In a press conference on Monday, Donald Trump stated that he “would certainly meet with Iran if they wanted to meet,” adding: “No preconditions. If they want to meet, I’ll meet.” To do so, writes Eli Lake, would be a grave mistake:
There was a time in Washington when the establishments in both major parties believed that a meeting with a U.S. president was something a foreign adversary had to earn. Unless concessions are offered and conditions are met, the leader of the free world should avoid parleys with rogues. Think of George W. Bush’s refusal for America to enter nuclear talks with Iran until it stopped uranium enrichment. . . .
This was a hot-button issue back in 2007 and 2008 when an upstart Democratic senator named Barack Obama proposed that if elected president, he would meet with leaders of Iran, Cuba, and North Korea in his first year. In his recent memoir, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser and speechwriter, Ben Rhodes, described [the then-senator’s] reaction [when] Madeleine Albright, formerly Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, criticized his naïve offer. Obama responded, according to Rhodes, by pounding his open palm on a table to emphasize every syllable: “It is not a reward to talk to folks!” . . .
Now the president says he is open to talks with Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, without preconditions. . . . [While Obama] pressed Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, in 2013 for a face-to-face meeting at the United Nations, he had to settle for a phone call. Now Obama’s successor, who withdrew the U.S. from the nuclear deal, wants a meeting with the man who denied one to Obama.
Given the Tehran regime’s current legitimacy crisis, it’s a possibility. Rouhani is desperate. Even before severe sanctions on Iran’s oil exports and banking system formally kick in, the value of the rial is in free fall. The demonstrations and strikes that began late last year continue to roil Iran’s ruling class. A meeting with Trump could be a lifeline to an Iranian president who has failed to deliver the prosperity and reforms he promised in his campaigns in 2013 and 2017.
Read more on Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-31/trump-s-offer-to-iran-follows-in-obama-s-footsteps