Iran’s latest proposal to the United States contains some non-starter demands that President Donald Trump is unlikely to accept, seemingly mirroring the maximalist approach Washington has taken throughout the negotiation process, an Iran expert said.
“Some of these demands are non-starters,” Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, DC, told CNN, “mirroring” what Trump has been doing throughout the war and negotiations.
Trump has repeatedly made demands that Iran has warned are beyond its “red lines”. He has also sought to bring Iran to a state of complete capitulation, which the Islamic Republic has vowed never to do.
Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency reported that Tehran has submitted a 14-point response to a US proposal. Trump said he will review the new plan from Iran, but added that he “can’t imagine that it would be acceptable.”
Iran’s proposal was submitted through a Pakistani intermediary and calls for “ending the war on all fronts, including Lebanon,” Tasnim reported, among other demands such as the release of frozen Iranian assets, the removal of sanctions and the payment of war reparations.
“The fact that there are still so many far reaching demands is a reflection of two things,” Parsi said. “One, the Iranians are mirror imaging what Trump is doing, because Trump continues to put forward maximalist demands. And secondly, within talks, the written negotiations have not made much progress.”
Parsi nonetheless noted that the demands the Iranians have put forward are not “non-negotiable,” nor are they demands the Iranians themselves believe are going to be fulfilled. The analyst added that we are yet to see what Tehran is offering in return to these demands, cautioning that so far the full picture is unclear.
“It is only after you see a totality of that picture that you can make a judgment afterwards whether this proposal has any legs or not.”
