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The White House has left the door open to a personal encounter between Barack Obama and Iran's new reform-minded president, Hassan Rouhani, at the UN general assembly next week, amid signs that western powers plan to seize on recent diplomatic overtures from Tehran.
The US president is not scheduled to formally meet with Rouhani, who has been on a charm offensive since he took up post last month, promising to end the standoff over Iran's nuclear program and provide the country with much needed relief from economic sanctions. But there has been growing speculation over a potential encounter between the two leaders on the margins of Tuesday's meeting at UN headquarters in New York, which would be a carefully choreographed but potent sign of improving relations between the two countries.
"The fact of the matter is we don't have a meeting scheduled with President Rouhani, but we're always open to diplomacy if we believe it can advance our objectives, and in this instance our objective is an Iran that meets its international obligations," said Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser at the White House.
Rhodes said Obama had indicated since 2007 that he was willing to have bilateral meetings with Iran without preconditions if there is was an opportunity for progress. Rhodes also said other western powers would be closely involved in any talks. "The issues between the United States and Iran are not ones that would be settled with one discussion," he added.
Western diplomats believe the new Iranian administration is playing a high-risk strategy that could face resistance from hardline elements in Tehran opposed to nuclear talks, particularly if Rouhani returns from New York with nothing to show in terms of progress. But they perceive a rare window of opportunity – and one that will not be open indefinitely.
One diplomatic source said the newly-empowered pragmatist wing in Iran had displayed "some pretty fancy footwork" in recent weeks in preparing the groundwork for the UN meeting, but Rouhani's delegation needed to convince western powers that it was serious about giving ground on nuclear enrichment, in return for an easing of sanctions.
Obama will give a welcome address at the UN on Tuesday, a few hours before Rouhani is scheduled to address the assembly, a symbolically important though coincidental confluence of scheduling that will highlight building hopes of a breakthrough in relations between the two powers. Asked on Thursday if the two leaders would meet, a White House spokesman replied: "We will see. It has always been possible."
Obama plans to meet formally with his counterparts from Nigeria and Lebanon in New York, and has also scheduled a meeting with the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. The meeting will occur just days before Obama hosts the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, at the White House.
Obama's address will, according to Rhodes, focus on recent events in the north Africa and Middle East, touching on the final status negotiations between Israel and Palestine. He said it will also include a section on Iran's nuclear programme and US "openness to diplomacy and the prospect for a peaceful resolution".
Rhodes told a conference call with reporters that the US administration still believed there was time for a diplomatic solution to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, despite suggestions from Israel that time had run out for any negotiated solution. Israel dismissed Rouhani's attempts at dialogue on Friday, saying the Iranian leader was engaged in "media spin". Yuval Steinitz, Israel's minister for strategic affairs, said the Iranians were six months away from developing a bomb, and that "there is no more time to hold negotiations".
Signs of a changing attitude under Iran's new leader have been coming thick and fast. On Friday, Rouhani called for "constructive interaction with the world" in an opinion article published by the Washington Post. In language that contrasted starkly with that of his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he wrote: "Gone is the age of blood feuds … A constructive approach to diplomacy … means engaging with one's counterparts."
Rouhani went on to say that the old "Cold War mentality leads to everyone's losses", and expressed a desire to move "beyond impasses, whether in relation to Syria, my country's nuclear program or its relations with the United States".
The recent, more conciliatory tone from Tehran is being seen in Washington as the best hope of an end to the hostile stand-off with the Islamic Republic which has existed since Obama came to office in 2009, when he promised to try to put the two country's relations on a new footing. Were Obama and Rouhani to meet in New York next week, it would be the first face-to-face interaction between the countries' presidents since the Iranian revolution of 1979.
The driving force for the apparent glasnost in approach in Tehran appears to be the ongoing international sanctions that are extracting a heavy price on the Iranian economy. Geneive Abdo, a former Guardian Tehran correspondent who is now an Iran expert at the non-partisan think tank the Stimson Center, said the sanctions "have never been this deep or broad. Oil exports are plummeting and Iran can no longer participate in the international banking system, which prevents it selling goods for hard currency".
Abdo said there are indications the regime fears that prolonged economic hardship could instigate another round of popular protests such as the "green" unrest of 2009, which was harshly crushed.
Ayatollah Khamenei is Iran's supreme leader. Photo: Ay-Collection/Sipa/Rex Feature
Judging from past experience, the key to whether Rouhani can effect real change will be the support, or lack of it, of the true power in the land, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. There too, signs are so far promising. On Tuesday Khamenei used the expression "heroic leniency", which is being interpreted as a euphemism for a softer stance on foreign policy. The following day, 11 political prisoners were freed from jail.
Apart from Rouhani's appearance at the UN on Tuesday, he will be speaking in New York at an event co-hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Asia Society on Thursday. He will also make appearances on CNN and on Charlie Rose's interview show on PBS.
Obama has promised to test the new apparent openness to dialogue in Tehran. But administration officials are at the same time making clear that there will be no lifting of sanctions without real movement from the Iranian regime.
In particular, Iran will have to accept stringent controls on its disputed nuclear programme, which the US and its allies see as a path to acquiring nuclear weapons. Negotiations on nuclear enrichment may prove to be the most difficult shift to get past Iran's hardliners and Rouhani is treading carefully: in his Washington Post article, he repeated the conventional argument that for Iran, developing a "peaceful nuclear energy program" is "about who Iranians are as a nation".
