TEHRAN (Agencies): Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said Tuesday there was “no barrier” to engaging with the “enemy,” signaling a potential openness to renewed negotiations with the United States.
Khamenei’s comments, made during a meeting with President Masoud Pezeshkian and his cabinet, mirror those around the time of Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, which saw Tehran’s nuclear program curtailed in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.
“We do not have to pin our hope to the enemy. For our plans, we should not wait for approval by the enemies,” Khamenei said in a video broadcast by state television. “It is not contradictory to engage the same enemy in some places, there’s no barrier.”
Khamenei, who has final say on all state matters, also warned Pezeshkian’s cabinet, “Do not trust the enemy.”
Khamenei, 85, has occasionally urged talks or dismissed them with Washington after then President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the nuclear deal in 2018.
There have been indirect talks between Iran and the US in recent years mediated by Oman and Qatar, two of the United States’ Middle East interlocutors when it comes to Iran. Khamenei’s remarks came a day after Qatar’s prime minister visited the country.
Since the deal’s collapse, Iran has abandoned all limits that the deal put on its program, and enriches uranium to up to 60 percent purity – near weapons-grade levels of 90 percent.
Surveillance cameras installed by the IAEA have been disrupted, while Iran has barred some of the Vienna-based agency’s most experienced inspectors. Iranian officials also have increasingly threatened that they could pursue atomic weapons.
Meanwhile, tensions between Iran and Israel have hit a new high during the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip. Tehran launched an unprecedented drone-and-missile attack on Israel in April after years of a shadow war between the two countries reached a climax with Israel’s apparent attack on an Iranian consular building in Syria that killed two senior Iranian military commanders and others.
The assassination in Tehran of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh also prompted Iran to threaten to retaliate against Israel.
Pezeshkian, a former lawmaker who won the presidency after a May helicopter crash killed President Ebrahim Raisi, campaigned in part on a promise to reengage the West with negotiations. Khamenei’s remarks as Iran’s paramount leader could provide him with the political cover to do so. Pezeshkian’s new foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, was deeply involved in negotiations on the 2015 deal.
In Iran, the supreme leader, not the president, holds ultimate authority over all state matters, including foreign policy and the nuclear program.
