Iran Couldn’t Avoid Talking With Trump Any Longer

In the first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second term, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, repeatedly rejected the U.S. president’s offer of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, just as he had during Trump’s first term. Tehran would not talk to this U.S. administration, Khamenei insisted. And even if it did talk, it would only do so indirectly. Talking to Washington was “not honorable,” the supreme leader claimed.

Khamenei’s objections collapsed on Saturday evening when Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, chatted with Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steven Witkoff, in the residence of Oman’s foreign minister, Badr Albusaidi, in Muscat. Prior to this hallway chat, the two sides had spent close to five hours in two different wings of Albusaidi’s palatial home, exchanging written messages with Oman’s top diplomat as their mediator.

The direct discussion, long demanded by Trump but rejected by Iranian officials, showed just how well the initial talks via Albusaidi had gone. But it also underscored how weak, even humiliating, a position Khamenei finds himself in.

The U.S. and its allies in the Middle East want to ensure that Iran won’t build nuclear weapons; Iran wants to gain relief from harsh U.S.-led economic sanctions and avoid potential Israeli or American military strikes on its nuclear sites. Until recently, Khamenei was unwilling to consider making the concessions necessary for an agreement. But the pressure on Khamenei’s regime—both external and domestic—has grown to the point that he had no choice but to retreat.

[Read: Iran wants to talk]

During the past year, Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance, a coalition of pro-Tehran militias across the Middle East, has been crushed by Israeli strikes on Lebanon’s Hezbollah and American strikes on Yemen’s Houthis. The Syrian revolution that brought down Bashar al-Assad, Khamenei’s close ally, further eroded the Iranian leader’s strategy of “forward defense”—which is to say, relying on its Arab proxies to keep its adversaries away from the homeland. Meanwhile, Trump has also bolstered America’s presence in the Persian Gulf, suggesting to Khamenei that military attacks on Iranian soil are the most likely alternative to negotiations.

Inside Iran, public discontent with the regime’s political repression and economic mismanagement has grown. Many in the Iranian establishment are making ever more explicit demands for an end to their country’s isolation.

In a remarkable display of elite dissatisfaction, the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, Mohammad Bagheri, commemorated the Iranian New Year holidays earlier this month by shooting a video message outside Persepolis, the seat of the First Persian Empire, which dates back to the sixth century B.C.E. Bagheri expressed hope that Iran could follow “the same ideals” he had witnessed in the ancient monument: “peace, calm, friendship, and brotherhood with other nations.” Such a statement from Iran’s top soldier was unprecedented: Glorifying Iran’s pre-Islamic past is taboo for officials of the Islamic Republic. Bagheri also spoke of “peace with other nations,” which in the tightly constrained vocabulary of Iranian politics is code for diplomatic engagement with the West.

Proponents of such engagement are gaining strength in Tehran. Former President Hassan Rouhani, who negotiated Iran’s nuclear agreement with Barack Obama’s administration in 2015, has reemerged and is bitterly attacking people who oppose talking to the United States. By contrast, Khamenei’s most devout anti-American followers find themselves isolated. Their preferred presidential candidate, Saeed Jalili, badly lost the election last year.

Khamenei himself has taken a more conciliatory tone and openly speaks of welcoming American business. In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Araghchi said Trump could become “a president of peace.” For Iran’s foreign minister to bestow this title upon the man who ordered the killing of Khamenei’s favorite general, Qassem Soleimani, is astonishing.

Just like that, a new round of Iranian-American diplomacy has started. A second round of talks is scheduled for Saturday. The evidence suggests that the two sides have agreed at least on a framework for initial dialogue. Perhaps Iran is ready to make real concessions. Maybe it will accept heightened monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose head will visit Tehran this month.

If Iran and the U.S. can make a deal now, it might prove more enduring than the Obama-era one that Trump backed out of in 2018. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had led an impassioned campaign against Obama even talking to Iran, would be less likely to undermine an agreement negotiated with Trump, with whom he is much friendlier. Saudi Arabia and other Arab powers that felt left out by Obama’s focus on Iran are now welcoming the talks in Oman.

The talks could fail, of course. During Trump’s first term, U.S. discussions with North Korea over its nuclear program quickly collapsed despite all the buzz around his meeting with Kim Jong Un. The U.S. president’s lack of patience and his preference for showmanship may not bode well for the difficult, technical talks that must precede any substantive agreement with Iran. Faced with making real concessions to the U.S., Khamenei might panic.

[Read: The Axis of Resistance keeps getting smaller]

When talks get under way Saturday, Khamenei will be celebrating his 86th birthday. The jockeying to succeed him has begun, and his current humiliation is visible to Iranians. His shift in position offers a sign of hope that the page can be finally turned on his disastrous legacy.

Last weekend, just as the Muscat talks were going on, Asadollah Amraee, a longtime Iranian writer, posted a photo on Instagram of a woman walking on a Tehran street with her curly hair uncovered, in defiance of the regime’s mandatory-veiling rules. She was passing by a building emblazoned with the slogan Death to the USA and a quote by Khamenei: “We will not accommodate to America, not even for a moment.”

“No comment,” is how Amraee delicately captioned the picture to his 120,000 followers. But the message was clear: Just as the regime gave up on imposing the hijab on women, it will also have to give up on its anti-Americanism. In the comments section, Reza Kianian, one of Iran’s best-known actors and public intellectuals, opined: “Time and habit makes everything ordinary.” Khamenei’s vision of an Islamist, anti-American, anti-Israeli Iran is unlikely to survive him. Although some opponents of the Iranian regime worry that a new nuclear deal might throw it a lifeline, Khamenei’s need to negotiate more likely augurs his regime’s unravelling.