NEW YORK — Iranian President Hassan Rouhani spoke to an elite group of former US cabinet members and senior officials at an off-the-record dinner the night of Sept. 23. Among the guests were three former US national security advisers, Sandy Berger, Brent Scowcroft and Steve Hadley; former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; former US special envoy to Afghanistan James Dobbins; and scholar Vali Nasr, sources at the dinner told Al-Monitor.

If the atmosphere at a similar dinner held with the then-newly inaugurated Rouhani last year “was full of hope and excitement and the sense of history being made,” this year’s dinner was “more businesslike and normal,” one guest, speaking not for attribution, told Al-Monitor. “That is one thing. US-Iran relations, this is becoming more normalized.”

Rouhani told the audience, in answer to a question, that he would like to reach a nuclear deal by October, so that the complicated technical details could be worked out by the Nov. 24 extended deadline that Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) have set for themselves, the dinner attendee said.

There was nothing very surprising in Rouhani’s generally upbeat but vague remarks about prospects for possible US-Iranian bilateral discussions and possible Iranian cooperation on issues of mutual concern, such as combating jihadi militants with the Islamic State group, another attendee said.