Foreign & Public Diplomacy

U.S. President Donald Trump has two basic options regarding Iran right now. He can either push through an imperfect deal and sell it to the American people as a victory; or he can bet that Washington can sustain more economic and political pain than Tehran and continue to play a geopolitical game of chicken.

Which will it be? The stakes get higher with each passing day. This week, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a club of industrialized economies, projected that global growth could slow to 2.1 percent—a sharp drop from last year’s 3.4 percent—if a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz isn’t reached this year.

U.S. President Donald Trump has two basic options regarding Iran right now. He can either push through an imperfect deal and sell it to the American people as a victory; or he can bet that Washington can sustain more economic and political pain than Tehran and continue to play a geopolitical game of chicken.

Which will it be? The stakes get higher with each passing day. This week, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a club of industrialized economies, projected that global growth could slow to 2.1 percent—a sharp drop from last year’s 3.4 percent—if a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz isn’t reached this year.

On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with Robert Malley, a lead negotiator in the Obama administration’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and also a special envoy for Iran under President Joe Biden. Malley now runs the Middle East program at the International Crisis Group and teaches at Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs. Subscribers can watch the full discussion in the video box atop this page, or download the free FP Live podcast. What follows here is a condensed and lightly edited transcript, exclusive to FP Insiders.

Ravi Agrawal: So, every week now, there are new reports that we are close to a deal, and then nothing happens. What do you make of the ongoing talks between Washington and Tehran?

Robert Malley: Every day is Groundhog Day, but the groundhog is very sick. Every day is the same craziness. You just mentioned it: Within a 24-hour span, the president can say, “we’re on the verge of a deal,” that he “doesn’t need a deal,” he “doesn’t want to talk to the Iranians,” he’s “talking to the Iranians,” he’s “going to escalate,” he’s “going to end the war,” or he’s just going to “walk away.” So to measure where we are today, we’d have to measure the president’s mood minute by minute. That wouldn’t be very productive, so I think we should take a step back.

Big picture, both sides—you would think—have an objective interest in ending at least the Strait of Hormuz portion of this war. For the United States, it’s pretty self-evident what the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is costing economically and politically for the president and his party. Just today, oil executives are saying that if this goes on for a few more weeks, we could see a spike in the price of oil at levels that would make today look like a very easy phase of the economic hardship. So from Trump’s point of view, it would seem to make perfect sense: Let’s just open the Strait of Hormuz.

From the Iranian point of view, they could always close it in the future, but opening it now means that they could try to get some more revenue, which they have been forgoing so far. They would still have the deterrence of being able to close it, but at least they would start putting some oxygen back into their economy, particularly if it were wedded with some form of economic relief, which would be their demand. And then they could deal with the nuclear issues, and other issues, further down the road.

So we always seem to come to the edge of that deal, and then something pulls it back. I don’t want to put all of the blame on the U.S. side, because God knows the Iranians can be very hard to negotiate with, but in this case, it seems that the president is torn between this desire to end this phase, which is really costing him, but he hates appearing weak. People are whispering in his ear all the time, “A little more pressure, you’re gonna get them to buckle, you’re going to get them to surrender.” He’s always had an affinity for the language of force. So to give up now, when he thinks he may be close to a bigger achievement—he doesn’t seem to be prepared to do it, and the amount of mistrust just makes everything that much harder. So I think we are close, but “close” in this instance could be very far away.

RA: You know this so well, but negotiations, I think, always begin with maximalist goals. And I’m curious what you see as the minimal goals both sides must have in order to reach a deal.

RM: The minimalist goal is........

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