The U.S. and Iran can’t even agree on whether they’re talking : NPR

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Here’s one measure of just how far apart Iran and the U.S. are on negotiations to end their war. They don’t even agree on whether talks are happening. President Trump says they are. Iran says they aren’t. Well, all this talk of talks came after Trump threatened to strike Iranian power plants unless Iran ends its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and after he extended his deadline on that threat. I talked this through today on our national security podcast Sources & Methods with NPR’s Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman and our international correspondent Aya Batrawy in Dubai.

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KELLY: Aya, what do we know about these talks, starting with who’s talking?

AYA BATRAWY: So we did get confirmation now that Egypt and Pakistan have both said they’re involved in passing messages now, and that’s because the traditional mediators, which have been Oman and Qatar in the past, they came under attack after this war began – some retaliation attacks from Iran – and so they’re not involved in the talks at the moment, although Oman says they are playing a role at this moment. But the talks seem to be – or not talks. Let’s say the back-channel efforts to get talks going are being conducted by Egypt and Pakistan.

KELLY: OK.

BATRAWY: And Egypt’s foreign minister actually met with some reporters in Cairo on Wednesday, and he told our producer and the other journalists there that actually it was President Trump who asked Egypt to reach out and get this going. So it was actually – doesn’t seem to be that Iran was the one that asked for this, but rather it was the White House – President Trump himself – who asked for this.

KELLY: All right, so that is the who. Let’s get to the what – what we know and what we don’t about what the substances of what these talks to start talks may be. We know President Trump came up with a 15-point plan to end the war. Tom, we haven’t seen this plan, right? Do we – what do we know about what’s in it?

TOM BOWMAN: One of the things is give up your enriched uranium – it’s now at 60%. Get rid of your enrichment program. Also, limit the amount of missiles you can build. And also, stop supporting your proxies in the region, like Hezbollah and Hamas. But these have been on the table for a long, long time. It’s nothing new here.

KELLY: Yeah. Our colleague in Tel Aviv, Daniel Estrin, has been reporting that his sources are saying the proposal out of the White House to end this war is pretty darn close to what was on the table before the war when there were diplomatic…

BOWMAN: That’s right.

KELLY: …Talks happening. OK, we also know that Iran has said, yeah, thanks but no thanks. Right, Aya?What are they countering with?

BATRAWY: Yeah. I mean, first of all, they’re not even saying that there are talks. They’ve just countered with, I guess, a response. And what they’re saying is that, first of all, that Iran will end this war when it decides to do so, on its own conditions. And it says those conditions include attacks on Iran ending, guarantees that the war would stay ending – it wouldn’t come back. They also want sanctions relief. They want reparations for what’s happened. And, you know, they’ve made clear even before this war began that missile production to them was a matter of national defense and sovereignty, so that seems to still be off the table.

KELLY: That point that Iran says they’ll end the war when they’re ready to end the war, it’ll be on their terms and when they decide it’s time – you’re reminding me of a sign that I saw when I was reporting from Iran the funeral for General Qassem Soleimani, who the U.S. had just assassinated. And Iranians were angry and out in the streets, and I remember a guy holding up a sign that I took a picture of, and it read, hey, U.S., you started. We will end it. So that sign is – that pretty much sounds like the official response from Tehran to President Trump’s plan to end the war. It sounds like Iran thinks they’re winning. Is that right, Aya?

BATRAWY: From where I’m sitting, Iran isn’t losing. Yes, their population is being hit hard. Yes, they’ve lost a lot of civilians and there’s a lot of people suffering in Iran because of this war. But their propaganda machine out there on the internet now is proud. It’s projecting this strength that they’re able to take on this – the global superpower in this way. Again, they’ve hit U.S. bases. They continue to get through those interceptions in Israel, attacking residences but also military and security sites.

They’re also able to send those oil prices really high. Because the whole idea was that they can’t hit America back on American soil, but what they could do was they could inflict so much pain on America’s allies in the Gulf and on energy markets that this war becomes unsustainable, and that seems to be where it’s headed.

BOWMAN: And it’s important to note that the Iranian regime is still in power, and they could win just by surviving.

KELLY: Yeah. So let’s land here. We are closing in on a month, nearing 30 days of the war. Do either of you see an off-ramp?

BOWMAN: I don’t see it in the near future, in the coming weeks. The U.S. will still press Iran to come to the negotiating table. They’ll continue to bomb. Israel will continue to bomb. And also, the Iranians will continue to make attacks, particularly in the Gulf countries as well. And it’s important to note, remember, the long-range missile they shot to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Now, it was knocked out by air defenses, but that tells you something. The range of that was 2,500 miles. And the concern is that they’re basically holding on, they’re rationing some of their more, you know, long-range missiles. That has to be a real concern, particularly to the U.S. military.

KELLY: Aya?

BATRAWY: Yeah. Off the back of that, I mean, we have seen in some days, in recent days, maybe less attacks on Gulf countries than in previous days. The volume is less, but the precision seems to be more accurate. So that’s just, you know, off the back of what Tom said. But the other thing I want to mention is, you know, when we talk about off-ramps, let’s just go back to Day 1, the first hours of this war. The opening salvo of this war was killing and decapitating the regime, and that meant killing Khamenei, the supreme leader. After that, it was almost as if it was designed so that there can’t be an off-ramp, you know? And now we have his son as the supreme leader after he’s lost his wife, his child and both his parents in that attack.

So when we talk about an off-ramp, you know, we have to think about also who we’re dealing with – a new supreme leader who we don’t – we haven’t heard from yet, we haven’t seen, but we do know what happened to his family and his father. And so what kind of off-ramp can we possibly imagine from this?

KELLY: That was NPR’s Aya Batrawy and Tom Bowman. They joined me for Sources & Methods, NPR’s national security podcast. You can listen to the entire episode wherever you find your podcasts.

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