The fallout from the Iran deal continues in Iran, and, as reported by AL Monitor, even there the Trumpster is well-known. Question is, are the Iranians performing an elaborate dance – or do their hardliners really agree with Donald and, for that matter, Senator Cruz?
“The wisest plan of crazy [Donald] Trump is tearing up the nuclear deal,” Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the hard-line Kayhan newspaper, told Fars News Agency when asked about the Republican front-runner’s opposition to the nuclear deal. Shariatmadari called the nuclear deal a “golden document” for the United States but insisted that for Iran it has caused nothing but “damages, humiliation and deception.” Instead of making proclamations, Shariatmadari invited the administration to show one achievement of the nuclear deal.
While the director general for political affairs of the Foreign Ministry, Hamid Baeidinejad, responded that Shariatmadari’s comments were surprising, it was Reformist Arman Daily that compared Shariatmadari to Trump, who is sometimes simply referred to as “crazy Trump” in Iranian media. In the front-page story titled “What Shariatmadari and Trump have in common,” Arman Daily wrote that Trump’s opposition to the nuclear deal has made “domestic critics happy,” and that Shariatmadari “once again become one voice with American extremists.”
In another AL Monitor article, Rohollah Faghihi explains how each takes advantage of the other:
The manner in which Shariatmadari and Trump are publicly sharing an objective or view, particularly as representatives of fiercely opposed political factions, may astound many in Iran and the United States. Yet the reality is that these two factions in effect play complementary roles for each other, as they give one another excuses to advance their respective domestic agendas.
For instance, on May 7, 2015, amid the intense negotiations leading up to the JCPOA, the US Senate approved a bill that established congressional review of any nuclear deal as part of the six world powers’ negotiations with Iran. Five days later, on May 12, 2015, hard-liners in Iran seized the opportunity to obstruct the negotiations on their end — negotiations that they altogether considered as a trump card for President Hassan Rouhani in the then-upcoming Feb. 26 parliamentary and Assembly of Experts elections. Thus, they introduced a bill to stop the nuclear negotiations. However, parliament Speaker Ali Larijani stepped in to stop the measure.
In an interview with Al-Monitor, Mahdi Motaharnia, a political science professor at Islamic Azad University, said, “Radicalism in any country has one single identity. Hard-liners all over the world seek a tenacious situation in order to take advantage of it to their own benefit. This is why you see Donald Trump as a hard-liner in the US, and Hossein Shariatmadari as one of the mouthpieces of hard-liners in Iran’s conservative camp who have convergence against the JCPOA.”
Do Cruz and Trump revel in the approving rhetoric of the Iranian hardliners? It seems unlikely. Trump may not know there is such a thing, seeing them as a single entity; Cruz just doesn’t care. But for those who are professionally charged with resolving difficult diplomatic problems, this is no doubt a classic situation.
