AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: The U.S. and Iran are planning to hold talks this weekend in Oman. President Trump made the announcement on Monday. He said direct talks will be held, while Iran said they would be indirect talks. Presidential envoy Steve Witkoff will head the U.S. delegation. Iran is sending its foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi.

In 2018, Trump withdrew the United States from the landmark Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. On Monday, Trump directly threatened Iran when he was asked what will happen if a new nuclear deal is not reached.

REPORTER: If diplomacy fails, is the United States, under your leadership, ready to take military action to destroy the Iranian nuclear program and remove this threat?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think if the talks aren’t successful with Iran, I think Iran is going to be in great danger — and I hate to say it — great danger, because they can’t have a nuclear weapon.

REPORTER: So, is that a “yes”?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You know, it’s not a complicated formula. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. That’s all there is.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump was sitting in the Oval Office on Monday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he said that. Trump said Israel — yesterday, he said Israel would take a leading role if the U.S. went ahead with striking Iran.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: With Iran, yeah, if it requires military, we’re going to have military. Israel will obviously be very much involved in that. It will be the leader of that. But nobody leads us. We do what we want to do.

AMY GOODMAN: The Trump administration has also levied new sanctions against Iran, targeting its uranium enrichment program.

We’re joined right now by Negar Mortazavi, the Iranian American journalist, host of The Iran Podcast, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy.

Negar, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you could —

NEGAR MORTAZAVI: Thanks for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: If you could start off by responding to what President Trump is threatening and what you know of these talks taking place in Oman on Saturday?

NEGAR MORTAZAVI: Sure. So, Amy, it seems like President Trump is kind of using his usual and specifically first-term playbook of what they have themselves coined “peace through strength,” or trying to get to the negotiating table or to diplomacy via threats, which in this case is military threats. We saw him do the same in his first term against Iran, with North Korea, with other parties that he wants to get to the negotiating table and feels like the other side doesn’t come to the table, and so, with threats and with pressure, he thinks he can force them.

I think, though, the experience of the first Trump term, when it was maximum pressure on the other side, didn’t really work with the Iranians and backfired. And there may have been some lessons learned. We see that he has fired some of the main figures of the maximum-pressure Iran campaign: Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Brian Hook. They’re no longer with him. He’s publicly disassociated with them. And so, it seems like this might — this time he’s really intent on diplomacy, on a deal with Iran, on a deal that he’s been trying to say is going to be a better deal, that the Obama-era deal was a bad one, and his is going to be better. And potentially, I guess, a Nobel Peace Prize is something that he has his eyes on, if he can get this nuclear deal with Iran, which he’s called a nuclear peace deal.

But at the same time, we’ve seen that it’s difficult for him to get to the negotiating table with the Iranians, and so the pressure and these threats are also coming with it parallel. So, it’s a strange methodology to try to convince the other side with threats and pressure. And that’s one of the reasons the Iranians are not willing to sit down directly and negotiate directly.

And this emphasis on indirect negotiations is because they’re also saying, “Look, you want to negotiate and have diplomacy, which is something Tehran has indicated they want, as well. But at the same time, you’re increasing maximum pressure.” Just yesterday, as you said, Amy, they put on more sanctions on Iran. Since he came into office, he signed a memorandum of maximum pressure to tighten sanctions and pressure on Iran, and there have been periodic sanctions imposed on the Iranians. So, it’s not exactly the best way to get to the negotiating table. But nevertheless, this is his style, and the Iranians have played ball to meet with them on Saturday in Oman. But that’s one of the main reasons it’s going to be indirect, because the Iranian side is basically signaling that they want to see some goodwill.

They also want to understand the framework and the U.S.'s bottom line of what it is that they want, because if you listen to President Trump and, for example, Steve Witkoff, the structure or the framework they've talked about is Iran not having nuclear weapons, just not having nuclear weapons, which is something Tehran has agreed to before, and they’ve actually said they don’t want nuclear weapons. But if you listen, for example, to national security adviser Michael Waltz or Benjamin Netanyahu going out of the White House and some other people in that orbit, they’re saying a dismantlement, an entire dismantlement, of Iran’s nuclear program. Basically, no, Iran can’t have a nuclear program, period. So, which is it? I think that is also going to sort of show the way on Saturday to the Iranians.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Negar, also, if you could talk about what the situation is, the economic context in which these negotiations are taking place in Iran, the enormous economic pressure that’s been brought to bear on Iran over all these years of sanctions, now exponentially multiplied, and the fact that in an unprecedented move, the Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has said that if a deal is reached, American companies could come and invest in Iran?

NEGAR MORTAZAVI: Sure. So, let me start with the latest, Nermeen. The Iranian president, again, exactly as you said, unprecedented, has said that the supreme leader himself is open to American companies coming to Iran and investing. And this is a, again, signal to President Trump, because his criticism — one of his main criticisms of the JCPOA, President Obama’s legacy nuclear deal with Iran, was that the Europeans were reaping all the benefits, and not Americans. And this is mainly — it’s not something that Iran has started. It’s something that American companies can’t do because of very strict U.S. sanctions. American companies can’t have trade with Iran or any form of investment because of the punishment that the U.S. government will impose on them in the form of sanctions. In fact, secondary sanctions now have prevented other companies around the world, Europeans, Asians, many others — to these sanctions if they do trade with Iran. So, if that’s something that President Trump wants, he can change that. Iran had a deal to buy airplanes, passenger airplanes, from Boeing, and even that was stopped from happening, which essentially Boeing took an economic hit for that.

As far as the economic situation in Iran, well, the economy is in pretty bad shape, declining, as a direct result of these harsh economic sanctions. Iran is one of the most — if not the most, one of the most — sanctioned countries in the world right now by the U.S., as I said, these primary and secondary sanctions, which even punish non-American companies who do trade with Iran, if you buy Iranian oil, gas. As a result of that, Iran has a lot of its assets sitting in reserves, basically blocked outside the country. For example, the Iraqis buy a lot of energy from Iran, but they owe the money in billions to Iran because the U.S. doesn’t allow them to pay Iran back. And so, it’s a combination of this cutoff, Iran’s being cut off from the world economy, or most of it, that has really impacted the state of affairs and the living situation for the Iranians, working-class, middle-class Iranians. Their life, basically, their — 

AMY GOODMAN: We have 30 seconds.

NEGAR MORTAZAVI: — purchasing power has shrunk.

AMY GOODMAN: Negar, we want to thank you so much for being with us. Negar Mortazavi is an Iranian American journalist, host of The Iran Podcast, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. Of course, we’ll cover this more following the talks in Oman on Saturday.