_History in the Middle East is unkind to us westerners. Just when we thought we were the good guys and the Iranians were the bad guys, here comes the ghostly, hopeless possibility of a Trump-Rouhani summit to remind us that the apparent lunatic is the US president and the rational, sane leader who is supposed to talk to him is the president of the Islamic Republic ofIran. All these shenanigans are fantasy, of course like the imminent war between America and Iran of which more later.

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As for the Israelis, they dont want the man who thinks he might be King of Israel talking to the Hitlerite Persians. They suddenly sprayed Irans local Middle East proxies with drone-fired rockets in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon just in case the wretched, financially broken and inflation-doomed Iranians were tempted to chat to the crackpot in the White House. But the Israelis wasted their ammunition. Rouhani is not mad. America has to drop its sanctions against Iran if Trump wants to talk, he said.

It still amazes me that we have to take all this stuff at face value. No sooner had Trump waffled on about Rouhani being the great negotiator than we saw all the White House correspondents dutifully taking this nonsense down in their notebooks as if the American president was presidential, as if the old dream-bag was real, as if what he was saying had the slightest bearing on reality.

And when Rouhani made it clear that he was not interested in photo-ops an obvious allusion to the pictures of Trump and Little Rocket Man what did the po-faced_Washington Post_tell us in its subsequent report? Why, that Rouhani had dashed hopes of a potential meeting with his US counterpart. Ye Gods! What hopes do they still have in their homegrown crackpot president after these two and a half years of his threats and lies and racism? Have they learned nothing?

Its as if for the American media Trump is unhingedin Washington but a Kissinger the moment he lands in Biarritz (or London or Riyadh or Panmunjom or a Scottish golf course, or perhaps, one day, Greenland). And Rouhani who may be a great negotiator but is also a very ruthless man is therefore supposed to play the role of Irans previous president, the raving, crazed, Holocaust-denying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Indeed, had Ahmadinejads further political ambitions not been firmly crushed by his countrys supremeleader, Ayatollah Khamenei, we might just have witnessed a meeting between two of the worlds leading political nutcases. Ahmadinejad, it may be recalled, was the Iranian who claimed that a holy cloud was suspended over his head for 20minutes when he addressed the United Nations in New York. Now that is a phenomenon which Trump may also have experienced although at least he had the good sense not to tell us of it.

Ahmadinejad, you may also remember, was the president whose claim to have won the 2009 presidential elections brought millions of protestors onto the streets of Iranian cities until they were brutalised and imprisoned into submission. His cheeky smile, chipmunk eyes and Spanish armada beard could not persuade Iranians that the alternative facts of his presidential victory were real.

Everyone knew that Ahmadinejad would never be given a finger on any nuclear button many doubted if he knew the difference between nuclear physics and electricity but he provided at the time a hate figure to rival Gaddafi or any other of the ravers of the Middle East.

But now Trump wears Ahmadinejads international mantle of insanity and the Iranian presidential seat is today held by a far more pragmatic individual. For lets not be romantic aboutHassan Rouhani. Back in 1999, when he was a humble deputy chief of Irans Supreme National Security Council, Rouhani condemned pro-democracy demonstrators as muhareb and mofsad (corrupt on earth) opponents of the Islamic Republic,whose punishment would be death.

In the first eight months after Rouhani became president in 2013, the Iranian state hanged at least 537 people. In January of 2014, he had, according to a report in the Arabic daily_Al-Sharq Al-Awsat_, visited Ahwaz to deal with a number of sensitive files left untouched by Ahmadinejad. These included Hashem Shaabani and Hadi Rashedi both human rights activists in the minority Arab community in southwest Iran who had been condemned to death for waging war on God, spreading corruption on earth and questioning the principle of velayat-e faqih (guardianship of the jurist).

Shaabanis poetry, in both Persian and Arabic, was famous; he was a founder of an institute which encouraged Arabic literature and culture among Iranians. Rouhani signed off on the executions; Shaabani and Rashedi were hanged in a still-unidentified prison.

But it is Rouhanis negotiating skill which has apparently impressed Trump, who also has little time for minorities. And when you recall that one of Trumps Republican predecessors in the White House, Ronald Reagan, arranged for the Israelis to deliver missiles to Iran in 1985 in return for the release of US hostages in Beirut, you can see why Trump might think it strange that Rouhani would turn down a meeting with him. After all, during the Iran-Contra affair the then Iranian speaker of parliament, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, was deeply involved in the enterprise.

But even if Rouhani was fool enough to flirt with Trumps offer which he was not his fate would have been similar to the poet Shaabanis if he had dared to talk to the US president without the full restoration of the nuclear treaty.

It doesnt take much spreading of corruption on earth in Iran let alone disavowing the views of the Supreme Leader Khamanei to catapult a learned cleric into prison. Having learned from his foreign minister in Biarritz what the American deal was supposed to be, Rouhani wisely did not touch it. The US had broken the nuclear treaty and reimposed sanctions so Trump would have to rejoin the treaty signatories and lift sanctions for any hope of a meeting with the president of the Islamic Republic.

Of course, the Iranians will no more go to war with America than America will go to war with Iran. We all know that except for those who blast us all with brink-of-warscenarios in the Gulf. Weve been through Iranian ship-minings in 1987 without declarations of war. Besides, whats so new about an Iran insisting on its sovereign right to peaceful nuclear power?

When the shah of Iran wanted to acquire nuclear technology in 1974, according to documents in the US National Security Archive, he said that Iran had an inalienable right to the nuclear cycle and that it would not accept obligations dictated by the nuclear-have nations.

Which is pretty much what Iran_did_accept in the nuclear agreement which Trump tore up on behalf of the United States. And I still have a clipping from_The Times_of November 1972, in which my then colleague David Housego was reporting from Tehran that the shah had declared that Irans defensive frontiers extended beyond the Persian Gulf into the Indian Ocean!

In five years, the shah calculated, his arms build-up would make Iran the largest military power in the Middle East. The shah ruled with torture and executions, was crazed about the dangers of communism, and power-mad to the extent of celebrating his empires rule in 1971 with what he called the biggest party on earth in the ruins of Persepolis. How Trump would love to have been there.

Well, Macron may be able to turn himself into the Great G7 Intermediary, although all others who have tangled with Iran have been brought low by the experience. Think poor old Jimmy Carter, destroyed by the hostage-takers at the US embassy in Tehran. Think Reagan, almost brought low by Irangate. Think Colonel Oliver North. Or envoy Robert McFarlane. Or Terry Waite. Or Barack Obama, for that matter, his Iranian policy torn up by Trump.

In theory, what Macron is trying to do, if_Le Monde_has got it right, is persuade Trump to allow Irans principal petroleum importers to continue buying oil from the Islamic Republic. This includes Turkey, China, Japan, India and South Korea. In return, Iran would itself return to the original nuclear agreement. Thats the message Macron sent back to Tehran with Irans foreign minister, who airbussed into Biarritz for his briefest of meetings with the French president.

But what Macron is really doing which is what almost every EU leader is doing is trying to preserve the peace of the Middle East long enough for the Americans to elect a serious, intelligent, boring and moderately honest political leader to replace the mentally unbalanced and very dangerous current holder of the highest office in the US.

Well, good luck to the Americans. For at present, they are confronting not the lunatic rogue state which Messers Bolton and Pompeo have nightmared up for Trump, but a nation governed by bravely defiant, ruthless, and yes devious men. For Iranians understand America far better than Americans will ever understand Iran.

Robert Fiskwrites for theIndependent, where this column originally appeared.