Why Teheran should negotiate with Donald Trump
By Haytham MouzahemWashington is aiming to cut Iran’s oil sales to zero, accompanying these actions with the escalation of US threats to Tehran in the event of any attack on U.S. forces or America’s allies in the Middle East. But Trump has also opened the door to Iran to return to negotiations with his administration
A year ago, I was invited to a closed seminar with an Iranian diplomat in Beirut, which brought together some 12 researchers and journalists to discuss the implications of the US sanctions imposed by US President Donald Trump on Iran following its withdrawal from the nuclear agreement in the summer of 2015.
My input to the frank diplomat was that Trump has an Obama-complex. So all policies that his predecessor President Barack Obama drafted or followed has been cancelled: from Obama Care to the nuclear agreement with Iran, the climate agreement in Paris, the agreement with NAFTA, and the agreement with the Pacific countries. So, does Tehran think of negotiating with Trump and reaching a settlement agreement with him that would make him appear victorious and ease his complex toward Obama? The diplomat’s response was that the issue of negotiating with Trump was not excluded.
Today, a year after this talk and the return of US sanctions on Iran, Washington is aiming to cut Iran’s oil sales to zero, accompanying these actions with the escalation of US threats to Tehran in the event of any attack on U.S. forces or America’s allies in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. But Trump has also opened the door to Iran to return to negotiations with his administration, and had sent his phone number to Iranian officials, expressing the expectation that the Iranians will contact sooner or later with requests for negotiations.
The refusal of Iran’s leadership to negotiate with Washington, and not showing any fear of American threats by its carriers and bombers show in the Gulf, and its assertion of unwillingness and readiness for war at the same time, all this has made Trump retreat in his threatening speech. He first said that he is not seeking a war with Iran and then he declared that the U.S. does not want to change the Islamic regime in Iran; yet later Trump praised Iran and talked about its ability to be a great nation in the event of agreement with his administration.
It is obvious that Trump felt that there are some in his administration and amongst his allies, who want him to be involved in a war. This is the war that is being led by his national security adviser John Bolton and his Foreign Minister Mike Pompeo, as well as by some in Israel and in some Gulf states – what the Iranian foreign minister Mohammed Javed Zarif calls a ‘Camp “B”’ because the names of the leaders if this camp begin with “B” (Bolton, Benyamin Netanyahu, Bin Salman, Bin Zayed). Trump accepted the mediation of a number of countries between his country and Tehran, such as Switzerland, Oman, Kuwait, Iraq, and Japan, hoping to ease tensions between the two countries and to avoid sliding into any military confrontation that might lead to a comprehensive war that would not only harm the two parties and the entire region.
Hence, Trump wants to get off the tree on which he has been planted or has planted himself on, taking up a “maximalist'” position and campaign against Iran. To prevent a country that relies on more than 70 percent of its revenues on the export of oil and gas from the export of these goods, effectively means that an economic war is being waged against it. The repercussions of such an economic war on Iran will be far more painful and dangerous than a military war. Therefore, the indirect Iranian message in the Fujairah and Yanbu attacks against oil tankers and refineries on the Red Sea is to say that if we are prevented from exporting oil, then we will not be the only country to suffer; we will not only close the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, but will also prevent the export of Arab Gulf oil through the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandeb.
However, the Iranian refusal to accept negotiations with Washington does not help Trump and instead embarrasses him, and may make him, under the pressure of the war camp, to engage in a confrontation with Iran – a war that Obama had refused to fight, considering, rightly, that the Gulf Arab countries should resolve their problems with Iran through dialogue and mutual understanding and sharing influence in the region and not by any military confrontation involving the United States.
The Iran deal of 2015 agreement did not satisfy Israel, Saudi Arabia and UAE for three main reasons:
1) The restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program last only for a decade, and allows Tehran to return to enrichment at a higher rate, to store uranium inside the country, and possibly to produce nuclear bombs if it wanted to.; 2) The agreement did not address Iran’s advanced ballistic missiles, which have a range of more than 1,000 kilometers and become accurate, thus posing a threat to Israel; and 3) The agreement did not include the Iranian “interference” in a number of countries in the region, such as Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Palestine and the Gulf Arab states.
Hence, Iran is aware that if negotiations are reopened with Washington, these would also taking into account these three issues, which it is unwilling to compromise on. But Tehran must realize that making some concessions in one or all of these issues, whether formal or substantive, might be better than a military confrontation with America that might take the country back by decades; harsher economic sanctions could also starve the Iranian people and weaken its regime. In the siege of Iraq, beginning from 1991, which consistently served to weaken the country right till 2003, when it was invaded, Iranians have an example to think about and a lesson to study.
The American discourse about not wanting to change the Iranian regime is not quite true. During my meetings with a number of State Department officials between 2004 and 2005, they chanted “We do not want to change the Syrian regime, we want only to change its behavior.” Well, five years later the “Arab Spring” came and the change of the Syrian regime became a declared American goal through the mobilization, funding, and arming of some states and global jihadists to carry out this task.
Of course, the comparison between Iran and Syria is disproportionate in terms of population, country size, economic and military capabilities, sectarian and demographic structures and ideological nature of each. There is no doubt that war with Iran will not be a picnic and its invasion would be costly and painful far more than the invasion of Iraq. However, U.S. plans, especially the soft economic and propaganda war that earlier pushed Iran to negotiate a nuclear agreement between 2014 and 2015, should not be underestimated. Today, Washington aims to weaken Iran economically and politically from the inside so that it can be attacked from abroad or weakened from within.
The Iranian leadership should abandon some of its conservative slogans at the present time, think pragmatically, and avoid this slow reaction. Negotiating with the Trump administration to buy time and prevent the war camp from initiating a war might be Iran’s best choice today. Our Iranian friends must remember that we are in the “Digital” and “5 G” era and no longer in the era of weaving Persian handmade carpets!.
(The author is President, Beirut Center for Middle East Studies and Editor-in-Chief, The Levant, where an edited version appeared)
