From al-Jazeera
Why Ayatollah Khamenei will not negotiate with Trump
In a June 13
Washington Post article, former US ambassador to the UN Zalmay Khalilzad argued that the Trump administration's approach towards Iran - withdrawing from the
nuclear deal and imposing crippling sanctions - has a reasonable chance of bringing its leadership to the negotiating table.
The logic behind this idea is that imposing "the highest level" of economic sanctions will not only prevent Iran from supporting its proxies and
destabilising the Middle East, but will also lead to economic hardship and possibly mass discontent, which could shake the regime's stability.
This approach was tested under the Obama administration and eventually resulted in
Iran sitting down for talks in 2013 and signing a nuclear deal in 2015 under President
Hasan Rouhani.
But the idea that this could happen again in the aftermath of US President
Donald Trump withdrawing from the nuclear deal is not just optimistic - it is flawed. It is not in the interest of the hardliner leadership in Iran to sit down for direct talks with the Trump administration.
COMMENT:-
You have to interpose a bunch of "he thinks" and "he believes" at the appropriate points, but once done the article does give a reasonable description of the mind-set of the Iranian leadership.
It doesn't matter if that mind-set is founded in reality or not, because the important thing is that the mind-set is what is BELIEVED.