Former US Negotiator: Trump doesn’t Understand Iran’s Culture

Local Editor

A former US undersecretary of state for political affairs has taken President Donald Trump to task for his rash policies and uncalculated measures towards Iran after taking Washington out of a nuclear deal with Tehran, saying Trump does not understand Iran's culture of resistance.

In an interview with Yahoo News published on Sunday, Wendy Sherman slammed Trump's use of threats to push his adversaries into submission, emphasizing that Iranians are not a nation to surrender to any threats.

Sherman was a key member of the US nuclear negotiating team under former secretary of state, John Kerry, who pulled off the Iran nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [JCPOA], to fruition in 2015.

The US president announced on May 8 that Washington was walking away from the nuclear agreement and that he planned to reinstate US nuclear sanctions on Iran and impose "the highest level" of economic bans on the Islamic Republic.

Sharply criticizing the US president's policy toward Iran, Sherman said, “President Trump’s diplomatic style is to thump adversaries over the head with threats, and then after beating them up offer to sit down to talk and try and seal a deal.”

The former American nuclear negotiator added, “What he [Trump] doesn’t understand is that Iran has a culture of resistance that equates giving in to those kinds of public threats as surrender, and they won’t surrender.”

Trump has stepped up his hostile rhetoric against Iran. Just last week, he threatened Iran with hardship "the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before."

Trump's pugnacious Twitter message in all capital letters came late on July 22 after Iranian President Hassan Rouhani warned his US counterpart not to “play with the lion’s tail.”

Sherman’s remarks came after the commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) sharply reacted to the recent military threat by Trump against the Islamic Republic on Thursday, saying, “You threaten us with an action that is ‘unprecedented’ in the world. This is cabaret-style rhetoric. Only a cabaret owner talks to the world this way.”

Taking a jab at Trump by saying that he just reverts to the same transactional approach he used in real estate, Sherman said such an approach had previously led Trump into multiple bankruptcies in that sector.

“I worry that he will be similarly taken in on some of these geopolitical deals, and that is extremely dangerous,” she concluded.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team