In mid-November, Iran dispatched a top official to Beirut to urge Hezbollah to accept a cease-fire with Israel. Around the same time, Iran’s U.N. ambassador met with Elon Musk, an overture to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inner circle. And on Friday, it will hold talks in Geneva with European countries on a range of issues, including its nuclear program.
All this recent diplomacy marks a sharp change in tone from late October, when Iran was preparing to launch a large retaliatory attack on Israel, with a deputy commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps warning, “We have never left an aggression unanswered in 40 years.”
Iran’s swing from tough talk to a more conciliatory tone in just a few weeks’ time has its roots in developments at home and abroad.
Five Iranian officials, one of them a Revolutionary Guards member, and two former officials said the decision to recalibrate was prompted by Mr. Trump winning the Nov. 5 election, with concerns about an unpredictable leader who, in his first term, pursued a policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran.
But it was also driven by Israel’s decimation in Lebanon of Hezbollah — the closest and most important of Iran’s militant allies — and by economic crises at home, where the currency has dropped steadily against the dollar and an energy shortage looms as winter approaches.
Taken together, these challenges forced Iran to recalibrate its approach, to one of defusing tensions, the current Iranian officials familiar with the planning said. They asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, which could put them in danger.
They said Iran suspended plans to strike Israel following Mr. Trump’s election because it did not want to exacerbate tensions with the incoming administration, which was already lining up cabinet nominees who were hostile to Iran and staunch supporters of Israel. Mr. Trump’s stated plans to end the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, however, appealed to Iran, the officials said.
Before the U.S. election was even held, Iran sent word to the Biden administration that, contrary to claims by some American intelligence officials, it was not plotting to assassinate Mr. Trump.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Wednesday that Iran welcomed the truce between Hezbollah and Israel, adding that “Tehran maintains its right to respond to Israel’s airstrikes on Iran last month, but it will take into consideration regional developments such as the cease-fire in Lebanon.”
In the view of Sanam Vakil, the Middle East director for Chatham House, a British policy research group, it seems clear that Iran is responding to the coming changes in Washington, as well as the changed domestic and regional geopolitical landscape it now faces.
“It all came together, and the shift in tone is about protecting Iran’s interests.” Ms. Vakil said.
Iran’s opaque regime, and a governance rife with factional rivalries, can sometimes lead to mixed messages to external audiences and sharp internal differences, though the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, always has the final word.
The hard-line president Ebrahim Raisi died this year and a moderate, Masoud Pezeshkian, was elected in July to replace him, with a mandate to bring some economic and social reform and engage with the West. Mr. Pezeshkian has a lot of power over domestic policy and some influence in foreign affairs.
Just days after the U.S. election, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Amir Saeid Iravani, met with Mr. Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who has Mr. Trump’s ear, at the ambassador’s residence in New York to discuss reducing tensions with the incoming Trump administration. Two Iranian officials described the meeting as promising.
In Iran, the reformist and centrist factions rejoiced at the news.
But conservatives lashed out, calling the ambassador a traitor, signaling the kind of internal struggle the government faces over engagement with anyone in the orbit of Mr. Trump, who exited the nuclear deal with Iran in 2018, imposed tough sanctions on the country and ordered the killing of a top general, Qassim Suleimani, in 2020.
Facing backlash over the meeting with Mr. Musk, Iran’s foreign ministry issued a denial after three days that it had ever taken place. And last week, after a U.N. agency censured Iran for preventing international monitoring of its nuclear program, Tehran reacted defiantly, saying it was accelerating the program, while also insisting that it “stands ready for productive engagement.”
Several senior Iranian officials have publicly said Iran was open to negotiations with the Trump administration to resolve nuclear and regional issues. This itself is a shift from Iran’s position during the first Trump administration that it would not negotiate with Washington and that its regional policies and weapons development were strictly its own business.
“Iran is now applying restraint to give Trump a chance to see whether he can end the Gaza war and contain Netanyahu,” said Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian diplomat and nuclear negotiator who is now a Middle East and nuclear researcher at Princeton University, referring to Israel’s prime minister. “If this happens, it will open the path for more comprehensive negotiations between Tehran and Washington.”
For more than 13 months after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel, Iran and allied forces in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq insisted that they would not cease attacks on Israel as long as Israel was at war in Gaza.
But Hezbollah’s devastating losses concerned Iran, which exerts considerable influence over the Lebanese group. Iranian media also reported resentment rising among the more than one million displaced Shia Lebanese, who looked to Iran as their protector and patron.
In an unusually brazen assessment, Mehdi Afraz, the conservative director of a research center at Baqir al-Olum University, an Islamic institution, said Iran underestimated Israel’s military power and that war with Israel was not “a game on PlayStation.”
“Our friends from Syria called and said the Lebanese Shia refugees who support Hezbollah are cursing us up and down, first Iran, then others,” he said during a panel discussion at the university. “We are treating war as a joke.”
Mr. Khamenei, who has demonstrated a degree of pragmatism when survival of the Iranian regime seemed at risk, sent a senior adviser, Ali Larijani, a veteran centrist politician, to Beirut in mid-November. Mr. Larijani delivered a message from the ayatollah to Hezbollah leaders, according to two Iranian officials: It was time to accept the cease-fire and end the war, and Iran would help Hezbollah rebuild and rearm.
Less than 48 hours later, Lebanon announced a breakthrough in negotiations: that Hezbollah had agreed to keep its forces away from the Israeli border, a condition it had previously rejected as unacceptable.
At the same time, Iranian officials faced mounting domestic economic and energy crises. The government announced two-hour daily power cuts, inciting public anger and accusations from critics that its regional conflicts were too costly for average Iranians.
Mr. Pezeshkian, the president, who has promised to engage with the world to lift sanctions and improve the economy, said in a meeting with officials in the energy sector last week that he needed to “honestly tell the public about the energy situation.” Iran’s energy infrastructure, he said, cannot meet its energy needs.
Tehran has said it will send an experienced diplomat and former nuclear negotiator, Majid Takht-Ravanchi, to meet on Friday with officials of Britain, France and Germany, the countries that, along with the United States, sponsored the censure over Iran’s nuclear program.
“Without doubt in Iran, among senior officials and ordinary people, there is a real desire to end the tensions with the West and to get along,” Naser Imani, an analyst close to the government, said in a telephone interview from Tehran. “Cooperation with the West is not viewed as defeat, it is seen as transactional diplomacy and can be done from a position of strength.”
The post With Trump Returning and Hezbollah Weakened, Iran Strikes a Conciliatory Tone appeared first on New York Times.
