5 days ago
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The letter the US president, Donald Trump, says he sent to Iran’s leadership offering to reopen talks on the country’s nuclear programme comes at a point when Iranian domestic politics is at its most unstable for years.
In the past month, the conservative-dominated parliament has asserted its power over the broadly reformist president elected last June by impeaching and sacking the experienced economy minister, Abdolnaser Hemmati, while Mohammad Javad Zarif, the vice-president and most prominent reformist, has also been forced out.
Both power plays were clearly made against the wishes of the president, Masoud Pezeshkian, but with the economy reeling under the pressure of US economic sanctions, the 85-year-old supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has clearly decided against rescuing Pezeshkian.
The parliament, feeling it is on a roll, is now summoning a further group of 11 ministers to ask them 49 questions about their performance in what looks like an attempt to harass Pezeshkian’s government into further submission.
Rumours that Pezeshkian, an emotional man who sets store by integrity, will soon resign have been rife. His departure would confirm that the deep state, or what some in Iran call the shadow government, will not tolerate a loss of power.
If he does go, he has made it clear whom he would hold responsible. In a remarkably candid speech, he finally asserted himself, saying he had favoured negotiations with the west, but the supreme leader had rejected them, so “it’s over and done”.
“My position has been and will remain that I believe in negotiations, but now we have to follow the parameters set by the supreme leader,” Pezeshkian said. “When the supreme leader sets a direction, we must adapt ourselves to it. In order to adapt, we must try to find a way.
“From the day we took over the government, we were confronted with deficiencies in energy, water and power, and on the other hand extreme debts on payments to the agriculture sector for wheat, the health and medical sector, and retirement salaries and so on.”
Similarly, he said his efforts to relieve women of the pressure to wear the hijab had been constantly challenged. On Saturday he issued a further apology over the lack of energy supplies.
A lot of this manoeuvring, ostensibly about economic mismanagement and poverty, is in reality a broader battle over relations with the west, with the conservatives convinced that experience shows Trump and Israel, his ally, are not just untrustworthy, but bent on regime change in Iran.
Pezeshkian had argued in the election that Iran could end its confrontation with the west and still remain independent.
If Trump’s letter has now set onerous conditions for talks on Iran’s nuclear programme, the conservatives will feel vindicated in saying the price Washington demands is too high. But if Tehran rejects Trump’s approach, Israeli bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites then becomes more imminent.
The biggest constraint on such an attack may not be Iran’s many threats of reprisals – Israel thinks it has destroyed Tehran’s air defences – but from the arguments of the Gulf states. The level-headed prime minister of Qatar, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, gave a chilling interview to Tucker Carlson warning that if Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant were attacked and radioactive material seeped into the Gulf, within three days none of the countries in the region would have drinking water. They all depend on desalination for their water supply. Not just fish but life in the region would be destroyed, he said.
So far, Iran’s professional diplomats have held the line by saying they will not negotiate with America directly. This keeps open the possibility of indirect talks mediated by Russia, a variation on the wearisome form of negotiations staged in Vienna under the Biden administration that failed to revive the 2015 nuclear deal. The offer might buy Iran some time.
The consensus inside Iran is that Trump’s letter is timed as a piece of psychological warfare designed to force Tehran into rejection, deepening Iranian divisions about its strategy, and taking the crisis between the west and Iran to the final, climactic, level.
