In a strange turn of events, now it seems the meeting is back on track for June 12th. Trump left a channel of diplomatic communication between the two nations following his open letter. A US delegation arrived in North Korea on Sunday 27th May for preparatory talks. The US has stated preparations for the talks continue to go well.

The world is poised to see how talks between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un play out, if at all. There are some who believe Trump has badly misunderstood his counter-part, as North Korea has made plain there will be no attempts to denuclearise at all, unless there is a unilateral agreement. The Trump administration is thin on foreign policy experts, leaving planning to Mike Pompeo and the hawkish John Bolton, who has repeatedly advocated for regime change in Pyongyang. In such an unpredictable climate, what can realistically be achieved from this summit? What can we say about this huge world story if the talks are cancelled again? And further, how much can we really know what’s going on in the minds of these two world leaders?

Chair

Kimberley Leonard

Kimberley Leonard is the World News anchor on Sky News. Based in London, she has over 15 years of international experience, working as an anchor, reporter and producer for some of the world’s leading news channels. In the last two years, Kimberley has covered the ongoing tension on the Korean Peninsula, most recently leading Sky’s live coverage of the historic summit between Kim Jong Un and Moon Jae-In in the DMZ. A native Kenyan, Kimberley spent nearly a decade working in the Gulf before moving to the UK in 2015.

Speakers

Jihyun Park

Jihyun Park is a North Korean refugee who has settled in the UK. She is the North Koran Outreach and Project Officer at the European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea. She manages the Korean-language output, builds relations with North Korean refugees, and oversees all projects for the program. She holds a Mathematics and Science degree from a university in North Korea. Prior to leaving North Korea, she was a teacher in a high school. She gave testimony of her experiences at the UN Commission of Inquiry’s London hearings. Her story has featured in a high-profile Amnesty International campaign, various magazines and newspapers, and in two short documentaries.

Gideon Rachman 

Gideon Rachman is chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times. Before this, he was Asia editor at the Economist including spells as a foreign correspondent in Washington, Brussels and Bangkok. His particular interests include American foreign policy, the European Union, and globalisation.

Dr John Nilsson-Wright

Dr John Nilsson-Wright is senior research fellow for northeast Asia with the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House, senior university lecturer in Japanese Politics and International Relations at Cambridge University and an official fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. He was head of the Chatham House Asia Programme from March 2014 until October 2016. He comments regularly for the global media on the international relations of East Asia, with particular reference to Japan and the Korean peninsula.

President Hassan Rouhani was elected as the moderate candidate, who promised to resolve the nuclear dispute with the West, and bring a measure of greater social and cultural freedom to Iran.

Yet mass protests triggered in December 2017 were directed at the economic policies taken by the government and represented some of the toughest domestic challenges to the Iran state in years. Furthermore, arrests of critics and dissidents continue. Sporadic crackdowns on women and youth occur. RSF has described Iran as “one of the world’s biggest prisons for journalists”. The Islamic Republic keeps a tight grip on all its media outlets and the persecution of journalists has only increased in recent months. A state announcement this year of a national security criminal investigation and asset-freezing injunction targeting 152 current and former BBC Persian staff, has led to the BBC appealing to the UN to protect the rights of its journalists and families.

Nevertheless, Rouhani’s supporters argue he must gain credibility through successful nuclear negotiations before he can bring about any domestic reforms, particularly in light of the forces in Iran anxious to demonstrate their continued strength on the world stage. While his year has been a mixed picture, some argue his mandate has always only been to ease the country’s economic pain by rolling back sanctions: greater rights and freedoms at home have never been a priority.

Chair

Azadeh Moaveni is lecturer in journalism at New York University in London, former Middle East correspondent for Time magazine and the Los Angeles Times and author of Lipstick Jihad and Honeymoon in Tehran. Her research focuses on how political instability impacts women, and she is writing a book about women and ISIS.

