Iran Wants to Talk

Donald Trump loves letters. We know this from his first term, when he exchanged 27 letters with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in the course of 16 months and wrote a particularly memorable missive to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In his second term, he has already found an unlikely new pen pal: Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Early in March, a high-ranking Emirati diplomat delivered a letter from Trump to Khamenei. Iran has now sent Khamenei’s response through its preferred mediator, the Sultanate of Oman.

Iran’s letter is detailed and leaves the door open for negotiations, a source close to the Iranian establishment told me, on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press. In addition to the official response, Iranians have used multiple channels, including private business ones, to send signals to Trump and his team, the source added.

About two months ago, Khamenei said that talking with the U.S. was “neither rational, nor smart, nor honorable.” This seemed consistent with his posture during Trump’s first term: In 2018, he said Iran would “never” talk with the Trump administration in particular. In June 2019, when Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, brought a letter from Trump to Tehran, Khamenei rebuked him in front of cameras and said that the U.S. president was not “worthy” of a response. A few months later, Emmanuel Macron went out of his way to host a videoconference between Trump and his Iranian counterpart, then-President Hassan Rouhani. The logistical arrangements had been made, but in the end Rouhani didn’t take the meeting.

[Read: The Axis of Resistance keeps getting smaller]

Yet the supreme leader has been known to buckle under pressure and call it a strategic retreat. Decades ago, he coined the phrase heroic flexibility in praise of a Shiite imam who had made peace with a bitter enemy. He used the term in 2013 to justify Iran’s talks with the Obama administration (talks that started with an exchange of letters between Barack Obama and Khamenei.)  

Khamenei is not about to give up his lifelong anti-Americanism at this late hour, at the age of almost 86. Still, Iran is in dire economic straits, and domestic pressure is mounting. Trump’s message to Iran, meanwhile, has been constant and clear: Talk with me, agree to a deal in which you stop pursuing nuclear weapons and arming regional militias, and I’ll let you prosper.

If Iran declines, Israel, flush from having battered the Iranian allies Hamas and Hezbollah, could finally strike Iran’s nuclear program. But even short of that, Trump’s policy—his previous administration called it “maximum pressure”—could fatally damage the already beleaguered Iranian economy. The U.S. has threatened to seriously crack down on Iran’s oil trade with China, which would cost Iran its most important source of foreign currency. The markets are already speaking: The U.S. dollar now trades for more than 1 million rials, an almost 75 percent increase from a few months ago, making the Iranian currency among the most worthless in the world (in 2015, when Iran last signed a deal with the U.S., the dollar was just 29,500 IRR).

This explains why Iran is coming to the table. But knowing just how weak his hand is, Khamenei has tried to appear tough. In an Eid al-Fitr speech on Monday, he affirmed that Iran’s positions had not changed, “nor has the enmity of America and the Zionist regime, which continue to threaten us with their evil doings.” He went on to threaten the U.S. and Israel with “a firm blow in response” if they attack Iran—which, he added, was “not very likely.” As per usual, he threatened Israel with destruction: “Everybody has a duty to work toward eliminating this evil and criminal entity from the region,” he said.

His is not the only bluster from Tehran. Iran’s military leaders have recently threatened American bases in the region. Ali Larijani, a centrist politician and adviser to Khamenei, said that Iran has no intention of building a nuclear weapon, but it could be forced to do so if attacked by the U.S. or Israel.

These might sound like fighting words, but what they really are is a negotiating tactic. Larijani has himself said that he hopes for “a tangible result” to come out of diplomacy with America and praised Trump as “a talented businessman.” Other Iranian officials have made similar indications, even as they complain about Trump’s “bullying” and his threats to bomb the country. Iran is “always ready to negotiate on an equal footing,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Monday. Iran is not averse to negotiations, and “the ball is in the U.S.’s court,” a top communication official in the office of President Masoud Pezeshkian said a day earlier.

If the messages seem mixed, that’s because Iran has “readied itself for both negotiations and confrontation,” Mostafa Najafi, a Tehran-based expert on the Iranian security establishment, told me. He said that the Iranian authorities had reached out to the Trump team even prior to the U.S. president’s inauguration, as diplomacy is their preferred course—but they have also prepared the country’s defenses in case this effort fails.

According to Najafi, Iran wants a two-step process, with direct talks following the current indirect contact. Tehran prefers that these talks take place in secret, and it wants Iran’s missile and drone capabilities to be off the table, he added. But it would be happy to talk about “lessening tensions in the region.” Najafi continued, “This doesn't mean making deals over the Axis of Resistance groups, but, if Iran sees it as necessary, it can align them with a new agenda.”

This push for talks has a clear constituency in Iran. Op-eds in business and political dailies argue that the country has no choice but to come to a deal with the West. An online poll on a major news website showed a whopping 82 percent in favor of direct talks with the U.S., with 7 percent favoring indirect talks and only 11 percent opposed to all talks. Mohammad Ali Sobhani, a former Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, Jordan, and Qatar, even suggested that Iran should offer business opportunities to American companies to sell the Trump administration on dealmaking.

[Read: The Iranian dissident asking simple questions]

If Iran and America do get to talking again, many outside forces will try to shape the result. Israel might nudge Trump away from negotiations, in favor of attacks that could keep Iran weak and destabilized. And Trump might very well prefer that outcome too. But prominent voices in the Trump camp seem to be urging a more diplomatic approach. The talk-show host Tucker Carlson, known for his close ties to the president, has strongly pushed against attacking Iran. His interview with Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, in which the latter seemed open to discussions with Iran, was watched closely in Iran. Witkoff’s apparent favorability toward negotiations was cited by regional sources speaking to an Israeli newspaper as one reason Khamenei softened up and wrote back to Trump. Then, yesterday, came the disappearing X comment heard halfway round the world: Araghchi wrote a long post urging “diplomatic engagement” while asserting that “there is—by definition—no such thing as a ‘military option’ let alone a ‘military solution.’” Witkoff responded, “Great”—then deleted the comment. Judging from the flurry of social-media posts and op-eds, however, his message appears to have been received in Tehran.

The leaders of America’s Arab allies in the Gulf are also likely to discourage Trump from further inflaming the region by attacking Iran—this is in sharp contrast to their attitude during the Obama era, when they feared that a nuclear agreement with Tehran would leave them out.

Trump’s epistolary relationship with Khamenei is unlikely to develop into the sort of bromance he experienced with Kim, and even those personal talks collapsed because they weren’t accompanied by the necessary technical negotiations. But Iran is now going out of its way to affirm that it held up its end of the old nuclear deal and forswore developing nuclear weapons. What the Iranians also seem to know is that if they want to get a new deal with America, they will have to learn Trump’s style, and that includes the president’s love of letters.