Atlantic Council

Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said Tuesday that his government will not be offended if Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi spends only a few hours in Iran later this week. In an interview with Al-Monitor and Time Magazine on the sidelines of a conference of the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), Salehi said the mere “presence” of an Egyptian leader in Iran after decades of estrangement between Iran and Egypt would be a “landmark.” Salehi repeated Iranian offers to help resolve the crisis in Syria — offers that the Barack Obama administration has rejected. The soft-spoken foreign minister, who got his PhD in physics from MIT before the 1979 Iranian revolution and previously served as Iran’s representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, also said he remains optimistic that a “win-win” solution can be found to Iran’s nuclear confrontation with the US and much of the international community despite the current apparent deadlock in talks between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1).

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Al-Monitor:  We heard that [Palestinian Authority leader] Mahmoud Abbas is coming; was there also an invitation to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh?

Salehi:  Well, the Palestinian issue is such a great issue of interest to everybody that no matter how many representatives come from Palestine, still there is room to represent such a great country. They are all welcome ... Our invitation is based on the rules and procedures of the NAM so from this perspective, an invitation was delivered to Mr. Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas]. But we would have wished that as many Palestinian officials and heads of governments, states could have attended this meeting.

Read the rest of this interview on Al-Monitor. Barbara Slavin also recently published an article on Al-Monitor titled "From Tehran: Iran Using Summit To Showcase Victims, Friends."