September 06, 2019
Four weeks after stirring up a hornet’s nest by claiming the United States said it would sanction him if he refused to visit the White House, Foreign Minister Mohammad-Javad Zarif has retracted that story.
On August 2, New Yorker magazine reported that sources told it Republican Sen. Rand Paul had met Zarif and extended an invitation to visit the White House and meet with President Trump.
In an August 5 news conference, Zarif said Paul told him that he would be sanctioned if he did not go to the White House. And Zarif was sanctioned about that time.
But in a story published September 1 in the daily Iran, Zarif backtracked. He said, “When I went to New York, US officials came to me and said, ‘Mr. Trump has invited you to the White House to talk with him.’ But at the same time, they threatened that my name was going to be added to the list of sanctioned individuals—although they did not link the two matters.”
The reported threat to punish Zarif if he did not come to the White House stirred up a fury in the United States because it was both undiplomatic and uncouth.
In Iran, the bigger issue was the proposed visit to the White House, since the regime opposes any such contact.
In his interview with Iran daily, Zarif telegraphed his disgust with Iranians who oppose any contact with the Americans. These hardliners insist that Iran must follow a policy of “resistance” rather than “negotiations.”
Zarif said the two go together, and one must not treat them as either/or choices. He accused his opponents of being mere “critics in air conditioned rooms.” He said that the Iranian tanker held in Gibraltar was successfully freed because of a mixture of diplomacy and resistance.