Robin Wright reports on the failed efforts by European allies to arrange a Trump-Rouhani meeting at the U.N. earlier this month. Here she points out some of the obstacles that made that meeting impossible:
The Iranians, however, don’t trust Trump. Four days before Trump arrived in New York, the Administration added another layer of sanctions, this time on Iran’s Central Bank. “We’ve never done it at this level,” Trump boasted to reporters, in the Oval Office. “It’s too bad what’s happening with Iran. It’s going to hell. They are broke, and they could solve the problem very easily.”
This year, the Trump Administration has imposed at least sixteen new rounds of sanctions on Iran, beyond those reimposed last year. Some are unprecedented—including those against the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, everyone in his office, the entire Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Zarif. The United States has also at least twice launched secret cyberattacks against Iran.
After every Trump overture, Rouhani and Zarif have responded that the United States must first publicly promise to lift sanctions.
The president can’t get a meeting with any Iranian officials because the economic war he is waging on Iran makes it politically radioactive for them to accept. Even if there weren’t an economic war, the Iranian government would see no point in meeting just for the sake of meeting. Trump wants the spectacle of statecraft without any of the substance, and that is why his “overtures” never lead to anything. That is why there has been no meaningful progress in talks with North Korea since the first photo op summit in Singapore last year, and that is why there isn’t likely to be any progress before the end of this year.
The Iranian government could look at how he has dealt with North Korea over the last year and a half to see that meeting with Trump yields no results. Not only has Trump offered no sanctions relief in order to have a meeting, but he won’t even agree to sanctions relief when North Korea proposes to shutter some of its nuclear facilities. What chance would Iran have of getting anything from a president who thinks that diplomacy is a one-way street of making demands and extracting concessions?
Trump says Iran could “solve the problem very easily” right after he pretend that it is “too bad” what is happening to the country. All the while, he is piling on more sanctions as he pretends to be interested in negotiating. This is the same thuggish shakedown language that he uses all the time with other governments. Trump’s idea of a “solution” to Iran’s problems is for them to give him everything he wants. He expresses phony concern to remind everyone that he is inflicting needless suffering and could stop doing that if the target of his threats and intimidation would just “play ball.” It should come as no surprise that other governments react badly to such crude attempts at coercion, and so they refuse to play along with the president’s attempted shakedowns masquerading as diplomacy.