Could the US be about to seal a deal with Iran?

Trump may have revealed that diplomatic channels with Tehran are reopening without his usual noise and bluster, but this is big news. Conditions might never be better for normalising Iran’s relations with the West, writes Mary Dejevsky

Any other day, any other week, and the revelation would have dominated headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. With leaders the world over preoccupied with the turmoil caused by President Donald Trump’s tariffs, however, the news that the United States had made overtures to Iran and that direct talks were to take place on Saturday had to take a much lower billing.

It has to be stressed, nonetheless, how much of a departure this is. It represents a far bigger turn in recent US policy than Trump’s first phone call to Vladimir Putin last month, which ended more than three years of isolating the Russian president following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It may not be quite “Nixon to China”, but it has the potential to transform the politics of the region and beyond.

The United States and Iran have had no diplomatic relations since Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, when student revolutionaries held US diplomats hostage in their Tehran embassy for 444 days. There have been almost no contacts since, with one exception: the nuclear agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which committed Iran to limiting its nuclear activity to civil energy in return for the lifting of sanctions.

The US was a party to this agreement as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, but it had little effect on bilateral relations, and Trump withdrew the US from the treaty in his first 18 months as president, accusing Iran of violations. There is then a particular irony that it should be Trump, at the start of his second term, who is broaching talks on a new Iran nuclear treaty.

‘There is also a sense that the days of the nearly 86-year-old Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, are numbered, and change could be in the offing’ (AP)

There are, though, many reasons why such a move could make sense and might even have a chance of success.

Trump has a liking for the grand gesture, and initiating talks with Iran after nearly half a century is surely that. As was how the disclosure was made: almost in passing during an on-camera meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, an Israeli prime minister who has long seen Iran as an existential threat to his country. Last October, he authorised reprisal raids against an Iranian nuclear facility, and during his tenure, the threat of an all-out Israel-Iran war has never seemed far away.

That ever-present risk may be one reason why Trump has decided to talk to Iran, but other strategic and practical considerations militate for a change of policy now.

As seen in his first term, Trump has a way of focusing his foreign policy on just a few countries that he sees as particular sources of trouble, the point being that solving just a few problems can potentially defuse many others. Hence his intended – but thwarted – first-term rapprochement with Russia and his talks with North Korea.

For his second term, Russia again heads the list, with one of the hoped-for by-products being peace in Ukraine. But there were early hints that Iran could be a target for the Trump treatment, given its disproportionate capacity to destabilise the wider Middle East.

And now might indeed be the optimal time. Iran’s theocratic regime is facing more resistance – from women and young people – than it has for many years, and sanctions have left the country dangerously impoverished. The days of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, now in his mid-eighties, may also be numbered.

Regionally, Iran’s reach is nothing like it was only two years ago. Israel’s response to the 7 October attacks has included attempts to destroy not just Hamas, which had some support from Iran, but Iran’s powerful proxies, the Hezbollah militias in southern Lebanon. The sudden end of the Assad regime in Syria has left Iran without either the influence or the land corridors it had before.

There have also been signals, chiefly from the relatively new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, that Iran could be open to a rapprochement with the West. His speech at the UN General Assembly last September could be read almost as an overture to the US and Europe, and he has kept his job without any significant rowing back.

As yet, it is unclear whether any of this could translate into a readiness in Iran to consider a new nuclear agreement. Tehran has cast doubt on whether this weekend’s talks will be “direct” and insisted that there will be no concessions on nuclear policy.

What is clear, though, is that Trump senses a rare opportunity to transform relations with Iran and could potentially have others on his side – including Russia. Moscow has long harboured fears of a nuclear-armed Iran on its southern border while maintaining good channels to Tehran. For Trump to include Russia in a new diplomatic process with Iran could be a way of bringing Moscow back into the international fold, especially if the UK, France and Germany, who also underwrote the original nuclear agreement, were involved, too.

Three months into Donald Trump’s term is too soon to envisage Air Force One landing at Tehran airport and the US president descending the steps to a guard of honour, but strange things have happened, including first-term Trump’s stroll into North Korea at the DMZ. And if the stars were so aligned, it is not impossible that Trump could leave office having normalised US-Iranian relations, even if a new nuclear agreement remained a step too far.