Behind Iran’s Charm Offensive

The last time an American President tried to greet his Iranian counterpart informally, the gambit dissolved into a game of hide-and-seek.

The scene unfolded in 2000, when Bill Clinton wanted to introduce himself to Iran’s reformist President Mohammed Khatami at the United Nations’ annual gathering in New York City. The two leaders were preparing for a painstakingly orchestrated hallway handshake when Khatami balked–he ducked into a bathroom and refused to emerge until Clinton had given up. It turned out that hard-liners back in Iran had issued a last-minute veto to a clutch with the American leader. It would be 13 years before conditions seemed right for another try. At the U.N. on Sept. 24, it appeared possible that President Obama would have his own encounter, to use the diplomatic term of art, with Iran’s recently elected President Hassan Rouhani, somewhere in the bustling U.N. complex.

More than at any time since 1979, each side has a strong motive for a rapprochement: Obama wants to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear-weapons capability without risking another Middle East war. Rouhani was elected with a mandate to improve an economy ravaged by sanctions. In the days before the U.N. confab, the Iranians seemed very keen for a presidential handshake, and Rouhani told an interviewer he would consider meeting Obama. White House aides made it clear that the American President was game.

It didn’t happen. Officials on both sides discussed a possible meeting in the days leading up to the U.N. event. Reporters hopefully pressed them to ensure that photographers could witness the historic scene. But the planning never reached the 2000 effort’s level of detail, and the Iranians aborted. “It was clear that it was too complicated for them,” a White House official said. In plain terms, the Obama team was letting it be known that Rouhani had either chickened out–or, much like Khatami before him, had had his leash yanked from Tehran.

At a breakfast the following day with a group of journalists, Rouhani said it was the U.S. that had pushed hard for the meeting and claimed he turned it down because there hadn’t been enough time to prepare. Striking a slightly different posture from the one he struck in the lead-up to the General Assembly, he now said Iran “wasn’t opposed” to talks but that they should take place only when concrete plans were on the table. “If we don’t take the first steps carefully, [we] won’t meet our goals,” he said.

The weeklong do-si-do’s abrupt end was a puzzling turn–and a potentially pivotal one for Obama. Since Rouhani’s election in June, the Iranian President has repeatedly signaled a willingness to cut a deal over Iran’s nuclear program, which was generally nonnegotiable during the term of his predecessor, the gleefully antagonistic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It became clear that Obama was just as eager for a deal–perhaps even more so. But the missed opportunity to meet and Rouhani’s vagueness so far on possible concessions suggests that Obama could find himself with no hand to shake after all, right up to the day when he must decide whether to go to war.

“I think [Iran’s] system just got cold feet. Rouhani can’t afford to be seen shaking hands with the devil,” says Gary Samore, Obama’s Iran point man until earlier this year and now president of United Against Nuclear Iran. “All this puts a damper on expectations. The two sides are very far apart in terms of substance toward getting a nuclear deal.”

Old Problem, New Prose

It was the U.S. that planted the first seeds of Iran’s nuclear program, as part of the Eisenhower-era Atoms for Peace project, which supplied Iran’s friendly Shah with limited nuclear technology. Iran suspended its nuclear activities after the 1979 Islamic revolution but resumed them after the brutal Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s left Tehran feeling insecure.

Iran kept the scope and momentum of its nuclear program hidden through the 1990s, until in 2002 a dissident group stunned the world by exposing the program’s advanced state and Iran’s apparent goal of creating weapons-grade fissile material. Tehran insisted then, as it does now, that it’s enriching uranium for peaceful purposes only: Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei has issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, against nuclear weapons, and Rouhani recently told NBC News that Iran would “never” pursue the bomb. But international inspectors and every major Western government say Tehran’s nuclear program exceeds its domestic energy and research needs, and U.S. officials say they have evidence that Iran has researched how to construct a bomb. Today U.S. and Israeli officials generally estimate that Iran could build a nuclear weapon within less than a year if it chose to do so.

Obama’s efforts to slow that progress continue policies begun by George W. Bush, who enraged Tehran by declaring it a member of an “axis of evil.” Bush sought the first of many U.N. economic sanctions in 2006. Obama has won even tougher sanctions since Iran spurned his 2009 offer of direct talks–and he has repeatedly vowed that he’s willing to use military force to stop Iran from developing a bomb. (It’s not clear whether Obama’s trigger would be an Iranian refusal to accept limits on its uranium enrichment or signs of actual bombmaking activity.) The vise grip of the sanctions is choking Iran. Since 2011, oil exports have dropped from 2.4 million barrels a day to less than half that rate, costing Iran’s economy $70 billion. Inflation is officially pegged at more than 40% but is probably much higher. About a quarter of young Iranians are jobless–a dangerous condition at a time of revolutionary unrest in the region.

The sanctions had little effect on the posture of Ahmadinejad, who maintained a reliably defiant and obnoxious tone. But Rouhani has mounted a charm offensive that has juiced expectations in Washington and indeed the wider world. Officials in his government openly contrast themselves with Ahmadinejad’s hard-line coterie, speaking of cooperation and outreach. Rouhani himself has a Westernized streak, thanks partly to a graduate degree earned in Glasgow, where he strolled in a business suit without the turban he now dons. With a gentle demeanor and fluency in English, he’s adept at charming Westerners.

