Former US diplomat fosters US-Iran ties behind the scenes
William Luers has spent years pursuing a quiet “track 2” dialogue bringing American and Iranian officials and scholars together, some of whom have close ties to officials in the Rouhani administration.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani held an off-the-record dinner last month in New York with an elite group of former US officials. Among the guests were three former US national security advisers and a former secretary of state.
Rouhani spoke generally about the potential for further US-Iran cooperation if a nuclear deal is reached, but did not delve deeply into the details of the nuclear negotiations underway between Iran and six world powers as they seek to conclude a deal by Nov. 24.
In comparison to a similar gathering last year with the then newly inaugurated Rouhani, which was “full of hope and excitement and a sense of history being made,” a US expert who attended the Sept. 23 dinner told Al-Monitor that what struck him most this time was that US-Iran relations have “become more normalized.”
If the positive trajectory of the relationship that followed Rouhani’s replacement last year of the Holocaust-denying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad continues, some of the credit will go to a soft-spoken former US ambassador to Czechoslovakia and Venezuela, William Luers.