Speakers

Saeed Kamali Dehghan is a staff journalist with the Guardian. He has previously written from the Iranian capital, Tehran. He is now based in London and was named 2010 Journalist of the Year at the Foreign Press Association awards.

Richard Zaghari-Ratcliffe is husband of charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian dual citizen who has been detained in Iran since 3 April 2016. Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, travelled to Iran on 17 March 2016 to visit her family with her 22-month-old daughter Gabriella. On 3 April 2016, members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard arrested her at the Imam Khomeini Airport as she and daughter were about to board a flight back to the UK. On 10 September 2016, it was revealed that she was sentenced to five years imprisonment “for allegedly plotting to topple the Iranian regime”.  on 7 May 2016, Richard launched an online petition urging both the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Iran’s Supreme Leader to take appropriate action to secure the safe return of his wife and daughter Gabriella. Ratcliffe’s petition has been signed by over 1.5 million supporters in over 155 countries.

Kasra Naji is special correspondent for BBC Persian TV and author of Ahmedinejad: The Secret History of Iran’s Radical Leader.

Charlotte Phillips is a lawyer and freelance writer (The New Arab and anonymously for a national paper). She recently returned to London after spending the past 2.5 years living in Iran and completing a masters degree at the University of Tehran.  During this time she travelled widely throughout the country and in 2016 joined the 22 million Shia making the annual 82km pilgrimage from Najaf to Karbala, Iraq for the observation of Arba’een. Charlotte recently defended her thesis on Iran’s water governance crisis, which is presently being turned into a book. She is also writing a second book on Iran’s popular music scene. Charlotte is currently visiting Iran and will be back just in time to discuss the local reaction to Trump’s announcement regarding the JCPOA.

On Wednesday 2 September 2015, the Frontline Club hosted a debate on what the recent Iran nuclear agreement could mean for the country, the region and relations with the West. Just a few hours before the event, it was announced that President Obama had secured enough support in the Senate to ensure that the deal will go into effect, after Democrat Barbara Mikulski of Maryland became the 34th senator to deem it the “best option available to block Iran from having a nuclear bomb.” The agreement itself means a trade-off between Western powers, who will suspend economic sanctions on Iran providing that the regime limits the country’s nuclear programme.

L to R: Con Coughlin, Kasra Naji, Azadeh Moaveni, James Rubin and Saeed Kamali Dehghan

Hosting the panel of experts was Azadeh Moaveni, a former Middle East correspondent for Time magazine, who was joined by Kasra Naji, special correspondent for BBC Persian TV; Saeed Kamali Dehghan, staff journalist with the Guardian writing on Iran; James Rubin, a US foreign policy specialist who previously served under President Clinton as assistant secretary of state for public affairs; and Con Coughlin, The Telegraph‘s defence editor.

Dehghan began his opening remarks by expressing support for the Iran agreement: “When I was in Iran, I never thought that in my life I would see an Iranian foreign minister talking to a US Secretary of State, and now it’s part of the routine.”

He also drew comparisons between the Iran deal and the infamous Dreyfus affair in France, an espionage scandal which divided many families and society itself: “I think that Iran’s nuclear deal is Iran’s Dreyfus moment, albeit in the 21st century… It’s interesting in terms of how it’s dividing a nation, specifically in the US.” He then asserted that the deal did not polarise opinion as much in Iran, with the majority supporting it.

Rubin responded: “From an American perspective… I think there’s been a lot of over-hyped discussion… This is an evolutionary positive arms control agreement.”

He went on to outline the uncertainty of how the deal will pan out, but gave credit to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, whose election “changed things” and enabled the agreement to come about, rather than the work of President Obama or “John Kerry’s heroics.”

Rubin also stressed that the deal does not completely prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb, and will not ultimately change Iranian foreign policy in the Middle East: “[The agreement] makes it harder for [Iran] to build a nuclear weapon if they choose to. Not impossible, but harder.”

