All eyes are on Singapore this week for the forthcoming meeting between the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and US President Donald Trump. Nevertheless, Iran and its nuclear program have not been forgotten.

Despite enduring the hardship of extreme sanctions, North Korea managed to make a nuclear bomb and still get to the negotiating table. Iran reached the negotiating stage before completing that path. Despite Tehran’s claim that it never had any intention of making a nuclear bomb, world leaders negotiated with Iran for a decade.

The result was the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, signed under the presidency of Barack Obama and backed by a UN Security Council resolution, with the approval of most of the world. Most sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear program were lifted and emergency relief was offered to the country’s paralyzed economy.

None of this relief reached ordinary Iranians. When the US, the West and Iran’s Arab neighbors talk about Tehran’s regional ambitions, they mean meddling in other countries’ affairs. For ordinary Iranians, it means taking cash from their pockets and spending it on military adventures that have nothing to do with them. 

The Trump-Kim summit reminds some people of the talks between the US and Iran, but the accord that emerged from those talks has not lasted even three years. Iran has tried to dissuade North Korea from engaging with the US by using this as evidence that no one can rely on American commitments, and to cast doubt on the wisdom of US withdrawal from the nuclear deal. 

 President Trump believes that his tough line with Iran has already curbed Tehran’s aggression, and he believes he will obtain the same result with similar tactics on North Korea.

Camelia Entekhabifard 

However, most of the US Congress opposed Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, so it never became a formal treaty. In the case of North Korea, congressional Republicans have offered to legally  protect any agreement with Kim on denuclearisation by giving it the status of a treaty. 

Hardliners in Iran question the wisdom of President Hassan Rouhani and his diplomatic team in accepting such a shaky agreement in the first place, against the advice of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei not to trust the US. In fact, the Iranian negotiators were well aware of US law, and they knew the risk they were taking; but their options were limited because the Iranian economy was collapsing. 

In 2015, there was no way to reach an agreement if issues such as Iran’s regional policies and its ballistic missile program were included, as the USCongress wanted. The short cut was to deal only with the nuclear program and leave everything else to the future.

Conversely, President Trump believes that his tough line with Iran has already curbed Tehran’s aggression, and he believes he will obtain the same result with similar tactics on North Korea.

At a press conference last week in the Rose Garden at the White House with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the president said Iran was no longer as adventurous in Syria and Yemen, and had relaxed its ambitions to extend its influence all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. “Iran is not the same country that it was a few months ago, they’re a much, much different group of leaders,” he said. 

Is it perhaps time for the diplomacy of offering roses to Tehran? 

  • Camelia Entekhabifard is an Iranian-American journalist, political commentator and author of Camelia: Save Yourself By Telling the Truth (Seven Stories Press, 2008).

    Twitter:  @CameliaFard