The one that gets away: Joe Biden’s jaded romance with Iran – By Nahal Toosi (Politico) / May 9 2021
For four decades, Biden has remained hopeful that the U.S. and Iran could find some common ground. Now might really be the last chance.
Nearly two decades ago, as Americans stunned by the 9/11 attacks were still sifting through rubble on the East Coast and in Afghanistan, then-Sen. Joe Biden seized the moment to call for a revival of U.S. ties with Iran.
In a speech in Washington to the American Iranian Council, Biden laid out some modest steps the U.S. should take to court its longtime enemy, including allowing more people-to-people interactions. Biden didn’t shirk from addressing issues of concern to Washington, like Tehran’s nuclear program, and he acknowledged that anti-U.S. hardliners hold the key levers of power in Iran. But he also spoke of how ordinary Iranians had held candlelight vigils for the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks, and how the countries had cooperated to some degree in Afghanistan. Biden even invited Iranian lawmakers to meet with him, wherever and whenever they would like.
“I believe that an improved relationship with Iran is in the naked self-interest of the United States and, I would presume to suggest, Iran’s interest as well,” the Delaware Democrat, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time, said in the March 2002 speech.
Despite reverberating in Iran, a negative reaction from that country’s supreme leader killed hopes that Biden’s remarks would yield a diplomatic breakthrough. Still, the speech, and the mere fact that Biden gave it, was emblematic of his approach to the Islamic Republic throughout his decades in public life.
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