Journalist Jason Rezaian On The Road Ahead With Iran

Jason Rezaian, a journalist and the former Washington Post Tehran bureau chief, has some deep thoughts on President Trump’s foreign policy strategy toward Iran.

Rezaian is Iranian-American. He reported there. And he spent 554 days imprisoned in Iran’s Evin prison on charges of espionage.

So, what’s on his mind now with tensions rising between the U.S. and Iran?

Here‘s what he wrote for The Post:

Now is the moment, if there ever was one, for Trump to use what he touts as his creative dealmaking skills to support the Iranian people, while still applying pressure on the regime and its elites. There are options available to him if he truly wants, as he said last week, to “make Iran great again.”

The 2015 deal designed to curb Iran's nuclear activity addressed what the United States and other world powers identified as the biggest challenge to security and peace posed by Iran. Iran was unwilling to engage on other issues, such as its missile program, human rights and support for proxies.

By assigning such disproportionate urgency to a nuclear program that our own intelligence agencies believed was not moving toward weaponization, we squandered much of the leverage to address other critical issues.

We talk with Rezaian about the way forward with Iran, and what his imprisonment taught him.

Show produced by Kathryn Fink.

GUESTS

Jason Rezaian, Global Opinions writer and former Tehran bureau chief, The Washington Post; author, “Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison — Solitary Confinement, a Sham Trial, High-Stakes Diplomacy, and the Extraordinary Efforts It Took to Get Me Out”; @jrezaian

For more, visit https://the1a.org.

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