French president says diplomatic initiative at G7 meeting has paved way for summit between US and Iranian presidents

Emmanuel Macron has said that a French diplomatic initiative could lead to a summit between the US and Iranian presidents “within a few weeks”.

Macron made the announcement at a press conference with Donald Trump at the end of the three-day G7 summit in Biarritz, and he pointed to remarks from the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, earlier on Monday, expressing willingness to meet anyone if it was in the national interest.

Trump said he would be ready to meet, if the conditions were right. He did not specify what those conditions would be, but agreed it would be realistic to expect a meeting in the coming weeks. The Iranian and US presidents are both due to attend the UN general assembly in New York in mid-September.

Macron said the possibility of a US-Iranian summit was the consequence of a French diplomatic initiative aimed at defusing rising tensions after Trump’s decision last year to leave a multilateral nuclear deal with Iran.

He did not give details of the negotiations, but French officials said they involved a partial rollback of US sanctions and full Iranian compliance with the 2015 deal in order to pave the way for a resumption of high level US-Iranian diplomacy.

Macron said the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, flew to Paris on Friday with Iran’s negotiating position. After speaking to Trump and the other G7 leaders at a dinner on Saturday night, the French president decided there was enough convergence to invite Zarif to Biarritz for more talks.

“Through this coordination we took an initiative yesterday to bring back the Iranian foreign minister and many exchanges with the French ministers which has allowed us to sketch a path,” Macron said. “Nothing is certain and it is still extremely fragile, but there have been discussions on a technical level with some real progress.”

He said he had told Rouhani that if he agreed to meet Trump he believed “an agreement can be found” and said Rouhani had reacted positively.

The Iranian president said on Monday: “If I know that meeting with a person will resolve the problem of my country, I will not hesitate because national interests are the main principle.”

Macron added: “We know the terms and the goals. But now you have to sit around the table and get there. I hope that in the coming weeks on the basis of these exchanges we can succeed to have a summit meeting between President Rouhani and President Trump.”

Macron and Trump said the French president had kept his US counterpart fully informed of his invitation to Zarif and the outcome of talks with him in Biarritz on Sunday.

Asked about his readiness to meet Rouhani, Trump said: “If the circumstances were correct, I certainly would agree to that.”

Earlier on Monday, Zarif had told reporters he had spent four hours in talks in Biarritz, including an hour with Macron, as “some points needed to be clarified or negotiated more, especially banking and oil issues that were discussed in intensive talks by experts”.

France has been spearheading an effort to stop a drift towards tension and conflict in the Gulf following Trump’s decision in May 2018 to pull the US out of a multilateral nuclear deal with Iran and reimpose heavy sanctions culminating in an oil embargo. In response, Iran has begun to break out of some the restrictions on its nuclear programme imposed in the nuclear deal.

The French proposal is for the US to roll back some of its “maximum pressure” campaign and for Iran to return to full compliance with the agreement, allowing space for further talks on non-nuclear issues such as Iran’s missile programme and its role in regional conflicts.

Speaking about the French initiative on Monday, Rouhani said: “Even if the probability of success is 20 or 10%, we need to try and not lose the opportunity … We believe that we need to do every measure that is necessary.”

Vali Nasr, a former US government adviser and now dean of the Johns Hopkins school of advanced international studies in Washington, said: “By showing up in Biarritz, Zarif has showed Trump that Iran is interested in engagement and that Zarif has authorisation from the supreme leader to talk for Iran.”