Will the US and Iran make a deal (again)?
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What challenges did Trump face in negotiating with Iran?
ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Hello, I'm Annabelle Crabb. Now, I wouldn't say I'm a hoarder exactly, but I do hang on to things. It's not just you and me. Australia's oldest library is crammed with stuff that isn't books. Terrible paintings, old menus, human hair. Is this history or hoarding? Come and have a rummage through the story of us told by our stuff. Search for the History or Hoarding podcast on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.
This podcast was produced on the lands of the Wabakal and Gadigal people. If you happen to be wandering through just the right corridor of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City on the 18th of September 2013, you would have seen quite a bizarre sight. Two high-ranking American diplomats desperately trying to rip a framed photograph off the wall. The officials were these two men.
Bill Burns is someone who has worked on the Iran issue for several years. Jake Sullivan is someone who is really widely respected at the White House and at the State Department.
They would later go on to become CIA director and national security advisor in the Biden administration. But at this particular moment, their main concern was getting this picture off the wall. Outside, the streets of New York were filled with protests against the Iranian regime. They were there to denounce the new president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani.
This man Rouhani has an enormous amount of blood on his hands. There is no chance that the regime is going to give up its quest for nuclear weapons.
But secretly, there at the Waldorf Astoria, Burns and Sullivan were set to meet with Rouhani's advisers and try and convince them to do just that. get the Iranian regime to give up its quest for nuclear weapons. The trouble was, just as the advisers arrived, the Americans realised that on the wall outside their meeting room was a giant photograph of the last Shah of Iran visiting the Waldorf in the 1970s. A giant image of the man the Iranian regime hated more than any other person on Earth. The man they had overthrown in 1979. Seeing his picture next to the meeting room could seriously offend them. Burns and Sullivan, in a panic, began tugging at the frame, only to find that it had been bolted to the wall.
The relevant question here is, why did they care? Why were they worried about offending the Iranians? It's certainly not something that the Trump administration is worried about as they attempt to find a way to extricate themselves from the war they gleefully joined in February of this year.
They're animals and we have to stop them and we can't let them have a nuclear weapon.
Back in 2013, Burns and Sullivan were able to strike a deal with the Iranian regime that, in terms of substance, is probably pretty similar to the deal the Trump administration will be trying to get Iran to agree to this time. So today, I want to take a look at the similarities and differences between what happened in 2013 and what's happening now. I think it's going to tell us a lot about how difficult the process of finding peace will be in the next few weeks and months. I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening. Okay, for a lot of this story, we're going to be talking about William Burns, one of these two guys who were trying to rip that picture off the wall that day in the Waldorf Astoria in New York.
Burns is like an archetypal diplomat, softly spoken. He's got grey hair and a little moustache, educated at Oxford.
I took the written exam for the Foreign Service at our old embassy in London the same week as our diplomats in Tehran were taken hostage.
That incident, the storming of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979, ended diplomatic relations between the US and Iran. Over the next three decades of Burns' career, the two countries only spoke through intermediaries, like schoolchildren having an argument. Switzerland, can you tell Iran that we're very mad at them? Pakistan, can you please tell the US that we don't care and also that they have Western decadent cooties?
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