And he clearly knows what the West needs to hear. In a Sept. 20 Washington Post op-ed, Rouhani said he wants “constructive engagement” in a “changed” world in which “cooperation and competition often occur simultaneously.” He has tweeted Jewish New Year’s greetings to all Jews–something it’s hard to imagine the Holocaust-denying Ahmadinejad ever doing–and released a dozen political prisoners. “There’s something really interesting going on here,” says Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution and author of Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy. “We shouldn’t dismiss this as just words.”

Obama thought so too. The American President has plenty of reasons to want a deal. Foremost is his intense desire to avoid further military action in the Middle East–something clear from his tortured response to Syria’s recent use of chemical weapons–despite his repeated vows to bomb Iran if necessary. There’s also the alluring prospect of Iranian cooperation on headaches like Syria, where elements of Tehran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps and its Lebanese proxy, Hizballah, are fighting alongside dictator Bashar Assad. And then there’s the matter of Obama’s legacy. Handing off Iran as an unresolved problem to his successor would amount to failure on one of his central responsibilities. A grand bargain, particularly one enabled by his stricter sanctions policy, could be a legacy-shaping triumph. “It is one of the few tangible opportunities the Obama Administration has to leave a positive diplomatic legacy in the Middle East,” says Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

But beneath the soothing words coming from Tehran are some political realities that may not have changed much since the Ahmadinejad era. Hard-liners still hold great power in Iran, particularly in the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. And the real leader of Iran is not Rouhani but Supreme Leader Khamenei, whose worldview remains fundamentally hostile to the West. Just as conservatives warned Khatami in 2000 not to get too close to Clinton, Rouhani may have received a similar message on Sept. 24. “Shaking hands with Obama would have won Rouhani huge points with the Iranian public, but it would have caused Iran’s hard-liners to have a conniption,” says Sadjadpour. “The Islamic Republic’s identity has long been premised on resistance against American hegemony. After three decades of presiding over crowds chanting ‘Death to America,’ a fundamental strategic shift is incredibly dangerous for Khamenei.”

Nuclear Nitty-Gritty

Of course, real progress will require far more than stagecraft. The two Presidents have already exchanged secret letters expressing a desire to talk. And they have empowered their top diplomats–namely Secretary of State John Kerry and Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif–to do so. “Let’s get to those negotiations,” says Hooman Majd, an Iranian-American commentator. “Let’s get to the nitty-gritty.” The next round of formal nuclear talks between Iran and the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany will resume in Geneva in October.

But skeptics expect less nitty-gritty than the familiar broad talking points. The charm offensive from Tehran has come with no specific offer to make concessions, like a potential pause or slowdown in Iran’s enrichment of uranium, which the Obama team had been talking up in the past few weeks. Rouhani seemed to set that firmly aside in his U.N. address when he said it was “an illusion” to think that Iran could be pressured into limiting its enrichment program–a fundamental demand of the U.S. and its Western allies.

Which raises the very real possibility that the entire Manhattan charm offensive was a distraction, plain and simple. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called Rouhani–who was a key member of Ayatullah Khomeini’s original revolutionary inner circle–a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.” After Rouhani’s NBC News interview on Sept. 18, a statement from the Israeli government warned that Iran’s leader was dissimulating: “There is no need to be fooled by the words. The test is not in what Rouhani says, but in the deeds of the Iranian regime, which continues to advance its nuclear program with vigor while Rouhani is being interviewed.” Israel’s fear is that Obama will be seduced into letting Iran off too easily. “A bad deal is worse than no deal,” an Israeli official tells TIME.

There is good reason for Obama to doubt Rouhani’s intentions. From 2003 to 2005, the Iranian President was his country’s chief nuclear negotiator with European officials. (Bush wasn’t talking to Tehran then.) After he finished that job, he boasted in a 2004 speech to fellow clerics that he’d used deception to buy time for Iran’s program to advance. “While we were talking with the Europeans in Tehran, we were installing equipment in parts of the facility in Isfahan,” he said, referring to a key uranium-enrichment site. “There was plenty of work to be done to complete the site and finish the work there. In reality, by creating a tame situation, we could finish Isfahan.”

Obama officials say the West won’t be fooled again by happy talk. “The acid test remains whether the Iranian government is prepared to take actions that constrain, limit and roll back its existing nuclear program in a manner that provides confidence it is peaceful in nature,” says an Obama Administration official who works on Iran issues.

This helps explain why the failed handshake at the U.N. may prove to be a turning point. Obama may be eager for a deal with Rouhani. But the Iranian leader can’t ignore the fact that the nuclear program has strong support among both the country’s hard-liners and the general public–even those who detest the theocratic leadership. Yet if the West concludes that Rouhani and Khamenei are trying to dupe them, the consequences could be severe. “If [Obama] engages and Iran walks away, then his mandate to strike is all the bigger in the eyes of the world,” says Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

But Obama badly wants to escape the decision to attack Iran. The question is how far he’ll reach out his hand to do so.

–With reporting by Jay Newton-Small/Washington