Uh oh, Macron’s at it again

I thought we were done with this nonsense.

At the conclusion of the G7 conference on Monday in Biarritz, France, French President Emmanuel Macron held a joint press conference with best bro U.S. President Donald Trump. In his prepared remarks, the French president hinted at a possible meeting between Trump and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani sometime in the coming weeks. This announcement came after a whirlwind of a week in which Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif made a surprise appearance on the sidelines of the conference at Macron’s invitation.

Despite the drama surrounding the question of whether or not Trump knew about Macron’s invitation ahead of time (Trump claims he did, but I’m team skeptical) nothing substantive came as a result of Zarif’s brief appearance in Biarritz. He did not meet with any American officials, nor did he stick around long enough to do more than shake a few hands and take a few pictures before jetting off to China.

That didn’t stop Macron from hyping the possibility that his diplomatic maneuvering signified the first step on a path toward direct talks between the Trump administration and Iran. Macron, apparently after a prior conversation with Rouhani, said he believed that if Rouhani and Trump were to meet, “my conviction was that an agreement can be met.” Trump quickly latched on to the French President’s optimism. “If the circumstances were correct or right, I would certainly agree to that,” Trump responded. (Trump followed up that line by threatening Iran with “really violent force,” but for the sake of argument, let’s not dwell on that detail.)

If this Macron-Trump Iran discussion feels vaguely familiar, it should. We’ve been here before. Back in April 2018, Macron used a state visit to the United States to try to persuade Trump not to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA). During that visit, Macron tried to sell Trump on a vision of an enhanced agreement that would address some of what Trump had identified as the original deal’s “weaknesses” (these weren’t really weaknesses as much as they were items that went beyond the scope of the original framework, but that’s another discussion). It appeared as if Macron thought that if he could convince Trump to take ownership of the deal by allowing him to tack his name onto more robust enforcement mechanisms and a broader scope, this might be sufficient to maintain American participation and save the deal. Of course, that didn’t happen. Less than two weeks later, Trump torpedoed the whole thing when he formally announced that the U.S. would be withdrawing from the deal after all.

We watched a similar sequence of events play out again this week with the same predictable result. As before, Trump’s spur-of-the-moment statement sent the media into a frenzy. Headlines and push notifications gushed about a possible Truhani Summit. Reporters cited a semi-cryptic speech delivered by Rouhani the same day as firm evidence of his openness to talks. Here’s how the Washington Post framed his comments in an article entitled “Trump and Rouhani say they are willing to meet“:

Rouhani, in a televised speech in Iran, said he was open to talks. “If I knew that going to a meeting and visiting a person would help my country’s development and resolve the problems of the people, I would not miss it,” he said, in an apparent reference to Trump.

“We have to negotiate, we have to find a solution, and we have to solve the problem,” Rouhani said.

A day later, Rouhani issued a more definitive statement on potential U.S.-Iran negotiations, reiterating for what seems like the hundredth time Tehran’s stated position that no talks can take place until the United States lifts the economic sanctions it reimposed on Iran after Trump withdrew from the deal.

Naturally, the media flooded the zone with the latest update, with many of them framing the story as Rouhani backtracking from his initial commitment. NPR headlined their article “Rouhani Backs Off Meeting With Trump, Saying U.S. Must First Left Sanctions.” While it’s possible that Rouhani, facing blowback from hardliners and conservatives in Iran, had second thoughts, I think it’s more likely that Rouhani never intended to meet with Trump in the first place.

I’m speculating a bit here, but I don’t think that anyone at the Post, NPR, or any other major outlet that took the Macron-Trump press conference at face value bothered to check the Iranian President’s website for a more detailed report of what Rouhani said on Monday. The broader context of Rouhani’s speech reveals that he was talking more generically about the value of negotiations in the past tense, seemingly in an attempt to defend his decision to engage diplomatically with the P5+1 ahead of the original JCPOA: 

Power and diplomacy must work together; none can achieve results,” he added, saying, “After negotiations with the 5+1, we pushed 30-year resolutions aside, an immense amount of assets was unfrozen and oil exports returned to its previous state”.

“Some keep asking that what was the result of negotiation with major powers? After the negotiations, we were exporting over 2.8 million barrels of oil, and billions of dollars of our assets came back toe [sic] the country,” said Rouhani.

The fundamental flaw of Macron’s stunted attempts at Iran-U.S. diplomacy, besides the fact that they rely primarily on bravado rather than mutual understanding, is that he effectively ignores any considerations of Iranian interests when floating his plans publicly. In 2018, this meant offering the Trump a vision of an expanded nuclear deal that included issues such as Iran’s missile development program, which Iranian officials have repeatedly declared off-limits for negotiations. In 2019, it means heavy-handedly suggesting that he’s obtained Rouhani’s commitment to effectively break with a consistently stated Iranian bargaining position, then turning around and offering it up to Trump as an easy diplomatic win.

We don’t have any way of knowing what Macron actually said to Rouhani, nor is it possible to see inside Macron’s thought process. What we do know is that in both of his efforts to jumpstart Iran-U.S. diplomacy, the French President’s plan was dead on arrival. Until Macron can prove he fully comprehends the Iranian position, I suggest everyone — and most especially the international media — should disregard his half-baked gambits.