FRIDAY, AUGUST 2, 2019 The Boston Globe TheWorld A
By Vivian Yee
NEW YORK TIMES
BEIRUT — Iranian officials
reacted with unified irritation
Thursday to the Trump admin-
istration’s decision to sanction
Iran’s foreign minister, calling
the move petty and provocative
— further evidence, they said,
of Washington’s insincerity
when it talks of peace.
The foreign minister, Mo-
hammad Javad Zarif, a US-edu-
cated diplomat who negotiated
the 2015 nuclear deal that Pres-
ident Trump rejected last year,
is one of Iran’s best-known lead-
ers and perhaps its most effec-
tive in making his country’s
case to the West. The sanctions,
imposed Wednesday, could
make it more difficult to engage
in the new diplomacy that
Trump says he wants.
With Iran and the United
States locked for months on thebrinkofarmedconflict,Iran’s
leaders are often viewed as split
between hard-liners who urge
confrontation and moderates
like Zarif who support diploma-
cy.
But Western analysts see the
punishment of Zarif as the lat-
est in a series of signs that the
Trump administration is itself
deeply divided over the right
approach to Iran — and that,
despite Trump’s insistence thathe wants to negotiate, his most
hawkish advisers are not inter-
ested in diplomacy.
And official Iranian reaction
to the move was notably united.
“The ill-wishers of the Irani-
an nation and government have
now resorted to childish mea-
sures,” Iran’s president, Hassan
Rouhani, said Thursday during
a speech in northwest Iran, ac-
cording to Press TV, a state
news agency.Iran’s Revolutionary Guard,
an elite military branch that the
United States designated this
year as a terrorist organization,
is regarded as one of the most
powerful hard-line factions in
Iran. Its uncompromising
stance toward the United States
has often been at variance with
Zarif’s.
But the semiofficial Fars
news agency reported Thurs-
day that the RevolutionaryGuard had described the sanc-
tions against the foreign minis-
ter as “ridiculous, illegal, and
unwise.”
Zarif saw his position weak-
en inside and outside Iran after
the nuclear agreement failed to
deliver the economic benefits
the Iranian people had been
promised, though he remains
among the most popular fig-
ures in the country, according
to Iran’s limited polling.US sanctions on foreign minister unite Iran’s leaders