As Iran and the ‘P5+1’ (the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany) prepared for a new round of negotiations in late April to finalise the details of a nuclear agreement, a group of 24 executives and investors were touring the country on a ‘fact-finding’ mission. Although Iran still remains under a sanctions and American companies are prohibited from doing business there, the trip was the group’s third to the Islamic republic. So although several important differences remain between the US and Iranian interpretations of the tentative agreement on 2 April in Lausanne, some American firms are already signalling their hopes for new business opportunities with Iran.
Sanctions have massively undermined Iran’s economy but that anticipated new era is a matter of mutual interest. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has implicitly supported the view of the president, Hassan Rouhani, that the nuclear issue is a “symptom” of mistrust and conflict, not a “cause”. For the first time in decades, he indicated that reaching a decent deal might lead Iran to more co-operation with the US in the region. A few days later in the New York Times, the Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, underlined that “there are multiple arenas where the interests of Iran and other major stakeholders intersect … This unique opportunity for engagement must not be squandered.”
It seems then, that “the waiting list” of US companies—as Dick Simon, a co-founder of the Young Presidents’ Organization and one of the executives who visited Iran put it—is expanding. Another American investor told BBC Persian that the “vast number of educated youth, a huge market in the region, a western consumer middle class and the friendly attitude of the people” had made “the prospect of a changing Iran a very interesting one”.
