The glaring differences between the United States and Iran notwithstanding, the talks beginning in Islamabad tomorrow have a fairly good chance of being a success. There is too much at stake, and there are unifying factors where commonality of business and economic interests of the two leaderships outweigh geopolitical considerations. 

President Donald Trump has a counterpart in Majlis speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf heading the Iranian delegation, who is also self-made billionaire-politician like Trump and believes that all good politics is principally about creating wealth — for oneself as well as for the country. 

The routes they took in their meteoric ascendancy in politics were different but Ghalibaf is also not a cleric or a doctrinaire ideologue  who he rose through hawza (religious) seminaries or theological networks. Ghalibaf’s strategic asset lies in his revolutionary credentials — sacrifice, command experience, and institutional loyalty — by virtue of his long experience in the war with Iraq while serving in the Revolutionary Guards, then in the broader state machinery. 

Alex Vatanka, author of books on Iran and a Senior Fellow at the Washington-based think tank Middle East Institute (funded by the petrodollar Gulf states), recently wrote, “For all his (Ghalibaf’s) hardline rhetoric, for all his long record in the security state, he is one of the few senior figures left in Tehran who can plausibly be described as both a regime insider and a functioning political operator. He belongs to the Islamic Republic’s military elite, but he has also spent years trying to translate that pedigree into broader governing authority. That combination is what makes........

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