notably Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — are loath to see Iran become a nuclear state. Israel has even suggested in the past it would launch a preventive strike to keep Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
The possibility of a military confrontation is already high in the Middle East following a series of attacks on international oil tankers that the U.S. has blamed on Iran. The U.S. has sent hundreds more troops to the region as a hedge against Tehran.
To some Iran watchers, Tehran is erring by not talking to Trump now.
"Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would be smart to follow Kim's approach," said Mark Dubowitz of the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which generally supports Trump's tough policies toward Iran. "The deal of the century could await him if he put aside decades of anti-Americanism and met Trump at a summit."
But to others, Iran's reluctance is predictable. "You can't overcome some aspects of the revolutionary ideology still in Iran today," Maloney said. Unlike North Korea's Kim, "Iranians complicate their own path by being incapable of that kind of heroic flexibility."
In any case, comparisons between the two countries can only go so far. "They're suis generis. They're extremely different," a former top Obama administration official said. "They do watch each other, though, they do."
Trump has repeatedly made it clear that he would rather talk to Iran than fight.
He called off a military strike on Iran at the last minute last month after it shot down a U.S. drone, has promised the country economic riches if it bends to his demands and has quite literally urged Iran to "call me." The president and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have even said the U.S. is willing to talk to Iran without any preconditions.
It's also clear that Trump worries that a war with Iran would hurt him with his Republican electoral base during the 2020 election. He ran for office promising to pull the U.S. out of Middle East entanglements.
But as he often does, Trump has undermined himself by being inconsistent. He has threatened to "obliterate" Iran, beefed up America's troop presence in the Middle East and sanctioned Khamenei. The Trump administration has also threatened to sanction Iran's foreign minister, a move that would further undermine a shot at diplomacy.
Last week, as it became clear Iran would move toward greater enrichment of uranium, Trump tweeted: "Be careful with the threats, Iran. They can come back to bite you like nobody has been bitten before!"
Trump has said the 2015 nuclear deal wasn't long-lasting enough and that it should have covered Iran's many troubling non-nuclear activities. In recent months, however, he's further confused the situation by saying he simply wants Iran to give up any path to nuclear weapons. At other times, he has said he also wants Iran to stop funding "terror" groups.
Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader, has repeatedly dismissed the possibility of talking to Trump. The country's foreign minister, Javad Zarif, recently said Iran won't bow to threats from anyone.
"We will not give in to international pressure and along with the people of the world," he said, according to media reports. "We will make them talk to the people of Iran with language of respect and never threaten an Iranian."
Trump initially pursued a tough approach with North Korea before turning to personal diplomacy. He threatened Kim with "fire and fury," heaped sanctions on his regime and boasted that his nuclear button was "bigger" than the autocrat's. Kim responded with insults, too, calling Trump a "dotard."
Eventually, however, Kim and Trump met and have since showered each other with praise. At their first summit, in 2018 in Singapore, the pair signed a vague joint declaration saying they were committed to the path of denuclearization.
A second summit, in Vietnam earlier this year, ended early as neither side would agree to the other's terms for a more substantive nuclear agreement. The two met in late June at the Demilitarized Zone that separates North and South Korea.
It's too soon to tell whether the diplomacy at the DMZ will jump-start the stalled nuclear negotiations, and to date Kim has taken no serious step toward reducing his nuclear arsenal. But if Kim walks away with a good deal, Iranian leaders may reconsider talking to Trump.
The odds are, though, that Iran's government would prefer to wait, hoping that Trump will not get reelected in 2020. It would be easier for Khamenei to agree to talk with a new U.S. president than deal with a man who tore up the last deal the Iranian leader struck with America.
Given the damage done to the Iranian economy by Trump-imposed sanctions, however, Iran may have little choice but to talk to him if he is reelected. Still, the Iranians may insist that the U.S. offer some sort of limited concession before negotiations can take place, such as partial sanctions relief.
"To risk meeting Trump now, while being pretty sure nothing substantive would come of it, is to make yourself look small at home in front of your own people when you have said this man is not worth talking to," said Alex Vatanka, an Iran specialist and senior fellow with the Middle East Institute.
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