US shrugs off Zarif resignation reversal
Before Iran’s foreign minister had returned to the job, the Donald Trump administration dismissed Mohammad Javad Zarif’s resignation as essentially irrelevant, as the prospect of getting to the negotiating table looks increasingly remote.
WASHINGTON — Even as President Donald Trump held his second meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Hanoi to try to advance a North Korea nuclear deal, the Trump administration mocked as basically irrelevant Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s surprise resignation and return to the job this week, in a sign of how remote the prospects seem for the United States ever getting to the negotiating table with Iran.
Some administration officials have recently privately expressed misgivings about how far the policy has strayed from Trump’s stated goal last year — to try to negotiate a broader deal with Iran that would address other concerns not solved in the 2015 Iran nuclear deal that Trump withdrew from last year — to one that increasingly seems regime change in all but name.
“I … do think that Trump’s basic realist ‘let’s make a broader deal’ approach has been hijacked by the regime change people,” one US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said.
“I do think way, way too much of our stuff is … basically trolling the Iranians, which makes them less likely to negotiate,” the official said. “And we raise the prestige costs for them of the other side sitting down with us.”
