Trump to try out diplomacy with Iran before imposing pressures over nuclear program, says Financial Times

A report said U.S. President Donald Trump seeks to try out diplomacy with Iran first before potentially resorting to pressure on the country over its nuclear program.

News ID: 5848

Date: 23 January 2025 - 21:50

TABNAK, Jan 23: In a report, The Financial Times cited “people familiar with the matter” as saying that Trump had put his Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff in charge of the Iran portfolio, which it said suggested the U.S. president was “willing to test diplomacy before ramping up pressure on Tehran.”

It said that Witkoff’s new role would be “part of a broader Trump remit to ‘stop the wars’ in the region.”

If the reporting is accurate, Trump’s decision to test diplomacy with Iran will be a marked shift from his approach to Iran during his term, which was defined by the pursuit of what he called a campaign of “maximum pressure” on the country.

He withdrew the United States from a multilateral deal with Iran in 2018 that had been meant to resolve a dispute over the Iranian nuclear program before launching the “maximum-pressure” campaign of stringent sanctions on Iran.

The Islamic Republic had always maintained that its nuclear program was meant for civilian purposes and had under the deal addressed all international concerns regarding its that program. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which was in charge of monitoring Iran’s nuclear commitments, was in report after report confirming Iran’s full adherence to the agreement and the peaceful nature of its nuclear activities.

Nevertheless, Trump, who had surrounded himself with so-called Iran hawks, unilaterally withdrew from the deal after failing to force all other parties to renegotiate an agreement that had taken years to hammer out and that was working.

A major concern among Trump’s supporters as he campaigned for a second term was avoiding foreign conflicts.

‘A diplomatic accommodation’

Some officials associated with Trump have told foreign diplomats that Witkoff would “lead efforts to see whether a diplomatic accommodation is possible.”

Witkoff, who is said to have had a major role in securing a ceasefire deal between Israel and the Palestinian resistance group of Hamas, will retain his primary responsibility as Trump’s Middle East envoy, the report said.

Iran, which toiled to keep its side of the deal despite the United States’ withdrawal and sanctions, has said it is open to negotiations with the Trump administration provided that the other side does not renege on its obligations one more time.

“We have always been ready for negotiations. What we are concerned about and what has been borne out and resulted in the negotiations failing [in the past] is that, forever, we have been negotiating and we have been upholding our side [of the deal] and the other side has been seeking to exert pressure,” President Masoud Pezeshkian told NBC on January 15 in what was meant as a message to the then-incoming Trump administration.

President Pezeshkian said Iran would be fine with negotiations if Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei and the rest of the government trusted that the other side would comply with its own obligations.

The Financial Time report said that there were still anti-Iran figures around Trump, but the U.S. president had, through a number of appointments, “established a camp in the administration that would consider negotiating with Iran and is sceptical of a strike on its nuclear programme.”

It said that Witkoff’s role as Trump’s point man on Iran had already “alarmed” some anti-Iran figures in the U.S.

The U.S. president has not offered White House positions to politicians such as Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Brian Hook, and Michael Flynn, who held extremely hawkish views on Iran and who held top national security and foreign policy positions in his first term.

Witkoff, like Trump, is a real estate investor.