FP| Alex Vatanka: They almost were, and now Hassan Rouhani could help get things back on track.

On Nov. 4, Iran commemorated the 39th anniversary of the day some 400 militant Islamist students seized the U.S. Embassy in downtown Tehran. The United States marked the date, too: On Nov. 5, it imposed a new round of sanctions on Iran, which President Donald Trump’s administration has termed part of a “maximum pressure” campaign to bring the country back to the negotiating table.

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif quickly responded with a video message in which he told Trump to “dream on.” Zarif mused that Trump, like his six presidential predecessors whose main policy toward Iran was “bravado,” will see his efforts Tehran fail. And yet, whispers in Tehran about the need to break the stalemate and talk to Trump are becoming louder.

Even if negotiating with Trump is impossible—and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has said it is—the leadership in Tehran can still look at his presidency as an opportunity to prepare the ground to talk to his successor. As Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has put it, America is much bigger than just Trump. He’s right, and it will fall to the rest of the Iranian leadership to soberly admit to this reality and ease its demonization of the United States. If that sounds implausible, Tehran need only to look back to the birth of the Islamic Republic in 1979. It was in those early days that the question of relations with Washington almost by chance became contentious.


There’s some irony in the way Zarif responded to the sanctions. On the one hand, Iranian officials bemoan Washington’s bravado and alleged Iranophobia. And yet, since 1979, Iranian political orthodoxy has been Americaphobic on a grand scale.


Top figures such as Rouhani or Zarif who dare question this orthodoxy face severe censure from inside the regime. When Rouhani was in New York in September to attend the United Nations General Assembly, his entourage went to great lengths to avoid even an accidental meeting between Rouhani and Trump. It was likewise clear from Rouhani’s Sept. 25 U.N. speech that he was fixed on one thing only: reassuring his hard-line rivals in Tehran that he had no intention of courting an American president whose administration has put forward a list of 12 concessions Tehran would have to make before sanctions can be removed.

Khamenei will never agree to those concessions as long as he surrounds himself with the generals from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, whose livelihoods are most at stake should Tehran opt for any kind of reconciliation with Washington. And yet, Tehran knows beyond a doubt the serious costs that come with a hostile relationship with the United States.
Tehran knows beyond a doubt the serious costs that come with a hostile relationship with the United States.
In fact, the last 40 years is littered with examples to prove this point.

Rouhani—understanding both pressures—is looking for ways to take the America issue off the table. Rather than blaming the United States for the poor state of relations between the two countries, he has called on Trump not to be misled by the Israelis, the Saudis, and the Iranian opposition in exile. The subtext is clear: Third-party actors are spoiling relations between Tehran and Washington. It might seem like a cop-out, and it is, but it is also an overture of sorts. In fact, Rouhani and other first-generation Islamist revolutionary leaders who are guilty of having deliberately manufactured an American boogeyman are best placed to start looking for ways to break this spell.


If Trump, as in Rouhani’s telling, is simply guilty of gullibility when it comes to Iran, the regime in Tehran is guilty of something worse: spreading the historical myth that, from day one, the United States was opposed to the Islamic Republic. When Zarif, a purported moderate, speaks of 40 years of American hostility against Iran, it sounds as if Washington’s policies toward Iran’s Islamists were crafted in vacuum from the moment the republic was born. The reality is something different.


From the first signs that the shah’s regime was about to be toppled in 1979, Washington looked for ways to work with those it supposed would become Iran’s new rulers. Its main goal was to protect broader U.S. interests in a vital region at the height of the Cold War. At one point soon after the revolution, Cyrus Vance, then the U.S. secretary of state, even came to view Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as the best safeguard against a communist takeover in Tehran. He raised the possibility of close cooperation between the new regime and Washington. Vance may have been clueless about the worldview of the Khomeini circle, yet he was going by messages he was receiving from the cleric’s key deputies. Khomeini’s advisors told the Americans that the ayatollah would be open to U.S. investment but would be generally antagonistic toward the West. He would be even more antagonistic to the “atheist” and “anti-religious Soviets,” though.

At first, the Khomeinists showed no interest in an open confrontation with the United States. When on Feb. 15, 1979, a group of radical leftist gunmen stormed the U.S. Embassy, it was an armed rescue squad dispatched by Khomeini that ended the brief siege. “You are our brothers. Don’t worry,” Khomeini’s militiamen told the terrified U.S. diplomats and military officers. The U.S. ambassador told reporters that very same day, “We telephoned the Khomeini group and they came in and saved us in a nick of time.” Most of those militiamen were soon after organized in a brand new armed unit, the Revolutionary Guard.

In the following months, the moderate Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan repeatedly reaffirmed that Tehran intended to have good relations with Washington. When he was attacked for being soft on the Americans by the far-left or by hard-liners in the Khomeini camp, Bazargan duly defended himself by saying Khomeini had himself sanctioned talks with the United States. Bazargan repeatedly asked for U.S. military and commercial trade, and on at least one occasion he requested intelligence from Washington. Economic ties, including Iranian purchases of American goods, continued, albeit on a much smaller scale than during the days of the shah.