Tehran, IRNA – American television network NBC will broadcast an important message from President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran on January 15, an aide to the president has announced.
Mohammad-Mehdi Tabatabai, deputy director of communication and information at the Presidential Office, wrote on his X account on Tuesday that the message would be relayed via a televised interview conducted with the president by American news anchor Lester Holt, which is scheduled to be aired tomorrow.
In wording carefully chosen to give just a hint of the intended message, Tabatabi added that the Islamic Republic of Iran “seeks peace and de-escalation in the region and the world, condemns warmongering, encroachments, and genocide by the Zionist regime and is ready for equal and honorable negotiation.”
That last part — that Iran is ready for negotiations on an equal footing — could be a significant message to the incoming Donald Trump administration.
Trump in 2018 withdrew the United States from a multilateral deal with Iran that had been meant to resolve a dispute over the Iranian nuclear program and that had raised hopes of ushering in a new era of international engagement.
Trump’s withdrawal and his subsequent move to escalate with Iran under what he called a campaign of “maximum pressure” put those hopes on ice, even as it failed to achieve Trump’s own goal, which was to force Tehran to renegotiate the agreement.
The deal’s chief Iranian negotiator, Javad Zarif, is now President Pezeshkian’s vice president for strategic affairs, even though the former foreign minister is said not to be involved in strategic decision making until a dispute with the Iranian Parliament over his children’s citizenship is resolved.
Iran refused to reopen negotiations to change an agreement that had taken two years to hammer out and that the US government had signed. Trump’s vengeful escalation later made it all the more difficult for the possibility of any negotiations. And Iran held the US government accountable for casually walking away from a deal it had signed and been supposed to uphold in good faith.
While President Pezeshkian’s precise message is yet unclear, and as Tabatabai’s hint is rather encrypted, a potential announcement that Iran is ready to negotiate with a Trump administration at all would be a significant development in itself.
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