Anti-Iran maximum pressure policy won't work for Trump

Here is the full text of the interview of top diplomat Zarif and National Interest Editor Jacob Heilbrunn, which was held in New York on Friday and is republished from the National Interests website:

With the American shooting down of an Iranian drone in the Strait of Hormuz today, are we on a path of escalation?

I checked with Tehran, and we do not have any information about having lost a drone today. So, we don't know, as of now what has happened. We have the [US] president saying that they shot a drone. We don't know whose drone it is, but we don't have that information. But we are certainly moving in the wrong direction. The fact that the United States has an increased presence in the Persian Gulf doesn't help security or stability in the area-it's a tiny body of water and you cannot have such congested traffic there without something happening.

A lot of the tension is also focused on the tanker that went missing. Is Iran responsible for that?

All the information we have is that we confiscated a small tanker that was only carrying a million liters of smuggled oil products-not oil-and that happens quite often in the Persian Gulf because of heavily subsidized prices in Iran of oil products. There is a lot of smuggling from both sea and land borders and we interdict them on a regular basis. So if that is the tanker they're talking about, that is a smuggling tanker, not a shipping tanker.

Another move that the Trump administration has announced is sending about five hundred more soldiers to Saudi Arabia. What is your response to that?

It's a symbolic move that doesn't help security for anybody. Certainly, security in our region cannot be purchased from outside. We believe that countries in the region should provide their own security through cooperation and through regional integration, and not through trying to purchase it from outside. It's not usually a tenable avenue to getting security.

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