Some Iranian hard-liners have a surprising new view: Talk to President Trump

Iran’s most revered Revolutionary Guard commander says talking with President Donald Trump would be admitting defeat. The country’s supreme leader has ruled out any dealings with Washington.

But now, in a surprising split among Iranian hard-liners, some are expressing a different opinion: It’s time to sit down and resolve 40 years of animosity with the United States, by talking directly to Trump.

And the most striking voice in that contrarian group is former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, largely known in the West for his anti-American bombast, Holocaust denial, and suspiciously lopsided victory in a disputed vote a decade ago that set off Iran’s worst political convulsions since the Islamic revolution.

“Mr. Trump is a man of action,” Ahmadinejad said in a lengthy telephone interview with The New York Times. “He is a businessman, and therefore he is capable of calculating cost-benefits and making a decision. We say to him, let’s calculate the longterm cost-benefit of our two nations and not be shortsighted.”

Ahmadinejad’s remarks are among several signals from different ends of Iran’s political spectrum that Iranian officials want to talk as the risk of armed conflict with the United States has escalated.

The tensions were punctuated Thursday by Iran’s disclosure that it had seized a foreign tanker in the Persian Gulf and by Trump’s assertion that U.S. naval forces in the region had downed an Iranian drone.

Iranian officials on Friday denied that the Americans had downed one of their drones. (Ahmadinejad, who spoke before the Americans first reported their claim about the drone, said through an aide on Friday that it had not changed his view that both sides should talk.)

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif of Iran, who had previously insisted there could be no negotiations with the United States unless it rejoined the nuclear agreement Trump abandoned last year, said Thursday he was willing to meet with U.S. senators to discuss possible ways out of the nuclear crisis. For the first time, Zarif floated modest steps that Tehran would be willing to take in return for the simultaneous lifting of sanctions Trump reimposed.

Within the rivalries that pervade Iran’s political hierarchy, the Americaneducated Zarif is a big contrast to Ahmadinejad, who as president pushed Zarif out of government. Yet both are now seeking ways to communicate with the Trump administration.

Ahmadinejad’s selfaggrandizing demagoguery in some ways makes him Iran’s version of Trump, in the view of some Iranians.

But he still commands a following in the country of 80 million, mostly among low-income people who associate his tenure with better economic times and cash subsidies from the government.

He also has a seat on the elite Expediency Council, a body appointed by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to supervise the work of elected officials.

In The Times interview, Ahmadinejad said that Tehran and Washington should directly resolve the litany of disputes that began with the 1979 revolution, the seizure of the U.S. Embassy, the taking of American hostages, the mutual accusations of regional meddling and all the rest.