“I think today we can utterly negotiate on an equal footing and mutual respect with the US,” Rafsanjani said in an interview with a reformist website, irdiplomacy.ir.
Tehran and Washington have had no diplomatic relations in more than three decades and no formal negotiations since the 1981 agreement freeing the American hostages.
Rafsanjani said Ahmadi-nejad had already “broken the taboo of negotiations with the US” by “sending letters to American officials that remain unanswered,” referring to messages to Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush.
Surprisingly, Rafsanjani said he had tried during his time in office to initiate a dialogue with Washington, but that effort had been vetoed by Khamenehi. Rafsanjani was president from 1989 to 1997, during the US presidencies of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
“In my time, the Americans showed signs of wanting to soften their stance, but we responded coldly because we followed the policy of the leader [Khamenehi], who did not favor” a normalization with the US.
In his message for the Iranian New Year in late March, Khamenehi said: “The US president has sent a message that he supports [the Iranian people],… but he is lying.”
Rafsanjani also took a swipe at Ahmadi-nejad’s “reckless” policies, saying they had led to “bad relations” between Iran and many foreign countries.
Officials “say they want to have relations with all the world, but in practice it’s different. It is not without reason that our relations with neighboring countries are so bad,” he said. “They have a reckless approach on the economy, culture, social and foreign policies.”
The interview was conducted by Sadeq Kharrazi, a former diplomat, son of former Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi, and a person well-known in Iran for pushing for relations with the United States.
Rafsanjani painted the Americans as very open to his approach for talks before Khamenehi axed the effort. “They [the Americans] moved forward as much as I showed openness,” he said. “Maybe if we had treated the Americans in the same way that we treated the Europeans, we would have faced fewer problems.”
Rafsanjani’s comments were especially interesting because many Europeans have blamed the United States for failing to respond positively to Iranian overtures. Here Rafsanjani is saying Washington did respond positively and the failure of the initiative was entirely the fault of Khamenehi.
Rafsanjani also disparaged the frequent effort by Iranian policy makers to try to divide the Europeans from the US. “Europeans have always been joined to the United States,” he said. “Some gentlemen [Iranian officials] thought that Europe could be separated from the United States. But that is not an easy task. They [America and Europe] have common interests. They [Europeans] are ready to work with Iran to some degree. But, if their interests with the United States would be harmed, they will not accept to take a different road from the Americans.”