Naji said: “By signing up in Vienna, [Iran] agreed for all intents and purposes that they will not have the capability to build a bomb… Lifting up sanctions is a big, big thing for Iran these days.” He pinpointed the reality that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khomeini knew that if sanctions were to continue, then “the whole stability of the regime was at stake.”

Naji disagreed with Rubin on Iran’s ability to obtain nuclear weapons: “It’s not enough to have enough enriched uranium… you need to put it in some kind of delivery system – all those things have not been done yet.”

Naji agreed that Iran’s main policies wouldn’t change, but highlighted that it had given up its nuclear ambitions despite strong opposition from Iranian hardliners, the consequences of which have yet to be played out in the Iranian political sphere.

L to R: Kasra Naji, Azadeh Moaveni, James Rubin

Coughlin offered his view, echoing a number of Rubin’s points: “It’s a bad deal for the West… The Iranians have a lot of influence in the verification process.”

He argued that if UN inspectors have concerns on activities going on at military bases linked to the nuclear programme, Iran decides whether their complaints are justified. “I think the really big problem… is the message it’s sending out… What is this deal going to do to the other Arab powers in the region?”

Moaveni steered the discussion towards the alternatives, asking: “Would no deal have been better, and where would that have left us?”

Rubin responded that it would not take much effort to know if Iran is breaking the terms of the nuclear agreement, but that: “It’s harder than you think to get a better deal… They spent billions and billions of dollars on this capability to enrich uranium and we couldn’t get them to give it up completely.”

Deghlani also stepped in and disagreed with Rubin’s view that Obama’s election was not as important as Rouhani’s in making the deal a reality.

The discussion then moved to Iran itself, and how different factions in the country view the deal.

Naji said: “The hardliners have been forced to give up something big… but they’re not going to relent on other issues.” He then emphasised that their foreign policy will also remain firmly unchanged, and that the decision to limit their nuclear activity was a “pretty popular thing,” enabling Rouhani to fulfil an electoral promise.

The Saudi Arabian position vis-a-vis the Iran deal was touched upon, with Moaveni raising questions on how to tackle the Saudi-Iran rivalry in the aftermath of the nuclear deal. Coughlin briefly said: “Saudi Arabia would be a lot less agitated [by the deal] if they didn’t see the Iranian Revolutionary Guard backing the Houthi rebels [in Yemen].”

Dehghan commented on the reaction on the ground in Iran to the agreement, highlighting that many human rights activists supported the deal, especially considering the crippling impact of sanctions on ordinary Iranians: “From an American perspective, it might be an overstatement, but from an Iranian perspective, this is very important.”

An audience member asked: “Did you think Europe had a part to play?”

Coughlin responded: “I do think this deal was actually a deal between Washington and Tehran… The American president has had a dialogue with the regime since he came to power.” He then suggested Europe had “capitulated” and that “we are bit players…[who had] completely given into the Americans.”

Rubin disagreed: “I don’t think that sanctions would have bitten in terms of the financial and corporate sanctions and restrictions and overall effect without the Europeans.” He added: “You call it ‘capitulation’, I kinda call it ‘realism’.”

More heated debate arose when another audience member asked: “Why is it a better bet for us to ally with Qatar and Saudi Arabia… than it is to deal with a country like Iran?”

Coughlin replied: “My argument has been that we have traditional allies in the Gulf, who for the last thirty or forty years have secured our energy supplies. We’d be rather bonkers to just let them float in the wind because of this half-baked deal that Obama’s drawn out.”

Finally, when the possibility of Iran becoming an US ally was considered, Rubin said: “I know President Obama does talk about Iran’s ability to become a regional power, but an ally of the United States given the policies they pursue? Whether it’s in Damascus, whether it’s in Lebanon, whether it’s towards Israel… [Iran] do believe Israel shouldn’t exist… Would America want to be an ally of Iran? No, I don’t think so.”