All Quiet on the Eastern Front: A Post Mortem on the Xi-Trump Visit

Victor: Let’s start from the bottom up, Ali. You’re based in Tehran. Was this summit even on people’s radar there? What’s the talk of the town? Ali: Look, I don’t think it really captured the imagination of the Iranian public broadly. But in the foreign policy community, it got serious attention, and it basically split along the usual conservative-reformist lines. The conservatives, especially people in government, were pretty confident: “we’re not worried about being sold out by Beijing”. And honestly, they seem to feel vindicated. The US has been pressing China to stop buying Iranian oil for years, going back to Trump’s first term, and nothing came of it then either. So the reaction was largely: “see? Told you so”.