French president Emmanuel Macron said recent attacks on Saudi oil facilities have complicated his efforts to broker a U.S.-Iran meeting at the U.N. this week but he made clear he will press on with his initiative to bring the two sides together, reports Politico.
“Did we increase the chance of a meeting with these strikes? No, we need to be clear-eyed," Macron told reporters on board his plane en route to New York to attend the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA).
Macron is expected to hold separate meetings with US president Donald Trump and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani in New York. That has led to speculation that the U.S. and Iranian leaders could also meet each other at the gathering. But Macron lowered expectations that a meeting would happen at the U.N. summit.
Dressed down in jeans and a navy sweatshirt emblazoned with the slogan "La French Tech," Macron said that a major obstacle to his mediation efforts, besides acts of violence in the region, is the fact that the U.S. and Iran are set up very differently in terms of political machinery.
“President Trump is able, if he is convinced, to change things very quickly and he is not administration-driven, he decides alone and quickly and he has a very transactional logic,” said Macron. “President Rouhani is someone who needs to line up a whole system before negotiating, it’s almost the opposite.”