Many Iranians Celebrate Nuclear Deal As Opening To The West

Transcript

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

For how the newly struck nuclear deal is being received in Iran, we go to Scott Peterson. He's Middle East correspondent and bureau chief for The Christian Science Monitor. He joins us from Tehran. Scott, welcome to the program.

SCOTT PETERSON, BYLINE: Thank you.

CORNISH: So you've been out reporting, and I understand, actually, at celebrations. What does that look like? What does that mean?

PETERSON: You know, it's Ramadan now, so people really didn't begin celebrating today. The temperature got up to 102 degrees, so there really weren't too many signs when the deal was actually announced, which kind of came midday and early afternoon. But people weren't out on the streets. And so finally, when the sun went down, the temperature dropped, and people broke their fast for Iftar. Then we really then began to see a lot more people out on the streets - really, people today trying to, you know, show the degree of jubilation they have about the deal which they have been waiting for on an emotional rollercoaster, watching their pocketbooks and everything else and just kind of hoping and praying and sometimes even crying that the deal is going to be made. And today, it actually took place, and now they're kind of showing their pleasure with that.

CORNISH: Obviously this is country that's had a lot of animosity - right? - with the U.S. Where there were people who were unhappy about this new partnership, what did they have to say?

PETERSON: Well, it was interesting because a number of people, when I asked them today - and this was just on the street reporting. And when I asked them about what they thought about the nuclear deal, they immediately framed it in terms of a U.S.-Iran approach rapprochement. You know, they would say something like, we have a real passion for the United States, for Americans; Americans should know that. I heard this several times completely unprompted.

And of course, both leaders - President Obama and also Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader - have hinted that there might be other issues that can be discussed if, in fact, this nuclear deal proves to work out. The fact that we've had these years of very intense negations - of course, both sides know each other a lot better, but the bottom line is that a lot of Iranians themselves actually couch this deal in terms of an opening not just to the West, but also possibly a further opening to the United States. And many of the ones who I've spoken to today really were very, very much in favor of that. They really feel that this is going to be a transformational deal for Iran, that it's kind of a stepping out of the cold into the warm and kind of the first big step that President Hassan Rouhani has been able to show them in terms of his campaign promises to reengage with the rest of the world.

CORNISH: You've been reporting in and out of Iran throughout the period of sanctions. Help us understand what this has looked like on the ground every day for Iranians dealing with these sanctions and how you think that is going to look moving forward.

PETERSON: Well, Iranians, of course, hope that these sanctions are lifted because one of the Iranians that I spoke to today, she was a math teacher. And she reckoned that the quality of life for most Iranians had basically fallen by 30 or 40 percent, even up to 50 percent because the sanctions, because of economic mismanagement simply because of the state of the economy. It doesn't look like sanctions in Iraq in the late 1990s, where, you know, basically, you had children starving to death.

The sanctions here - sometimes you can't tell they exist at all because there's so many Western goods that are in fact still in shops if you have the money. But for many people here who don't have the money, they've seen a real drop in their purchasing power. They've seen real hardship over these last few years. So there is an impact, and that's how it's felt by Iranians.

CORNISH: That's Scott Peterson. He's Middle East correspondent and bureau chief for The Christian Science Monitor. He spoke to us from Tehran. Thank you so much.

PETERSON: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.