Only Trump Can Go to Tehran

For­eign Affairs

Only Trump Can Go to Tehran

He’s unique­ly posi­tioned to restore the Iran nuclear deal.

Cred­it: Borna_Mirahmadian

Fol­low­ing Israel’s assas­si­na­tion of Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, the Mid­dle East is on the brink of region­al war. The killing occurred in Tehran after Haniyeh attend­ed the inau­gu­ra­tion of Iran’s Pres­i­dent Masoud Pezeshkian, a mod­er­ate who cam­paigned on reen­gag­ing the West. Pezeshkian has been open to nego­ti­at­ing a revival of the Joint Com­pre­hen­sive Plan of Action (the Iran nuclear deal). But Israel’s attack makes that less likely—and rais­es the odds of the U.S. get­ting dragged into war with Iran.

Strange­ly, the best bet for improv­ing rela­tions with Tehran and putting the Iran deal back togeth­er may be a return to the White House of Don­ald Trump, the very man who blew up the accord in 2018. To under­stand why, con­sid­er an old Amer­i­can adage.

“Only Nixon could go to Chi­na” cap­tures a gen­er­al truth about pol­i­tics in a polar­ized democ­ra­cy. Con­ser­v­a­tive politi­cians who pur­sue lib­er­al poli­cies, and lib­er­al politi­cians who pur­sue con­ser­v­a­tive ones, sig­nal that those poli­cies real­ly are in the nation­al inter­est. Nixon’s rep­u­ta­tion as an anti-com­mu­nist lib­er­at­ed him to try improv­ing rela­tions with Red Chi­na in 1972, since vot­ers could then infer it wasn’t some peacenik aspi­ra­tion.

This dynam­ic helps explain why Pres­i­dent Joe Biden, ear­ly in his pres­i­den­cy, failed to revive the JCPOA, which like­ly would have involved lift­ing all of Trump’s “max­i­mum pres­sure” sanc­tions and remov­ing his des­ig­na­tion of the Islam­ic Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Guard Corps as a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion. Had Biden freed up funds for the “mad mul­lahs” and legit­imized the IRGC, he would have got­ten ham­mered by the same forces that panned his Afghanistan with­draw­al, from which his poll num­bers have nev­er recov­ered. To many vot­ers, these steps would have seemed part of a reck­less lib­er­al agen­da, and Biden would have seemed weak. Kamala Har­ris, if elect­ed, would face the same polit­i­cal cal­cu­lus.

Even after the reformist Pezeshkian’s sur­prise elec­toral vic­to­ry, the White House dis­missed the idea of nego­ti­a­tions. Asked whether the admin­is­tra­tion would make diplo­mat­ic over­tures, Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil spokesman John Kir­by answered with a curt “no.” Asked to elab­o­rate, Kir­by said “it seemed like a pret­ty easy ques­tion to answer” since Iran sup­ports Rus­sia and mil­i­tant groups across the Mid­dle E …